To be launched in a few weeks in Turkey, followed by Russia, the new interactive snippets enable webmasters and publishers to coordinate their own on-SERPS interactions with users which are fully controlled by their own sites.

Yandex’s New Interactive Snippets Could Be Used To Display Movie Titles. Source:Yandex

In a similar manner to rich snippets, the interactive versions are dependent on publishers marking up their content or alternately adding features to Yandex’s newly expanded webmaster tools console. The snippets can require a more expanded use of schema.org markup; but, Yandex believes that facilitating a rapid start to the user’s journey directly from the SERPS will improve user satisfaction and conversion rates.

Yandex’s New Interactive Snippets Could Be Used To Check Cinema Times Source:Yandex

Yandex CTO and co-founder Ilya Segalovich accepted that the concept depended on the cooperation of webmasters for its success.

“Publishers need to bring up to speed their Web-based activities to a level of usability delivered by apps to achieve an alignment of the Web and mobile worlds. Sitelinks are an outdated way of doing this and rich snippets are mere decoration.”

“All our user research shows they are incredibly impatient and some will leave a search results page in less than half a second if we don’t deliver what they want. By enabling them to start filling in contact forms, book appointments or get directions directly from the SERP, we get them hooked into the process more quickly and help them start their journeys much faster.”

Yandex’s New Interactive Snippets Could Be Used To List Products. Source:Yandex

Ilya Segalovich carried on by stressing, “At no point are we taking control of these interactions from webmasters. They can add and remove them at will and we will respect their wishes at all times. We do not own these interactions, we merely create a bridge between search and visit where the interactions can begin.”

He also confirmed that no ranking preference would be directly given to publishers who deploy the interactive snippets but because Yandex includes user behavior as a signal including click through rates, if the snippets proved attractive they could provide an indirect lift to adopters.

Yandex’s New Interactive Snippets Could Be Used To Check In For Flights. Source:Yandex

Simultaneously, Yandex is rolling out a new SERPS look and feel to accommodate the visual needs of the interactive snippets. Yandex also confirms that they have undertaken considerable research and discussed the new features with major sites targeting Russia, Turkey and the former CIS states. An example of the approach is available at beta.yandex.com

Yandex’s New Interactive Snippets Could Be Used To Book Hospital Appointments. Source:Yandex

Latvia — A Country With A Population Less Than Houston, Texas

Latvia is a very small country with a population of just over 2 million people — around the size of a smallish Chinese or American city. The country has a very checkered history with a Nazi occupation, being absorbed into the Soviet Union for over 47 years and then finally achieving full independence in 1991 — just 22 years ago.

Somewhere around 25% of the population speaks Russian as their native tongue, but they are still “Latvian.” What this means, in practical terms, is that many Latvians are bilingual, and some speak three or more languages. When you jump into a taxi in the capital, Riga, one driver will be listening to the radio in Russian (I just managed my directions in Russian), while another will be listening in Latvian (directions to him were in English).

International SEO & Personas Are Increasingly Linked. Source:Webcertain

When you land at Riga, you can just about see Estonia in the distance; when you take off, you are rapidly over Lithuania long before the plane has finished climbing. Latvia shares borders with the Russian Federation, Belarus, Estonia and Lithuania, and is just across the Baltic Sea from Sweden.

When A “Local” Isn’t Necessarily “Local”!

What, exactly, does this have to do with local/global search marketing? It’s very simple. What most people mean when they say “think local” is that you should work with someone who is “local.” But, if your country is so small that going to dinner sometimes means crossing a national boundary and speaking a different language, then who really represents that “local” person?

In this crazy, mixed-up, increasingly complex world we live in, thinking global and acting local is no longer a useful idea — though the principles behind it were valid (and in many cases, still are).

The main problem with “acting local” is that it you run the risk of putting vastly different customers with vastly different needs into the same “box” based solely on geographic location. And, as Latvia shows us, geography isn’t everything. A more useful way to target such a diverse customer base is by developing personas that represent each different group of customers within your target market. Today, the Web is all about personas — even if you don’t work with them, they still matter.

Keywords & Personas

Keywords and personas are linked. Yes, it would be great to have much more data about keywords and the people who use them available easily online, but if you’re clever and you structure your website around clearly defined “personas,” then you probably have more data than you actually realize. (And, by the way, Facebook is a very useful tool to help build a better picture of your personas, even if you are not advertising.)

Personas are closely aligned with SEO needs. If the information presented in a SERP is appropriate to the targeted persona, the click-through rate will be higher, ultimately improving the traffic and ranking potential of that particular result.

Different personas will respond differently to the same content. For optimal success, you must consider how to differentiate your approach for each of your target groups.

Defining Personas Is Possible For Everyone

Going back to Riga, we could define our customers and potential customers in the following ways. Note how the personas become more precise and more closely defined as you work your way down the list:

• Potential customer – speaks Russian
• Potential customer – speaks Latvian
• Potential customer – product group A – speaks Russian
• Potential customer – product group B – speaks Latvian
• Potential customer – product group A – visited description page B – speaks Russian
• Potential customer – product group A – visited description page A – speaks Latvian

The above list is only to give you the idea in very simple terms. If you have different “description” pages which describe the same product in different ways, then you are already personalizing your Web content to some extent — but is your SEO also personalized? And, do you think about your content and SEO in terms of personas?

