The discussion did make me realise the importance of understanding the names of things – technical terms if you like. Time someone put that right, with this glossary list.

Canonical Tag

A tag which is included in the page HTML to indicate a single URL for otherwise duplicate content. Useful for global websites especially where they run content in world languages such as English, Spanish or French and where the same content is cascaded to all same language countries.

CDNs

CDN stands for “Content Delivery Network”. The purpose of these networks is to improve the user experience of using websites because they deliver quickly and have high availability.

Global websites are important users of CDNs and this has become more important due to the speed of delivery of content now factoring into search engine algorithms. The downside of CDNs is they typically show search engines URLs not from the country the websites target.

Click Through Rate

This has been a common term for pay per click ads for many years. It means the percentage of users which see an ad and click on it. Now it has been adopted by the organic search algorithms of search engines including Yandex, Google and Baidu.

Geo-Selector

Every global website needs a geo-selector if users need to be able to navigate to different countries or languages. Geo-selectors which cannot be crawled correctly by search engines are damaging to their owners’ website SEO performance. Geo-selectors need to be fixed or alternative methods of geo-targeting should be adopted.

Geo-Targeting

This is a range of tactics which ensure that the website pages are shown to users matching the countries and languages in which they search. The geo-targeting options include local domains, webmaster tools geographic settings, canonicals and Hreflang tags, local links, local hosting and languages.

Geo-targeting Is A Critical Success Factor In International SEO

Keyword Research

Finding the right keywords is absolutely key in search marketing and that means researching them rather than translating. Translating keywords to find search opportunities in other markets produces distorted results and poor performance.

Local Domains

More technically known as ccTLDs or country codes, local domains have a number of important uses. They produce better conversion with local users and are a particularly strong signal for geo-targeting.

Local Hosting

Websites served from local servers deliver pages faster and provide search engines with a local IP address to help in the geo-targeting decision-making. Proxies delivered from local servers can also be used for this purpose.

Hreflang

 A relative newcomer, the Hreflang tag helps to provide a geo-targeting signal to search engines. It’s a tag in the HTML which indicates a connection between two countries and enables Google to correlate the two.

International SEO

It’s SEO and it’s international! Often the term is used by people meaning that the website concerned is targeting several countries – but often they are English-speaking.

For SEO in countries speaking different languages, the term “multilingual SEO” is more often used. There is much debate over whether international SEO is really different to domestic SEO, but I argue that it involves not just different languages but also different techniques and a completely different mindset.

Machine Learning

All of the major search engines use machine learning. Machine learning means that the machine (ie., the computer) sees that it has made errors in its selection and corrects, hence the term learning.

Yandex uses machine learning extensively for its organic results, Google less so though Panda is a machine learning system. It is used extensively for Google Adwords.

A Correctly Functioning Geo-Selector Is Key

Page Rank

Remember this? Invented by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and the original basis for the creation of Google, the concept of inbound links creating authority and that authority being passed to the next in the chain.

Yandex and Baidu basically do the same thing but don’t publish a figure. Google no longer regularly updates its published Page Rank figure so it’s less than reliable.

Page Speed

Although this speaks for itself, page speed still requires some definition. In its raw sense, it’s simply the time it takes for a page to appear to the user.

Google takes account of this within its algorithm but it’s important to note that the measurements Google uses are taken from the browser and so take account of the speed of delivery of the page at a local level. You can’t just measure the size of the page and extrapolate what the speed might be!

SEO-Localization

SEO-Localization is a combination of localization or translation with on the page search engine optimization. That is stating the obvious, but the trick behind the combination of these two processes is that they normally conflict.

As I have said many times, keywords do not translate so content which has been worked on for SEO purposes will lose the SEO benefit the moment they are translated – the keywords do not travel through to the translated content. In SEO-Localization, the keywords do travel!

User Agent Recognition & IP

The user agent is basically the name of the crawler or browser connection as it accesses a web page and it’s own location on the web. It is used by some to determine the location from which is visitor is coming and to re-direct that particular visitor to a particular country based on the original IP address.

This is not to be recommended, by the way, as users should really be able to choose which country information and language they wish to view. Redirecting “non-local” IP addresses can also result in non-local search engines crawlers (otherwise known as “Google”) being pointed to locations which are not the target or are not connected.

It’s a challenge many organizations face. That’s not to say that these businesses are bad at retaining staff — the very fact that they are global often means that they offer something special to the world. Their staff are often not moving onto other organziations either — but simply are being promoted to a different position, team or department. Some, of course, are leaving the company too.

Another issue is that “SEO” responsibilities around the world aren’t often held by people who are dedicated to the cause of SEO. Mostly, they have other marketing tasks to handle too and have a relatively limited bandwidth for SEO.

Before going further, I have to declare two areas of personal interest. My company runs the International Search Summit with SMX and training programs. I’m also a long standing fan of SMX and SearchEngineLand and first attended conferences by Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman in 2003 in the UK and 2004 in the US. So this gives me something of a bias, but also I think a unique insight into the industry we’re all in.

In many sectors there have been studies into the value of training. I don’t propose to labour this point – I think we’re all aware of the rapidly changing nature of the business.

The value of keeping abreast of search engine and social media developments pays for itself many times over – I’m sure we all agree. You would think that investing in training would be a no-brainer but it’s still a cost and it’s value isn’t always recognized. (My staff at this point are also nodding.)