I should add that, in my example above, I split the languages to demonstrate my point — but there are cases where it may not make economic sense to target every language. It all depends on your organization.

However, my key argument is that personas take your SEO efforts to the next level. Moving your messaging from “global” to “local” is naturally followed by “personal” — and that that’s where the edgy, fast-moving businesses are going as fast as their coders can take them!

One final note: the word “international” itself means different things to different people. In conversations with those I met in Riga, people did not generally use the term “international” to refer to working between Baltic states. On several occasions people said to me, “there are not many international firms in Latvia,” which was odd to me, looking at a country which bordered with so many others speaking so many different languages. I think it would be fair to say that they often saw “international” as outside their region rather than outside their nation.

The recurring narrative seems to be that Matt Cutts, like some kind of demon, is always about to unleash a torrent of difficulties for SEO folks. One area which has come under heavy scrutiny in light of the recent Panda/Penguin updates is link building and adding links to your site. Unlike some colleagues, I don’t believe that link building is over, but I do think that those inbound links have to have a genuine value for users, otherwise they’re really not going to help much.

To be honest, that’s been one of the search engines’ objectives for quite some time — to use links as an indicator of quality. So, if you’ve been “gaming” the system to get links, you’re much more likely to fall under the microscope each time a new change hits.

I’m not going to write one of those posts about SEO being dead, because I certainly don’t believe that to be the case. But, I do think it’s worth examining some of the common anxieties within the industry, especially as applied to Multinational SEO.

PPC Or SEO To Go First? Best Not To Work In Silos!

One of the things I hear often is the concern that paid search is eating into organic search, making SEO either less relevant or a less worthwhile time/financial investment. This strikes me as the wrong way to look at it.

If paid search is supplanting organic search permanently or temporarily (or, indeed, at all), that doesn’t change the fact that strong SEO is an integral part of any online marketing plan. If your competitors invest in SEO while you don’t, they’re going to see gains that you’re missing out on. SEO and PPC often work hand-in-hand, and you can make use of both while still erring on the side of caution.

For example, I no longer believe it makes sense for any company to roll out an international SEO programme to multiple countries without also having a PPC campaign in place. In some cases, we would recommend leading with PPC and landing pages first, rather than full blown (and relatively expensive) international SEO.

There are a number of reasons why we recommend this, but one is that user satisfaction on your site can be measured much more quickly with PPC than with SEO. Behavior really matters — so if you can study it first and quickly with PPC, your SEO efforts later will work out to be much more successful. I do worry that the association of search engine warnings with SEO being “bad” are beginning to stick with people who are newer to the industry, and therefore, SEO is having a health warning attached.

There is no doubt that not looking after your SEO health could potentially have even bigger commercial consequences for your organization — but if you walk away, you’ll never actually know what you lost until a competitor shows you the way (which they surely will).

The Power of Language — Is International Marketing Now More Significant?

A conversation with a translation agency this last week also made me chuckle. Because translation agencies have seen an opportunity to sell more services from their existing resource networks, they’ve created terms to cover the services they’re adding to their websites.

This has given rise to terms like “MSEO” (supposed to stand for “multilingual SEO”) and “transcreation,” another invented term meaning that a team of translators can create semi-original content based on the original text, but with a significant degree of latitude. If you see either of these terms, run a mile. In fact, run ten!

In 15 years, I’ve never heard these terms coming from the mouth of a client (though it’s possible they’re being used by the localization teams). We prefer “SEO Localization,” which we see as a very specific but different process involving both SEO teams (including SEO linguists and translators). However, the conversation added to the feeling of disquiet I have about the terms we use ourselves.

On the other hand, sometimes language can make a huge difference. For example, we recently decided to change the name of our International SEO School in Barcelona to “International Marketing School.” This means we’re up against some big-name competition, but it definitely doesn’t mean we’ll no longer be offering international SEO courses (which have, to date, been the most successful).

I came to the conclusion, after feedback from delegates, customers and others in the industry, that an international SEO course from an international marketing school was more acceptable than one from the equivalent “SEO School.”

Maybe “Culture” & “Multilingual” Are Winning Terms For The Future

There are some important lessons I’ve learned over the years. When someone says that there’s no real difference between “SEO” and “international” or “multilingual SEO,” they probably have never had their hands dirty in running a serious international SEO campaign. If they focus solely on geo-targeting, then they’ve probably have never had a large client. And, if they have “translation partners” to deliver the language element, or they talk about “translating keywords,” run a mile (or several hundred).

Culture Or Technique? Which Is The Most Important? Source:Webcertain

Essentially, the word “multilingual,” or even “multicultural,” should become a much more significant part of everyone’s thinking — more important, in fact, than the “SEO” or “PPC” part. In this case, you really need to put the cart before the horse. What that means in practical terms is:

1. Understand who your customers are first
2. Decide how best to reach out to them
3. Then implement PPC, SEO, Social Media in whatever appropriate mix makes sense.

The point is that the “multilingual”/cultural bit is really important. It’s actually an integrated part of every step you take on your international site — not something that you can relegate to “later.”

We know that content is the new marketing driver which many are talking about. Google has driven us to it with a variety of animals (Pandas and Penguins) and has threatened to unleash even more terrible creatures on our poor quality content this year if we don’t behave. Move over Pandas and Penguins, the Tigers are about to be unleashed.