We also have to recognize at this point that for those working in international SEO the challenges are particularly tough. No one speaks 20 or even 10 languages well. If you see someone who claims that, I suggest you challenge it. So how can a normal human being SEO working internationally actually cope? Let’s look at some strategies.

1.  Conferences Like SMX & The International Search Summit

If you think I’m about to say it’s a good idea to go to conferences, you’d only be half right. There are conferences all over the world so you could quite easily send staff to the most local conference for them. I think there is a better strategy which I’ve seen a few companies deploy.

A good strategy is to choose a big and wide ranging conference somewhere in the world and then to fly in the relevant staff from all over the world. Yes I can hear the sharp intake of breath and I know there’s a little more cost involved with that, but the value is clear.

With all of the global SEO team in one place, they can discuss not just what they’ve seen and heard but also their own issues. In effect you can organise a parallel conference for you own organisation alongside the main conference with the inspiration of the main conference in the team’s minds.

Bring The International SEO Together And Have An In-Conference Conference

I have to say that in my humble opinion, major conferences such as SMX have made a major contribution to the development of this industry.

2.  Work With An Agency Which Shares Knowledge Rather Than Tactics

I wish I saw this more often in RFPs. There are basically two types of agency in the world; those agencies who keep their insight and knowledge up their sleeves not wanting to share it with their clients, presumably because they take the view that they will earn less money if they “Teach our clients how to do it!”

Then there are those agencies which take the view that if they do not pass information to the people working within the client company, they will simply not achieve their combined goals.

3.  Create A Center Of Excellence & Best Practices

There are many tools available where you can create a repository to store information on best practice. If you don’t have a system for this in place, then you are going to find that you constantly need to re-invent the wheel and to spend much more money on training. But be careful, the information stored in your repository needs to be regularly reviewed to keep things up to speed with the latest developments.

Use Best Practice Guides Such As This One On SEO-Localization

4.  Create Your Own In-house Training Materials

You can share responsiblity around the organization for creating in-house training materials. A good system is to allocate areas to cover such as link building, content management, on page code and so on and give these to different people around the team to manage and to provide the training to others.

The process of creating and maintaining the training materials actually turns the people involved into experts in their own field which makes you much less dependent on external resources.

5.  Use External Webinars & Training Courses

There are some pretty good resources available which staff can participate in remotely. Consider that it might be wise to get translated transcripts produced to enhance the understanding of your co-workers. Never forget that whilst your colleagues appear to speak good English, when it comes to training, it’s harder if you don’t speak the language as your mother tongue.

I also believe that in the end, quality face-to-face training in small groups makes a huge difference to your success.

Let’s take the raw sales performance first. Below is a chart which looks at the rate of growth of the US, UK and then the rest of the world. You can see that the dramatic peak of two quarters ago (mainly from the international markets) has disappeared and things have returned to steady growth rates around the 30% year on year level.

International Stabilises But Growth Rates Declining

A 30% growth rate is great in anyone’s book — but we tend to forget that this isn’t just a Google figure, this is a reflection of growth in the market as traditional forms of advertising fade on the vine and online takes off. Google has done a lot to help it along, but the market has generally been going dramatically in that direction.

As the chart below shows, the market for search outside the US and UK now exceeds at least $23 billion.

Google has at least 80% of that, which we’ll dig into in a few moments, but the two biggest global competitors (non-US, non-UK) are Baidu and Yandex who between them earn around 16% of the total market share.

The Global Search Market Outside The US And UK

The last two quarters of more “muted” growth have seen the huge rate of increase in spending from Google on people and advertising dipping also. Which was the chicken and which was the egg? I guess we’ll never know the answer to that.

What we can say is that the Larry Page inspired shift upwards in gears, has settled, albeit at a higher level. The spend on advertising and staff hasn’t abated, it just hasn’t accelerated to the same degree it did last year.

Google Growth Rates In Headcount & Sales Dramatically Slow

One feature of Google’s last quarter’s report was a drop in the value of clicks at the same time as the number of clicks increased. The Web conference to explain the company’s financial performance this quarter pointed much more at clicks in the mobile sector being part of the cause.

Thanks to the huge rise in Android and a strong increase in mobile advertising, Google has seen a significant rise in the number of mobile clicks on its ads.

The problem is, the value of the resulting clicks is much lower as the chart below seems to show. In fact, the average cost of a click now is less than it was in 2008, according to Google’s own figures extrapolated in the chart.

This is good news for advertisers for sure, but does mean if that’s not the pattern you’re seeing, you may need to think about which types of ad to buy? Might this be a time to consider adding mobile to your portfolio of activity?

Average Value Per Google Click Drops To 2008 Levels

If we correlate the clicks volume to rising revenue divided by the US, International and the rest of the world, if you check out the trends in the red circle below, it does seem that click volume might be putting revenues under pressure.

US revenue is following its normal cyclical pattern of a decline in the first quarter of the year, but looking behind the figures, this decline is actually slightly more than usual.

Mobile ads, and the US decline might all be linked to the lower value of clicks.

Regional Revenues Correlated To Click Volumes

Perhaps more influential on the Google’s psyche and strategy is the concept of a falling global market share outside the US and UK. Our figures show that from quarter 1 2009 to now, Google may have lost as much as 8% market share.