So, if you’re a global company, it’s fair to say that your international content strategies are the difference between winning or seeing your competitors sail away with the main prize. It’s clear that many have realised the importance of making your own brand-domain a magnetic go-to Web destination in today’s online marketing world.

Brainstorming+Translation Trap

What isn’t clear is how many have fallen into the brainstorming+translation trap which is one of the most dangerous places to be. Why is this?

The Dangers Of Brainstorming Your International Content Marketing. Source:Webcertain

The issue is that the very brainstorming which comes up with all those super duper ideas that are going to stun the audience with their brilliance and bring them in droves to the website, is the very fuse that will light a much large explosion in dissatisfaction with the brand and its marketing team in the rest of the world.

Let’s take an extreme example. Let’s imagine that you sell healthcare services to Americans. To promote your capabilities to doctors, you create a fantastic infographic which tells the story of how many are using insurance, how many are on medicare and what the health differences are between them.

Indeed, that may be something which works well for those doctors in the US — fantastic; roll out the translations. But wait — will this work in Germany? Nein danke! Will this work in France? Absolument Pas! What about Italy? No grazie! Surely the UK? Guys, we have the NHS, which is a bit different to your system!

Neither Translating, Nor Localizing A Bad Idea Works

In fact, the majority of nations have their own healthcare system with its own quirks and foibles — the infographic simply isn’t worth translating. We should localize it then, right? Well, you see, this isn’t so great, either, because what it means is starting with the same idea and then trying to make it relevant, and it’s just not going to be. Ever.

One solution would be to “Go Local,” right? Yes, I know that’s what everybody says, and it’s so much simpler — except, it isn’t. Going local means giving up control and not taking the brand forward consistently, and there are significant risks in that approach. There must be a better way.

The problem starts with the idea generation process. If a team in the US — or any single country, in fact — comes up with a bunch of clever ideas, you can bet that they’ll be based on their own experience of their own homeland.

Try Re-Planning The Idea Generation Process

So, the solution, in fact, is to re-plan the idea generation process. There are a number of ways of doing this. Our preferred approach is to bring together a team of people from all over the world to a single location to discuss and generate ideas which will work in multiple regions — but not necessarily everywhere.

It’s relatively easy as we have a team from all over the world, and any organization could achieve this by flying in representations of the organization or its partners to generate and evaluate the ideas. This seems expensive at the time, but it will save you so much money in the long run that you simply have to treat this as a wise investment in the future global success of the business.

The process runs in roughly three-stages. Avoid the single one-off brainstorming like the plague. Here are the steps:-

1. Pre-Briefing And Classification Of Regional Business Models (Off-Site)
2. Idea Generation Meeting And Discussion (Together — Ideas Submitted Ahead Of The Meeting)
3. Evaluation Team (A Smaller Group) Meets To Select The Best

Few Ideas Work Globally — Many Work Regionally

For cultural reasons, and because the make up of countries or regions varies greatly around the world, it is rare that a single idea will really work everywhere — so best not to shoot for that.

However, there is a significant benefit in grouping regions around each idea you come up with and choosing the most regionally compliant ideas for the campaign roll-out. The savings in terms of content cost, updating and maintenance, as well as the success of the ideas deployed, is huge.

On top of the huge and here’s an idea to save you thousands and generate millions statement, so few are capable of doing this that you can expect to leave your competitors in a thick trail of dust!

Maile Ohye of Google spent over an hour speaking to delegates and answering detailed questions covering many of the issues international marketers face. She covered the geo-targeting challenges faced by organisations and discussed how the still relatively new Hreflang tag, as well as Webmaster Tools, can be used to help Google make the right decisions on location.

Maile Ohye Of Google At The International Search Summit Source:Webcertain

Maile Ohye of Google spent over an hour speaking to delegates and answering detailed questions covering many of the issues international marketers face. She covered the geo-targeting challenges faced by organisations and discussed how the still relatively new Hreflang tag as well as Webmaster Tools, can be used to help Google make the right decisions on location.

Beginning by highlighting that international sites present complex issues for search engines, and the Google team itself had experienced the challenges through its own multi-language webmaster and marketer support sites, she stressed that the key issue is having the right page appear in front of its target users at the moment when they search.

Things that get in the way of Google figuring out how a website should be positioned include obstacles such as unnecessary 301 redirect chains, soft 404s (pages not found but which display a 200 instead of a 404) and non-useful language parameters.

Display Relevant Local URLs

Search engine users often examine the URL displayed in the SERPs, and it’s important for that to display a meaningful ‘local’ URL whenever possible. But, that requires a URL and website structure which delivers the right geographic information to the search engines.

Maile also asked international marketers to do some self reflection, “Is your team committed to developing an experience tailored to users of a different region or language as well as supporting those customers?” She also pointed out that successful rankings in one country do not automatically lead to similar rankings in a new one.

International sites take many forms. For instance, there are sites which rely extensively on UGC content which is written mostly in one or a small number of languages, but the site has auto-translated templates. Other sites feature virtually the same content in different regions using the same language — such as sites for South America, for instance.

The differences may be relatively minor — sometimes just the price and the currency. Or, there are the international sites which most think of where all content is given in local translations and many variations in-between.

Hreflang Consolidates Indexing Signals

Maile pointed out that the use of rel=”alternate” hreflang tagging in order to help Google “consolidate various indexing signals” can help a lot. It can be deployed on-page in the HTTP header, or in XML Sitemaps. A secondary benefit of using Hreflang is that Google will use it, almost as a link for discovery purposes only.