This doesn’t mean that Google isn’t getting people to use it or to use search, but it might mean there’s much more competition for online marketing bucks than there was just a couple of years ago.

These figures are based on publicly declared reports, but they are nonetheless difficult to calculate as all businesses have multiple sources of revenue.

However, just suppose that Google was looking at a similar pattern internally, how would you change your strategy?

I think you’d try spending more on advertising, recruit more people to push the Google message home, focus only those developments that could help take your business forwards competitively and you’d try launching products that trod on the toes of your budget stealing competitors (Facebook?) — namely something like Google+.

Does this sound familiar? Oh this might be a good time to change the share structure to protect your control for the future too — while you still can!

Google Global Market Share Outside UK And US - Estimated

In this situation, many would resort to translation and translation agencies (readers of this column know already what a poor view I have of that) — but that’s not how Niall and the team at Be2 approached the international roll out of their sites internationally.

First a quick bit of background. Be2 is a dating site which operates in 39 countries and 18 languages — pretty global you’d have to say. It relies on international PPC for the recruitment of subscribers who are interested in dating.

Be2's Roll Out Comprised 31 Countries

The challenge for Niall was how to achieve that with a relatively small team operating in so many countries — the approach kept his audience spellbound for 30 minutes.

It was decided to “Hire based on SEM skills and experience, not on language skills. To focus on getting the best SEM account managers we could find and not to limit the profile to certain language sets.”

This is interesting because my concept in business for many years has been the opposite, to recruit people with the right attitude and native language and then to train them the practical skills they need on the job.

Keep Translators As Far Away From Campaigns As Possible

I have always taken the view that it takes years to learn a language correctly — plus a cooperative mother. To train in something as technical as international SEO or SEM is, by comparison, a little easier to do.

Niall did also say they aimed to, “Keep translators as far away from the campaigns as possible.” The Be2 team was actually split into portfolios taking responsibility for a group of countries with specialists advising on areas such as YouTube or Retargeting.

Be2 Allowed Broad Match To Select Its Keywords

The process was to work with a native speaker to get the core words, the most important keywords, for the language. These keywords would then be used to set up a small campaign in Google using the broad match settings. This would then go live for a week or until there was sufficient data. “Let the millions of users decide your keyword list,” said Niall.

The generated keywords would be grouped into campaigns and ad groups using intuition. Google Translate would be deployed to help with understanding what the keywords roughly meant.

Further keywords, plus negative keywords, would be “fished” from broad match occasionally seeking the support of native speakers. Stir and repeat.

The Be2 Internationalization Process

Niall confessed that the most challenging aspect was creating the adtexts to accompany the campaigns, but even here, they found a workable cheat.

Working on the assumption that very high volume keywords are unlikely to contain grammar errors, they created ads from the keywords they saw searched for in high volumes and then tested different versions against each other.

The benefits of the approach were faster development of the the accounts, longer and more accurate long tail, keywords close to what people actually search for and it was easy to optimise going forwards.

Dating Is A High Volume Sport

The approach is fascinating and one I’m sure is used by many more than most would expect. However, before you rush off and fire your agencies, bear in mind the following thoughts.

Firstly, dating is a high volume sport which interests a lot of people.

This type of approach would hold much more risk for business-to-business companies or for businesses operating in very specific niches where the likelihood of the keyword set falling out of Google’s broad match would less — especially if you didn’t get exactly the right terms in the account at the very beginning.

Dating is also a powerful human need which means that people are highly motivated to find a solution even if your adtexts don’t hit the nail on the head when they show up.

If you were trying to sell something like insurance, which people don’t really want to buy, then you’re going to find this approach less successful.

Do The Millions Really Decide?

When you let the “millions of users decide your keyword set,” do bear in mind that that is technically not the case.

It’s Google broad matching algorithm in the first place. The way this works is it is constantly testing new matches to see if people click. If they click, it will continue to be matched up in that way. I imagine, but can’t prove, that Google measure up the conversions it’s seeing in Google Analytics too — but it’s still not exactly that users are “deciding”.

Finally, built into the approach is an acceptance of a certain rate of failure compensated for by the lower cost of implementation. My concern with this, however, is that for many businesses this could lead to the conclusion that, “There’s no opportunity in international search for me!”

I’m not saying that this is not a good approach for some and it may be something you wish to try at first. And when you’ve don’t that — you know where I am!

But when I added the word “Apple” to the headline, it completely changed its dynamics — just like Apple does every time it enters a new business area.

So, I must be talking about Siri right? Wrong. I agree actually that Siri is a really important development, but Apple has much more up its sleeve than just Siri.

What Does Apple Have Up Its Sleeve?

On the 23rd of February, Techcrunch followed by the Financial Times reported that Apple had paid $50 million to acquire a start-up called “Chomp”, whose homepage is shown below.

Chomp is an app search engine where you can find apps using keyword search. Intriguingly, it covers both iPhone and iPad along with Android.

Chomp Is The New Global Search Engine Due To Launch Soon

The image below shows how Chomp currently presents listings (that’s rankings right?) for apps giving you their ratings and clearly identifying if they are free are not.

The team which created Chomp is already working at Apple on the company’s plan to replace the current “App Stores” with Chomp or a version of it.

Chomp Shows Apps Trending In Popularity And Algorithmically Selects Categories

A little testing of Chomp reveals that it is a little more sensitive to keywords than the App Stores themselves – but much needs to be done. Don’t forget, there are now well over half a billion apps which have been downloaded over 25 billion times.

For “apps” read “websites” and for listings read “rankings”, this is big world search and its happening all over again. The app world is now bigger than Google was in the year 2000 when Google had indexed one billion pages — since an app typically has several “pages”.

“Expect To Be Penalized For Abusing Our Rankings!”

Apple is already releasing warnings to app developers saying, “You should avoid using services that advertise or guarantee top placement in App Store charts. Even if you are not personally engaged in manipulating App Store chart rankings or user reviews, employing services that do so on your behalf may result in the loss of your Apple Developer Program membership.”

That is such an uncanny parallel of warnings which Google gave to users of analysis and positioning software in the early years including that they would have their websites de-indexed.

Search For Apps By Keyword

Although Chomp’s multilingual capability is currently still sadly lacking (as was Google’s before 2006), the image below suggests that the potential for rolling this out successfully globally is just vast. Don’t forget, Apple already has the apps “indexed”, it just needs to provide greater access to them via a more effective search paradigm.

Multilingual Keyword Search Works - Sort Of

The Big Question Is: Will Apple Keep Android Listings?

Chomp currently lists Android apps too. The big question is whether Apple will continue this with some revised version of the App Store. I suspect they will close down the Android side — even though I believe this would be a strategic error.

Obviously users of Android phones only really want to find listings which will work on the Android platform — and vice versa for iPhone and iPad users. But if you’re looking for a solution for a particular business problem, wouldn’t it make sense if you could search for that before choosing which phone you buy?

A universal search engine also builds better brand loyalty and would, in my view, enable Apple to stay firmly in charge of the market which they created.

Some Brands Will Clearly Be Winners!

Above, you can see how one brand marketer is already benefitting through German language searches in targeting the Austrian market.

This image is included solely to help you visualize the potential, particularly if you’re a brand marketer in a world where even Google says that more than 50% of searches will eventually come from a mobile device with more than a billion people globally using them.

Will Keyword Search Become Part Of The Mix?

Chomp Already Offers Keyword Search Advertising

You may not be aware of it, but Chomp already offers keyword advertising. What a fantastic tool for Apple to make more money from apps in which it then shares a margin for every sale. In this context, Apple is a step ahead of Google.

But this is also a big opportunity for advertisers and search marketers to get involved right now as this market develops.

Keyword Research Is Already Possible

See below for some rather rudimentary data which Chomp publishes on popular searches. You can already see the lack of sophistication from searchers using Chomp since it doesnt really make sense that “Apps” is so frequently a component of the keyword — in a search engine which, for now, only lists apps.

Rough And Ready Keyword Search Is Already Available

What The Chomp Team Needs To Fix

There have always been weaknesses in the App Store and Chomp doesn’t solve all of them. For international search marketers, they need to fix the following:

• Geo-targeting by country – for searchers and advertisers
• Geo-targeting by language – for searchers and advertisers
• Much more relevant search results
• More effective social sharing

I’m pretty puzzled (please explain someone) why more of us are not talking about this. The game is about to start – it’s time to get on board!

How? Here are a few ideas which might help:

• Analyse the keyword searches on Chomp to better understand the mobile user
• Develop and launch an app or two
• Advertise against keyword searches on Chomp
• Review strategies to see if apps can replace web investments

Don’t forget that people who are searching Chomp are searching for solutions. They have a need to solve — just like any searcher at Google!

Susan Moskwa provided a very helpful session on the Monday at the International Search Summit event and was followed by Maile Ohye at SMX West (with Susan’s support from the audience).

Suddenly, A Lot Of Code To Implement

Why all this effort? Well frankly, not many have been adopting Google’s latest advice. Reason? Not many actually understand what it’s all about.

The reaction from many delegates at the Summit was that few webmasters would actually have the capacity to implement the code as Google suggests.

Strong opinions were expressed by some – especially my fellow columnist and regular speaker at the ISS Bill Hunt who firmly expressed his view that “Panda is going out and making decisions about content before the normal indexing processes are taking account of geo-targeting settings. This has been significantly and negatively affecting global websites”.

Nothing To Do With Panda!

Google has firmly denied that the Hreflang tag is a response to Panda both in conference sessions and recently when I quizzed UK-based Google engineer Pierre Farr. The hreflang tag, according to Google, has absolutely nothing to do with Panda.

Regardless of the debate over the background to the new tags, it is the case that Google is launching and promoting many more tags for various purposes.

I have joked to people that SEO’s may need to change their job titles in future to “Google Markup Manager” as just keeping tabs on all the tags and micro formats will require some in-depth training. Nor will there be time to spend on other SEO matters!

So here’s the simplest way I can present the guidance from the sessions! If I’ve over-simplified, feel free to pick me up on the details in the comments!

Canonical Tags

Originally, the canonical tag was added to enable publishers to identify that content was, indeed, duplicate – perhaps because of session parameters in the URL string or because a site had multiple URL routes to the same content.

The canonical tag basically says, “Yes this content is the same, but this is the single URL I’d like to represent this content despite the various forms in which I present it.”