If you’re able to verify ownership of your sites in Google Webmaster Tools, then you can create just one sitemap that lists every URL with the corresponding rel=”alternate” hreflang.

If you have these three pages that correspond:

• www.example.com/fr/page.html
• www.example.mx/page.html
• sp.example.com/page.html

If you verify ownership of:

• www.example.com
• www.example.mx
• sp.example.com

You can submit one sitemap, but that sitemap must contain the grouping:

• www.example.com/fr/page.html
• www.example.mx/page.html
• sp.example.com/page.html

in the sitemap three times (once for each URL).

Maile stressed the importance of making sure that ALL alternates are tagged and, as demonstrated above, they can be on the same or different domains.

Take Care Not To Limit Visibility Outside A Region

It is also still possible to use the geo-targeting feature in Webmaster Tools using verified sub-domains or sub-directories — but care should be taken not to use this setting for a generic language, as it will “limit the searcher findability outside the region.”

When using fully regional tags such as en-gb and en-us, for two versions of English, for English searches outside those regions, Google will act as if the hreflang tags do not exist — but the possibility exists that you could target a version of English globally by using just “en.”

Best Practices For International Sites

Maile also covered other best practices for international sites including:

• Each URL should be capable of being shared and should not be redirected because of user IP or language preference. In addition to helping the user, this also avoids sending Google’s mainly US crawlers into the mist.
• For translated URLs, it’s best to adopt UTF8 encoding and stick to it. If you’re using “safe” URLs, namely URLs without diacritics because of a content management problem, Google will do its best to figure out the original intention.
• Make sure your site architecture is capable of scaling to a larger number of users across longer distances as speed of content delivery is critical.

Eli Schwartz Of Survey Monkey At The International Search Summit Source:Webcertain

Eli Schartz of Survey Monkey spoke particularly to methods which can be used by non-speakers of a language to undertake their own keyword research — including using Google Translate, Trends or Google Suggest, but ultimately checking the search terms with a native. He pointed out that this was only realistically possible in languages using Latin characters.

Bill Hunt of Back Azimuth Speaking At The International Search Summit Source:Webcertain

Bill Hunt discussed methods of getting management on board by demonstrating “missed opportunities” in keywords and then by demonstrating the potential value lost by not succeeding with those keywords. That value, when calculated by the value of demand lost, could amount to millions.

Preston Carey Of Yandex Speaking At The International Search Summit Source:Webcertain

Preston Carey described the current status of Yandex in Russia highlighting its continued resistance to the Google presence in Russia, and despite an intense “distribution battle — it’s all about the distribution.” He also intriguingly referred to Yandex’s intentions to expand internationally beyond its current Russian, Ukrainian, Belorusian, Kazakhstani and Turkish borders.

Mel Carson Of Majestic SEO Speaking At The International Search Summit Source:Webcertain

Data mining was the central message from Mel Carson who extracted geographic linking patterns from Majestic SEO’s database with those from social media sources such as Twitter. “If the interest on Twitter doesn’t match with your link profile, that would indicate a potential source of new links and a potential business opportunity,” he said.

Gemma Birch Of Webcertain Speaking At The International Search Summit Source:Webcertain

Gemma Birch of Webcertain relayed the latest “search engine headlines,” the latest news from Google, Yandex and Baidu in the international arena. One key observation was that whilst Baidu is holding its own in China, the competition is definitely getting hotter with the launches of new search engines and new potentially threatening alliances.

Andy Atkins-Krueger Compared Search Engine Settings At The International Search Summit Source:Webcertain

As well as discussing the Webcertain Geo-Targeting grid, I highlighted the differences between the systems of the international search engines comparing match types and settings, noting that they are almost all different and inconsistent, often caused by local language requirements.

Christina Zila Of Textbroker Speaking At The International Search Summit Source:Webcertain

The quality of content featured centrally in the presentation from Christina Zila from Textbroker, as she described the briefing process needed to generate good quality content and the number of times it needed quality reviewing. She also compared the quality of directly translated content with fresh and original content written by copywriters.

If you start to think of PPC as a device of SEO, it takes on a very different light and your own attitude shifts slightly. Now, I know you’re already ahead of me and thinking of keywords and the dreaded “not provided” category of keywords as the point of this post — but in fact, that isn’t my main point.

Rather, the insights which pay per click campaigns deliver to marketers are crucial to making the right decisions about SEO campaigns and, moreover, the ability for the Global SEO Manager to actively deploy PPC activity to test issues and concepts before implementing expensive SEO projects means that it should really be the tool of choice for the world’s greatest SEOs — not the abominable beast it is sometimes described as by pro-SEO SEOs.

Trust Your Global SEO With PPC Budget. Source:Webcertain

There are two thoughts I’ve had for literally years that I continue to wrestle with; firstly, how can we, as an integrated global SEO and SEM agency, find ways for clients to fund their SEO activity directly through their PPC campaigns. And secondly, how should PPC and SEO campaigns relate to each other.

I’m certainly convinced that the PPC budget should not be taken away from the SEO for purely political reasons — in fact I would go so far as to say that exceptions should be made to PPC versus other forms of media spend, and paid search should not be regarded as part of the advertising mix for organisational reasons.