Google's Webmaster Central Gives Lots Of Guidance On Language Tags

The above remains true. Google has confused users by repeatedly saying that you can use the canonical with the hreflang tags. Whilst this is true, the canonical should not be used with different URLs where the languages are different.

There is a possible exception to this which is when a page is translated dynamically on the fly by a tool such as Google Translate, which would mean that Googlebot would see the original content – not that which was translated for the user.

It should also be used even where the templates are in different languages but the main content is the same.

Hreflang Tags

For years, we’ve been saying that the geo-selector of a website is a critical component in ensuring it’s success. With the Hreflang tags, Google is effectively asking website owners to include directions to all related content for other countries to the content on the page, within the code of the site.

This means for an 80-country site, there would indeed be 80 lines of extra code sitting in the meta content.

The purpose for Google is that it then knows and has a clearer idea that certain content is related and should not be shown at the same time in results.

The Effect Of Combining Canonical Tags & Hreflang Tags

Not forgetting that the canonical tags should only be used with content in the same language, when would we use both?

Well firstly, the use of both would involve what I usually call world languages such as English, Spanish, French or Portuguese. These languages are used in many countries and, whilst there are variations between the use of these languages in those countries, the variations are sometimes small.

Additionally, multinational publishers often save costs by using one version of the language for all countries speaking that general language, thus ignoring the regional variations. In other words, for Spain and Mexico, Google is presented with exactly the same content, letter for letter.

The canonical acknowledges that this is the same content. The Hreflang tag identifies which URL should be displayed in different sets of results.

So, in other words, canonical + Hreflang = same content + different URL.

Google knows the content is the same, but displays the correct URL for the Google domain search (e.g. google.com.mx will see the relevant URLs for Mexico displayed in the results).

With Dot Coms Or Local Domains?

The simple answer is that the use of Hreflang and canonical tags applies to both local domains and dot coms, though Google’s examples tend to show dot coms.

By the way, neither the canonical nor the Hreflang tags have a direct impact on ranking – canonicals do not share the link equity of the domestic market with the new markets targeted.

It’s A Mystery

Bearing in mind that the Google team clearly says that you don’t need to identify the language – they use language detection for that purpose; that you don’t need to indicate the location for local domains; that you can set the geo-location of a dot com in Webmaster Central and that they say they can figure out which is the most important content; why the heck is this rather intensive tagging needed all of a sudden?

I’m sorry Google, but as someone who spends most of their time advising the owners of multilingual websites on how best to manage their content, there is only one reason which rationalizes the whole thing.

Bearing in mind that “Panda” is a separate process from indexing and ranking sites which examines the quality of content and throws away poor quality content and sites, this is a rather clumsy Panda fix.

Perhaps Google Will Explain The Why?

Canonicals and Hreflang tags are visible on the page to Panda and say “Please leave me in – I’m not just a duplicate and have a specific local market purpose and this is the market.”

Many large websites rely on machine translation (not a good solution for SEO at any time) and they are particularly affected by Panda.

Google, if you disagree with me, please explain why all of this extra coding is suddenly needed. Or simply come clean and explain why you need us all to do this for Google and then we’ll all understand things more clearly.

Both Pierre Farr and John Mueller of Google are speaking on this subject at the Munich and London International Search Summits. We look forward to developing this discussion with them!

1.  Understand That Keywords Cannot Be Translated

Yes I know, this is an old chestnut which I’ve been pronouncing out since the Vikings invaded Britain. But let’s just recap. Keywords are a fundamental building block for an international search strategy and nowadays also for social media strategies.

So if keywords are so desperately important and represent a key pivotal point in a search campaign, then why are so many marketers not listening?

We still get requests daily for translations of keywords – which to us is like someone saying, “How many search engines do you submit to?” Now that question has largely died out but it’s lasted a good decade after the point where that wasn’t a part of your services.

Here’s a quick metaphor to try and explain. You’re a builder, building a six foot long wall. The red bricks lying on the ground are all six inches – so you need twelve sets times the height of your wall. Another building has yellow bricks of four inches and they need 18 sets times the height of the wall.

Those bricks represent words. The nearest translation is that one Yellow brick roughly equals one red brick – but as you can see, that won’t get to the right answer on its own!

2.  Are You Appearing Where You Should Be?

Susan Moskwa from Google is speaking at the next International Search Summit on Hreflang tags and geo-targeting, so that will hopefully give us more clarity to share on those areas. However, the fundamental goal remains the same,  regardless of the technique.

Whatever it takes, we need to ensure that our website appears in front of our target customers at that critical moment, namely when they search for a critical keyword. Thanks to personalization, that now means more than just understanding the difference between “The Web”, “Pages in Germany” and “Pages in Germany.”

3.  Check Out Your Google Places Presence

In my experience, Google Places has had a more profound impact on international SEO campaigns than anyone realises.

As this has rolled out across the world, it has presented many opportunities for local businesses to pick up on searches that are associated with some generic keyword or brand name that in many cases they are not really entitled to. This is particularly the case when searching the maps themselves.

Search for "tüv neuss" in Google.de

The above shows that Google Places results push down the other organic results for such searches as “tüv neuss” – a form of test for technical certification.

Sometimes the organization itself has not allowed, in its number crunching, for the fact that Google Places has brought exposure correctly, but at the expense of not having those visits land on the main target site.

Sometimes, this is due to local teams listing their business with Google Places without realizing the broader implications. Indeed, this may have been the right strategy for the organization, but simply got lost in the analytics.