The reason for this is basic and simple; if you spend the money purely with the advertising team you will get the advertising and nothing more. Spend it with an SEO team which has so much more to gain from the knowledge gained from working with it, and you stand to gain substantially more besides the normal paid clicks.

Motivate Your SEO Agency To Perform With Slices Of The PPC Budget?

The funding mechanism is so much more challenging. I’d be interested to see what would happen if clients merged their PPC and SEO budgets into one once more — in other words to hold search budgets.

One solution might be to have a fixed budget — let’s say $10,000. That budget would be available to use as media spend or as ‘Search Referral Conversions’ (SRF). In other words, let’s say a fee of $5 per SFC was agreed. This would be paid for each conversion whether it came from a paid or an organic click.

If the agency started off with $10,000 but was generating 100 conversions, the agency would actually spend $9,500 in media spend and claim $500 in SFCs. The more SFCs the agency was able to claim, the less the agency would spend on media.

The downside of this, you say, is that the client would eventually see fewer conversions for their media investment — but this isn’t actually true. If the number of conversions dropped, the agency would lose revenue they would otherwise have been allowed to keep. So, they would have a vested interest in maintaining or improving performance.

International SEO Agency Mixing It Up With PPC Budget. Source:Webcertain

If you allow the agency access to make SEO recommendations — in fact you’d be wise to actively encourage that — then the agency will be minded to focus on making the changes offering the greatest likelihood of success. They’d also be likely to focus on the most important improvements first –as well as knocking over any obstacles in the purchase funnel. As the SFC revenue grew and they gained confidence in you being fair and paying the fees, the agency’s commitment and efforts invested would also expand.

The result is that you would have converted your PPC budget into an also-SEO budget without too much effort. By the way, the main reason these performance schemes don’t work is because the client puts in thresholds and caps. A threshold might be because their search referrals are already converting and they don’t want to just pay money across to the agency rewarding them for past efforts that are just now producing conversions.

Thresholds can actually work as long as they reflect the conversions already being generated, and are not thresholds based on some future figure or upward pointing trend.

Caps, however, are a killer. They turn an agency’s motivation and risk taking effort right down — and why would you cap things? If your budget is capped, why would you need to cap SFCs? Because your media spend has been completely cannibalised? So what? If you did the math right in the first place, that was what you always wanted and you can surely afford now to increase your media budget to take things to the next level?

What’s To Be Gained By SEOs Working With PPC Budget?

Looking at this from our original angle of the PPC experience helping the SEO team, what exactly can an SEO gain from working directly alongside PPC?

The first benefit could be described as gaining an insight into user behaviour. This means much more than understanding which keywords prospects use. By understanding things like time of day or search patterns you can gain a real grasp of how prospective customers are thinking — which in turn would highlight which aspects of your SEO program are most important and have the greatest upside value.

Secondly, don’t forget that testing content against users is no longer the sole preserve of the usability or conversion optimization teams. The best measure of content quality is to ‘bounce’ that content off users. And since content quality is key for SEO these days — witness Panda, Penguin and click through rates — finding out quickly whether your pages or liked or not quickly, is essential.

Finally, an SEO does need to know if the users fail to convert because of obstacles they meet en route through the site — if the conversion path isn’t smooth, why would you invest in further SEO techniques?

Culture and language is the answer you’re expecting from me – right? Yes, that’s definitely an important part of the mix, but there is more, much more, to it than that.

Listening to Chinese military strategist, Sun Tzu, can give us a few clues. I have a sneaking suspicion that he would have also made a great PPC strategist.

Knowing Your Customers And Competitors And That They Are Different. Source: Webcertain

I’ve organised this post as a list of tips so you can pick out the important points which apply to you – and ignore the ones you’re confident you have sorted. (Really?)

1.  Understand Your Customer

It’s obvious to understand your customer, and it goes without saying. However, when worrying about “localization” and “Going Local,” we do need to bear in mind that we need to “localize” our understanding of the customer, too. Yes, they are human beings, just like you, but they still operate in an environment where the rules are different and their training and business practices may be fundamentally different.

By the way, in my experience, this oversight is actually most common with western companies who are targeting Europe – because they assume that Europeans must all be the same. Well, we’re not — there, I’ve said it! Targeting a German customer versus a Spanish customer is not the same.

2.  Research Keywords, Don’t Translate Them

I will not give up on this one – despite the fact that the industry constantly drifts in this direction!

There is no one-to-one relationship with keywords. The keyword you think is tops, may not even exist in the market you’re targeting – and sometimes, it will have a completely different meaning. A word which only has one meaning in English, may have several uses in French or Romanian.

No One-To-One Relationship Exists Between Keywords In Different Languages. Source: Webcertain

Translating keywords is just morally wrong. Just because I search for “pumps” in English, doesn’t mean I will search for “pompe” in Italia,n especially as I really meant [scarpe con tacco] or something which you wear on your feet! If you come across someone who suffers from KTO (that’s “keyword translation obsession”) please don’t hesitate to refer them to me, and I’ll put them right!

3.  Don’t Be Lazy, Invest In The Local Search Engine Where There Is One!

If you’re targeting a market where there is an important local search engine, such as Yandex in Russia or Baidu in China, it pays not to be lazy and to have your campaign set-up for that search engine in that market.

Mostly, the reason why people do this is because the search engine’s are different in the way they operate, and so, campaigns have to be re-built to function correctly.

However, what’s a bit a of re-build versus saving the day with your campaign’s ROI?

4.  Is There A Market For Your Product Or Service? Competitors?

You might ask what this is doing amongst a list of PPC tips, but it’s one of the most common reasons why campaigns don’t succeed. Yes, the customers may be very interested in pink ice cream in that market, but did you know there were already 20 suppliers locally and their prices are all lower than yours?

5.  Go Local, But Don’t Throw The Baby Out With The Bathwater!

A very common mantra is to “go local.” Do you actually know what that means because I don’t? There’s an implied inconsistency in the term in that if you’re “going” local – then you’re not actually local. Should that be “pretend your local”?

Anyhow, it’s much more important to understand and speak directly to the customer than to worry about what this expression means.

And, there’s a trap in “going local,” too. If you work with a local agency, they’ll be able to justify everything they say, right or wrong, by simply saying “That’s how we do things here!” The reason you’re in the market, we hope, is because you offer some added value that the customers will truly appreciate.

So, if you’re “Nike,” for instance, and you’re targeting Italy, don’t try making your brand “Italian” and going local because the Italians will probably be more interested in the fact that you’re involved with sporting events around the world and offer them a solution that their local providers don’t.

In other words, first understand your customers, check to see if they like what you offer and then offer the benefits they like. Don’t try and pretend you’re from around the corner because it’s not going to work!

6.  Oh So Crucial Landing Pages?

In a previous post, I named these “first impression pages,” and I really think that term has a lot of value.

The term “landing pages” means you’ve arrived, now let’s see what we can do with you. “First Impression” means now you instantly see who we are, and we hope you like it. It doesn’t mean, “here’s the only page we’ve translated, now let’s push you into our traditional English funnel.”

However, you can do a lot with landing pages. If you’re concerned that your site, translated or not, may not deliver, why not create a much more detailed and long landing page which tells them all the things they need to know?

If you’re doing this, you need to junk that concept of only giving them the links we want them to click to convert. You need to do a different and more complete job than you would ever think necessary in your usual market place.

7.  Check Regulations And The Law!

You definitely need it to be legal or it really isn’t going to work! Not only are your competitors going to try and make things as difficult as possible for you – and you just handed them a weapon – but you’re going to find that what search engines allow you to do doesn’t mean that it’s OK for you to do them.

Trademark law in Europe, for example, does not match up directly with Google’s policy. You may be able to set the campaign up in the first place, but leave a space on your desk for the hefty wad of papers that’s going to land there with a great thud from someone’s legal team.

8.  How Many Of Them Search In English?

Oh boy, do I really have to keep dealing with this one? Seriously! A better way to phrase the question would be, “Are there enough searches in English to get me some non-converting clicks so I can burn through my budget quickly enough?” I’ll move on.

9.  Your Logistics – Can You Actually Deliver?

What have logistics got to do with PPC? Let me explain. The first time someone orders something from you and you take three weeks to deliver when their normal supplier manages it in two days, is the last time that customer is going to order from your site. But, if you have a nice site, they’ll probably still keep visiting. They may even look for a “New speedy delivery” message to decide whether they want to spend much time there.

And, if you keep on failing to satisfy the speedy delivery need, well, they’ll even get bored with visiting!

And, don’t forget the logistics of your campaign. Sun Tsu would have have told you, you need to keep your army fed, and that means make sure the samples, brochures, collateral and training are all available to support your roll out strategy.

10.  Check That The Benefits You Offer Are Still Relevant

You know your product so well – that’s great! But can you put yourself in your customers shoes, sitting in his or her world and imagine what it means to them? A crazy example I know, but if you’re selling umbrellas to Saudi Arabia, the benefit of keeping the sun off might be more relevant than the rain! Again, it really keeps going back to jetisoning your assumptions and getting to know your customers all over again!

11.  Don’t Use Irrelevant Symbols To Back Up Your Case

That badge or logo you were given by the association you pay your membership to, is not going to cut any mustard in a new market. Irrelevant badges are worse than no badges at all because if your badges don’t say, “You can trust us,” then you can’t. Take them off, throw them away and think again about how you can build new trust with your new target customers.

12.  Whose Brand Is It Anyway?

Even if you’re a small player, you probably have some brand value in your market at home. Take account of that now before you spend money where no one has ever heard of you?

I’d strongly recommend that you assess which market has the best potential for your future expansion – allowing for the impact of losing your existing brand power. If you don’t have it in the markets you’re going into, take it easy, launch into these markets one-by-one, not all at once.

13.  Is Seasonality The Same?

We’ve just come through Chinese new year – an event which has a huge impact on what goes on and what gets bought in China. It’s roughly a month after the western Christmas. Then, there’s Ramadan later in the year, and Diwali, and many other festivals.

Think that they don’t apply in Europe? Try making any progress during Carnival week in south Germany or Austria. The customers are probably not thinking about buying right then. (Difficult when you’re wearing comical costumes and dancing in the street!)

14.  Do Offers Mean The Same Thing?

Check that your promotional offers make sense. Twenty percent (20%) off may have zero impact if everybody is already saying that in the target market. Free delivery may be meaningless where no one charges for delivery.

15.  Don’t Use PPC Experts From The US To Launch Your Campaigns Without Additional Support

Your existing agency may be doing a fantastic job, and you like working with them. Great. But don’t let them loose on an international campaign without checking that they really know what they’re doing. One thing that clients often don’t do, but should, is to specify that you want to work with your agency but they need to find proper support and partners. They can do this, and it may be a great solution for your campaign.