4.  Keywords Can Exist In More Than One Language

If you do a search for Lufthansa in the UK and then in Germany, you get English results in the UK and German ones in Germany. How does Google know the difference?

From a search point of view, that’s not so difficult. They can use the fact that you used Google.co.uk or Google.de to decide which language you were expecting to see. But the point is that the results for that one keyword are very different in English or German.

With a brand name, that’s easy to appreciate. But is also applies with keywords which exist in more than one language. “Casseroles,” for instance, means something very different in French and English. And if you were targeting “Landing Pages” in France, you might be surprised to find that a term you think of as English, is actually being used in a French context.

5.  Use Google Search Plus Your World

It’s pretty clear from all the noises coming out of Mountain View that Google Plus is here to stay and that we’re all going to have to live and work with it. From an international perspective, I cannot remember a Google product which rolled out internationally so quickly.

When researchers are phoning me up to ask, “Is it possible that there are 30 million Google Plus users in China,” then you know that something is going on, even if that figure is not wholly achieved yet. None of us have a totally clear idea of the impact this is going to have on Google’s results in Thailand, Nigeria or Uzbekistan.

What is clear is that a train is coming down the track and we either have to get on board or get run over. What that means is we have to give people access to Google+ buttons throughout the globe today and not next week.

6.  Make Your Content Clickable

The quality of your content just became even more critical. If someone doesn’t click through to your content when they see it listed in Google’s results, they’re neither going to share it nor are they going to give Google signals to promote via Google’s click through measurements.

7.  Trust Me Now, You Need Trust Symbols

Trust mainly means providing symbols in each country which show you are a credible supplier. The correct currency, correct credit card symbols, correct local offices and a language they understand (not some auto-translated approximation).

8.  Link Building Still Makes Sense

Citations, reviews and social sharing may have been added to the mix – but nodody said that local links had become less important. They’re all signals, they all matter to the search engine – so don’t throw the baby out with the bath water by not seeking local links.

9.  Investigate Your Mobile Performance

I’m sure you’ve already heard from people that mobile is now a really significant factor; but what they might have said is that in parts of Asia, Africa and South America, mobile is even more important because smartphones can provide more reliable and available connections to the Web and everyone needs a phone.

10. Play Locally with Baidu, Yandex, Naver and Seznam

Google is very, very important but there are opportunities in Russia, China, Turkey, Korea and the Czech Republic to take a slightly different route where the approach will not be helped by Google+ of Places!

The short answer to the question, “Do I Need To Comply?” is “Yes” and you do need to make changes to your site. If what you wanted to hear was a “Maybe” or a “No”, then I’m afraid you’re just going to have to read the rest of this post to find out how to mitigate the impact where you can.

The Effective Deadline Is May 25th 2012

In the UK, the Cookie legislation, as well as privacy issues and email legislation, are overseen by a body known as the Information Commissioner’s Office or ICO. The UK legislation technically came into force on the 25th May 2011 through an Act of Parliament known by the snappy name of “The Privacy And Electronic Communications (EC Directive) (Amendment) Regulations 2011.”

However, businesses were given a full year to comply, which therefore means compliance is needed by the 25th May 2012.

In its guidance document, ICO explains that, “These are not rules designed to restrict the use of particular technologies as such, they are intended to prevent information being stored on people’s computers, and used to recognize them via the device they are using, without their knowledge and agreement.”

The most important word in that quote, and in the document itself is “Consent”. Generally speaking, you can assume that if you warn users that you are using Cookies to do anything at all, and then give them the opportunity to opt in and accept the use of cookies, then you are pretty much guaranteed to be compliant. In fact, that is pretty much the whole of the regulation summarized in one paragraph!

ICO Demonstrates Its Own Use Of Consent For Cookies

So why not just do that?

Well, the key problem is that a typical website uses not just one but several cookies and each one would need to be accepted by the user. Even the UK’s ICO does accept that “Implementing these rules requires considerable work in the short term but compliance will get significantly easier with time.” Compliance could involve changing many systems and incurring considerable effort and cost.

We mustn’t forget that virtually all major tracking and analytics systems depend on cookies, so the non-use of cookies would create a further degree of inaccuracy in the data lovingly analysed by us all.

So how do we obtain consent in order to comply with the legislation? The first main point is that consent has to be “Opt In,” it cannot be implied. The user has to knowingly accept the use of the cookie.

Note these words in ICO’s guidance document, “It is not enough simply to continue to comply with the 2003 requirement to tell users about cookies and allow them to opt out. The law has changed and whatever solution an organisation implements has to do more than comply with the previous requirements in this area.”

Sending Users To Browsers To Change Settings Is Not Enough

The ability to change browser settings is also specifically mentioned as a route which can be used to achieve compliance – but this also doesn’t mean that you can simply rely on the user’s ability to change their settings themselves.

In order for browser settings to be a suitable form of compliance, the website must identify that their browser is set up to allow cookies of certain types (but not others) and there must be some form of prompt, a pop-up message for example, where the user can confirm their acceptance of or implement a change of the settings. The Commissioner, however, does not think that this will be a suitable route of compliance for some time.

By the way, these regulations apply to ALL cookies, so you cannot say that your cookie expires at the end of a session to comply.

The “Strictly Necessary” Defence

There is only one significant means of complying with the legislation which allows a website publisher not to seek the consent of users and that is if the cookie is “Strictly Necessary”.

This applies when the functionality of the website cannot be achieved without the cookie such as keeping the contents of a shopping cart available for a combined purchase at the end of the process.

However, it has been made very clear that the “Strictly Necessary” rule does NOT apply to analytics.

Gaining Consent At Login

ICO clearly expects that websites where a login is required to use services, that the login will identify if cookies need to be used and will give the user the opportunity to tick a box to ensure compliance. However, this consent needs to be sought before or immediately after cookies are used — a delay is not regarded as satisfactory.

What If I Host Outside The UK?

Neither the law or the guidance is very clear in this respect. If the organization is UK-based, the laws will clearly apply whether the website is hosted in the UK or overseas. Those corporations outside the UK or Europe are advised that their users in the UK will expect clear information about cookies too.

What Action Will Be Taken For Non-Compliance

The Information Commissioner at ICO has said that ICO will take a proportionate response which seems to be mean that organizations will first be given the opportunity to comply. But be aware that penalties of up to £500,000 can be applied by the commissioner to offenders.

Best To Audit Your Cookies Now

By the way, ICO’s recommendation is that you undertake a full audit of the cookie’s you use now to ensure you comply with the law. Such an audit involves checking:

• Which cookies are used?
• What’s the purpose of the cookies?
• Do cookies link to other personal information?
• What data do the cookies hold?
• Session cookie or persistent?
• Lifespan of the cookie?
• First or third party?
• Check your privacy policy covers your cookie use?

One thing is clear: you need to provide very obvious and clear references to cookies on your website as a bare minimum – hiding this information in the privacy policy will definitely not wash!

Nor is Google without blame. I started digging into Google’s figures expecting to find that Google had actually seen a fantastic success at the end of 2011 – but had miscommunicated this with the city.

There is some truth in this but it is, by no means, the whole story. Google didn’t and doesn’t communicate fantastically with city slickers – but there are also some surprises in the figures when you look beyond the headlines.

A Wall Street Communications Issue Or The Figures?

On its webcast, where Google explained its figures, there was some puzzlement over an 8% drop in the value of clicks combined with a 34% increase in the number of clicks.

This definitely worried some analysts – it’s a complicated piece to explain and Google didn’t say, “The value of our inventory dropped, but we sold much more inventory” which actually might have been a better presentation of the truth.

However, looking at the figures in more depth what was interesting was that Google seems to have performed relatively better in the US during the last quarter growing by 12.7% over the previous quarter. The UK grew by just 1.6% quarter on quarter and the rest of world managed just 6.8%.

However, last year at the same time, Google was reporting 15% growth in the US, 4.5% in the UK and 19.85 in the rest of the world – so there does appear to be some softening of growth.

Share Of Google Revenue By Region Q411

When you look at the growth rates over time on the chart below, it all becomes a little clearer. Growth is “drooping” in the US and the UK, but has fallen back very sharply by some 15.7 percentage points in the rest of the world. Now, not many folks would sniff at an almost 30% (29.5%) rate of growth internationally, but this is the city we’re talking about.

In its announcement, Google talked about launching new ad formats which had reduced the revenue per click – analyst hearts could be heard beating faster.

Then like me, they popped the new growth rates they’d just heard into tracking spreadsheets and spotted the droop. Whoops. 2 + 2 = 15. Or rather, new ad formats + decline in revenue per click = seriously worrying downward trend.

International Growth Rates Q411

You will recall that Larry Page worried the city on his first set of figures by revealing huge growth in sales and marketing costs and in the headcount of people employed by Google?

The promise was all to do with what he now terms “velocity”. He wanted to get Google’s core products to a wider audience faster, before the doors closed and the first mover advantage was gone.

So are we seeing an appropriate return from the that investment? The uptick in investment started at the beginning of 2010, as you can see below. Would you expect a return by the end of 2011 and roughly 8 quarters?

The Investment In Marketing & People Must Show Results

People I’ve spoken to about changes in search technology tell me it can be as long as two years before you see the fruits of your labor.

So we should really have seen it by the end of 2011 and mid-2012 will definitely have to show some serious uplift if Larry Page’s dream is not to begin to be heavily questioned by analysts and shareholders. The stopwatch is running, the finish line is in site and at the moment Google isn’t going to hit the tape as it should.

Google Headcount And Sales Marketing Q411

But it also seems that Larry Page and Patrick Pichette, CFO have already spotted the danger as you can see above. The rate of growth in headcount and in sales and marketing costs softened already in the last quarter of 2011. Don’t forget though, these figures are percentages – the spend is still growing, but now by less than the company is growing.

Turning to the topic of inventory and the value of a click, Google has been providing up and down percentages for sometime, so below you’ll see a model based on all clicks having a value of 50 cents at the beginning of 2009.

In fact, the shape of the graph doesn’t vary regardless of the value – but it doesn’t affect the average value axis which is not shown here because it is simply a guess.

Average Google Value Per Click Q411

What you can see from the chart above is that in fact there has been a two quarter drop in the value of clicks which has the result that a click today has roughly the same value it did back in the depths of the 2009 recession. The clicks volume has naturally increased to compensate.