Let’s deal with the forms first. Many writers at Search Engine Land have talked about the usability of forms, about them working and about avoiding obvious errors.

An example is avoiding making postcode fields mandatory in a country such as the Republic Of Ireland where there are no postcodes. Hey presto, guaranteed zero performance!

Forms Are Highly Significant To A User’s Stickiness To Your Site

But, there is much more to forms than just collecting the customer’s key data to record a sale. Users frequently “kick tires” to see how something works — or doesn’t. And that means they’re going to have a play with your forms as a part of choosing you as a supplier.

Pricing Issues Affect International Search Performance. Source:Webcertain

The fields and options your form presents are highly meaningful to the user. They can inspire everything from a focus on service to pure greed. For instance, if the form says, “You may want to take an extra bag on your flight, book now to save 30% on airport prices,” then that’s a service even though it’s asking for money.

Do You Tell Your Customers You Are Greedy?

If the form says, “Book extra bag $50,” then that’s more of the greedy variety, and yet, these two form questions are doing pretty much the same thing.

Now, add culture into the equation and things do get a little more complicated. Firstly, you have to consider regulations. In Europe, for instance, extra charges have to be declared up front, not late in the booking process. And if you are going to charge extra for credit card bookings — and you don’t allow bookings any other way — you’ll have to include the credit card fee in the up front price.

Beyond regulations, there are other cultural questions to consider beyond the obvious address fields. Asking certain questions can seriously offend the user — even if the questions are not mandatory. For instance, some enquiry forms ask for comments on existing supplier relationships — and in many cultures around the world this question would be considered inappropriate, and in others, it would elicit a response that had nothing to do with the reality.

Trust — That’s What It’s All About!

Ask yourself how you will earn greater trust from the questions your users are asking. For instance, for retail or e-commerce, one of the big worries concerns whether there are extra costs for delivery: how long the delivery will take and am I able to return the product if it doesn’t work for me?

Don’t forget also that putting such things on a page does not always mean that your customer has actually mentally engaged with them. Think about asking the customer to confirm the delivery address required and whether this should be where any potential returns are collected.

Or, is there an alternate way customers can return goods to you? Do they have a choice? By confirming acceptance of a statement that delivery will be to x address, you can actually reinforce the delivery approach you have.

Pricing Issues In International Search Marketing. Source:Webcertain

Pricing also communicates. I’m sure we all know that a high price indicates better service and quality than a low price. But the trick is: what’s high and what’s low?

Global Pricing Or Locally-Differentiated?

Some companies, Apple is well known for it, adopt a global pricing strategy where all products cost the same everywhere, and if prices vary, then it is because the product has been varied for that market. For some, this is definitely the right approach — but it’s not right for all.

Bearing in mind that in your own established market, you have a brand and a reputation which help you to reach the giddy heights of your current domestic margin, that means you may have some fiscal cliffs of your own to contend with in new markets and should consider varying your price appropriately.

Currency Mayhem — And No, We’re Not Talking Exchange Rates!

Different currencies will completely blow up your “just noticeable difference” strategy completely.

Trying to price something just under $99 might seem cheap in Euros at €72.95 and expensive in Russia at over 3,000 Roubles. Pricing it just a little lower for the Russians would bring it under the three thousand barrier — but maybe Euros could be a little higher?

Taking account of economic strength also impacts your pricing strategy. Selling to India or China would not justify prices as high as in, say Germany.

What Difference Do Pricing & Forms Make To Search?

But, let’s get to the nub of the issue: what difference do pricing and forms make to international search strategies? For once, I think a list is the best way to answer the question:

• Price points directly affect media conversion rates — if you’re A/B testing ads, then you should be thinking of A/B testing price, too!
• Reviewing competitors’ pricing may lead you to vary prices to enter certain markets.
• Including price in the ad texts you promote will have a greater impact in some cultures than others. Think about varying it!
• If you’re very high priced, you may want to think about delaying the display of your prices as you don’t want users to “bounce” and return to Google too quickly!
• If you offer highly competitive rates lower than competitors locally, get them up front early! That’ll get users to stick around and is especially significant if you’re new to the market. It is also important for both SEO and PPC strategies.
• Be careful with your border pricing differences in markets next to each other — especially if they use the same currency and language — such as Germany and Austria. The consumer will start preferring your site just over the border.
• Making your forms stress the questions your users have in the target market will give them more confidence in buying from you and improve your conversion rates!
• Getting prices in local currency into your page titles can have a significant effect on getting customers to click through to your site — and therefore, even promote good rankings. This is especially the case if your competitors don’t do this or don’t offer local currencies!
• Don’t leave pricing and forms out of your thinking or separate them from your search strategy!

Don’t forget — both forms and prices have a significant effect on communication, and communication is what search is all about!

Described by the company as “experimental,” the app responds to users’ spoken queries and displays results from that user’s social connections in a horizontal format which Yandex believes may be the best way to display social search for the future.

One key aspect of the app is the historical nature of the data queried. “Wonder” is not looking at what someone is saying now about a restaurant you’re thinking of visiting, but what they have said in the past. This enables much richer information to be displayed to users from a limited data set than would be the case with traditional search engines.