This is potentially good news for smaller businesses and for adaptible search marketers since if there are many more clicks to fight for at lower value – there will be opportunities for some to capture leads or business and to really make a mark.

Google's Rough Market Share Outside US And UK Q411

The above chart warrants some explanation and some words of caution. We are only looking at Google, Baidu and Yandex figures to create the shares above and are ignoring Seznam, Naver and Yahoo-bing.

However, even when those figures are added back in, it is unlikely this picture would be that much different. Google is the clear leader in the rest of the world (excluding US and UK) but it’s share does appear to eroding very slightly at the edges.

Is Google Affected By Fear Of Losing Leadership?

Google will have much more data and analysis than this – but it might well explain the behavior of the company in terms of its sales and marketing and recruitment efforts.

One of the latest Googleplexes to open was in Paris for the purpose of targeting the Middle East and Africa, for instance.

Rough Search Market Size Rest Of World Q411

$22 Billion – Now That Is Good News!

There is also definitely good news for international search marketers in Google’s figures and in the chart above. The global search market (yes with a little display inter-mingled) is at least $22 billion!

Most recently Scott Thompson was the President of PayPal and is credited, especially within the Yahoo announcement press release, as “Driving customer engagement built on strong technology platforms.” But much of the chatter around Wall Street has questioned Mr. Thompson’s ability to grow a “media” business when the focus of his experience has been around technology.

Is Yahoo A Media Or Technology Company?

For a search engine, this would be a ridiculous statement the equivalent of saying, “If Google is now a media company, it doesn’t need to invest in algorithms to decide on rankings.” After all, as Sean Corcoran of Forrester Research recently said in a Search Marketing Now webinar, “Technology is the new creative”.

But what of the global perspective? The good news is that at PayPal, Scott Thompson has been working in a global environment much more so even that it’s parent company eBay. PayPal has some 104 million active users in 190 countires worldwide.

Will Yahoo Dispose Of Prize Assets In Asia?

His brief at Yahoo is to continue the strategic review process the business has been going through and to “Identify the best approaches for the company and its shareholders.”

The Yahoo release poignantly continues, “Yahoo is considering a wide range of opportunities for the company’s business, as well as specific investments or dispositions of assets.”

Yahoo Taiwan Currently Remains In The Yahoo Stable

The dispositions of assets relates mainly to an area of great interest to international search marketers like me. Yahoo was one of the great international successes of the last decade but sadly failed to capitalize on some huge successes. Now the discussion is all about Yahoo disposing of those international assets and potentially, through certain asset swaps, becoming much more of a domestic US company.

I sincerely hope that Scott Thompson does not fall for this crazy idea. It amounts to saying, “Because you messed up a few things recently, why don’t you sell of your prize international possessions and focus instead on the market where you’re less competitive.”

Yahoo Owns $14 Billion In Its Alibaba Stake

One of Yahoo’s principal global assets is its share in Alibaba — the Chinese giant business-to-business match making site — where Yahoo owns 43% of the shares. This asset alone Yahoo valued at $14 billion in October.

Meanwhile, the founder of and chief executive of Alibaba, Jack Ma, had expressed an interest in buying Yahoo rather than just the shares that Yahoo owned in his own company.

Alibaba Is A Major Player In China Giving Yahoo A Great Foothold

This looks less likely now and talk is of an asset swap which might involve gaining assets in the US or Yahoo reducing its stake in Alibaba from 43% to 15%. One mooted plan is that Alibaba buys the Weather Channel and then swaps it for the Yahoo shares in Alibaba — this apparently is a tax efficient way to achieve the result.

Yahoo Japan, which for years has been the leading search engine in Japan, is jointly owned with Softbank Corp. In a bizarre turn of events, last year it switched its search support from Yahoo and its alliance with Microsoft, to have its organic results and ads powered by Google, giving Google first and second spot in the significant Japanese market.

Yahoo Japan Is A Leading Search Player In Asia

Other uses of “Overture” the older version of Yahoo ads included Naver in Korea who have since switch to their own system. Meanwhile, Yahoo in Hong Kong and Taiwan are going strong.

Amongst all of this talk, not much is said about Yahoo returning to any kind of role in search — other than through its international sales teams recruiting advertisers for Microsoft-Bing. Does that potential exist? I think it does…

Yahoo Hong Kong Is A Wholly-Owned Yahoo Asset

Yahoo needs a formula to give it a purpose in life and I cannot see how being a “media” company can ever give it a distinctive purpose as a former technology company. So, perhaps Scott Thompson would like a few suggestions from me (ironic smile)?

Will The Real Yahoo Stand Up

Yahoo is not really a media company. Yahoo is no longer a search company. Yahoo is not really an email company. Yahoo is not a social network. But Yahoo does have aspects of all these — so what should it do.

Here’s what I think:

• Yahoo should reinstigate the directory which made it famous! There is still a role for that!
• Yahoo should merge all of its diverse assets under a single brand — in other words Flickr should become Yahoo images!
• Yahoo should hang onto its international foothold — somehow, anyhow — especially when so many are desperate to get a slice of the Chinese market.
• It should treat display advertising as an extension of search advertising increasing the level of intelligence used to target ads
• It should expand and combine its Q & A sites and invest in the technology of how it provides “answers”. There is a growing need for that too!
• Yahoo needs a powerful suite of mobile solutions fast!

Good luck Scott Thompson!