How The Yandex “Wonder” App Is Structured. Source: Yandex

The supported social network platforms include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Foursquare and other tools connected through Facebook such as Spotify.

Developed by Palo Alto-based Yandex Labs, the app is limited to the US for now, but a spokesman for the company said, “It’s an experimental app which uses many existing Yandex technologies and tests some that are new. We aim to learn about users preferences, such as the horizontal results display and may then roll it out to other regions.”

A typical search query might be, ” I wonder what my friends are listening to?” or “what sushi restaurants do my friends go to in New York?” A key aspect that the technology tries to achieve is to recognise the many different ways that a particular restaurant or venue, might be described by different friends in different networks — a new form of “duplicate removal” similar to duplication removal in traditional search engines.

In addition to the fact that its development came out of the US, the company says it chose the limited iOS platform in the US because it is a single market speaking predominantly one language, more social data is available, and US users share more on average than those in other parts of the world.

“Wonder” Has Horizontal Scroll To Display Its Social Search Results. Source: Yandex

The spokesman noted that, “We may use what we learn on voice search from this experiment in connection with our main Yandex search engine.”

Inevitably, the app will be compared to Facebook’s new Graph Search concept and has many similarities, except the addition of natural language voice search. The app is available to download for free.

Other than “Yandex.com,” which is an English-language search tool from Yandex, the company has never made forays into the US in its own name — but has invested in US search engines such as Blekko. This is the first direct search investment in the US.

Postscript by Matt McGee: TechCrunch is reporting that Facebook has blocked Yandex’s access to its data, and the two companies are discussing next steps.

Postscript #2 by Matt McGee, January 25: Yandex has shared this official statement on the situation:

Wonder app has been blocked by Facebook. We are in touch with Facebook to enquire about the reasons for this and what can be done to solve this problem. As of now any new users trying to sign up to Wonder with their Facebook account receive a notification by Facebook: “An error occurred. Please try again later”. Those users who have already signed up can still ask questions, but the Facebook data will not be updated. Instagram, Foursquare and Twitter data are updated as normal.

International Business Is Becoming The Norm

I’m not going to do the shocking numbers bit this time, but what I am going to say is that the Web is so significant to business development in the modern age, that the businesses which are going to do well will all be international! In fact, international will be the new default position for businesses, and dealing with multiple languages, the norm.

You only have to look to the High Street in the UK, in other words, the main shopping areas downtown in the UK, to discover how important this really is. Almost all large and successful retailers in the UK, for instance, win business from other countries. And those who are not doing so well internationally…. well, they are not doing so well overall, either.

First Law Of Marketing: Target Customers Who Are Interested

One of the secrets of success is making the right decisions in the first place about where to target. If you think about it, this is the major cause of all business difficulties when beginning to market overseas.

Target customers who are genuinely interested in your product or service, in the right location to which you can deliver — and things will go swimmingly. Target customers who are not interested and can’t buy your product anyway; well, that’s another case study for me to go on display with at a future International Search Summit.

Making the right decision, however, isn’t easy. As part of the courses on international SEO that I run, we cover a way of thinking about using keyword research in the process.

The first step is to create your candidate list of target regions. (A region, by the way, would be France::French or Belgium::French, both of those would be regions in our terms. You can’t safely treat the world as countries with national borders these days — it’s far more complex than that!)

Using Google Trends Can Help To Identify Target Markets. Source: Google & Webcertain.

Creating a candidate list is sometimes determined by logistics, delivery capabilities, the legality of the product or service or other factors. But what do you do if you still have 40 to 60 potential regions to target at the end of the process? The ideal process is to undertake some local market research, perhaps in-street surveys or focus groups, but doing that 40 times over in maybe 20 plus languages would not be for the feint hearted!

Search engines to the rescue.  Fortunately, consumers reveal their purchasing inclinations through the keywords the put into the search query box of search engines — which then kindly enable us to investigate which keywords are showing up in their logs.

Now, it gets a little trickier, but you have to infer some meaning to what they’re searching for.  If you’re about to launch with a product that is already well known and established, this isn’t too difficult to do. The difficulty arises if you’re inventing something new, something which is market disruptive or something completely revolutionary. You are brave.

Look For Indicative Search Terms

But, keyword research can still help you here because there will always be some related terms that will be a good indicator of likely interest in the target region. As I sit here in a snow covered Britain, let’s imagine you’re about to launch some treatment you can use with summer tires to make them more suitable to run on the snow. You’ll want to check out the level of searches for winter tires, even though that’s the market you’re planning to disrupt.

But you also know these searches are historical — they only really show what happened yesterday — so how do you predict the future?  Well, partly, that’s where trends come in. Take the image below showing a search for “winter tyres” in the UK — noting the UK spelling.

Even despite the fact that Google made a geographical tweak in 2011 which shows more data for the UK than before, the patterns show that searches for winter tires have gone up dramatically. Not surprising, when you consider that the last two UK winters have been by far the worst for snow for many years.

Google Trends Shows The Growing Interest In “Winter Tyres” In The UK. Source:Google & Webcertain.

The Diffusion Of Innovation Curve

Now, the thing to remember if you’re checking out something that is truly revolutionary, is the diffusion of innovation curve — something marketers have known about for years.

Often, very successful products already had the creative pioneers and pathfinders  trying to find a solution similar to the one you are offering. This frequently means looking deeper at long-tail keywords because they show more clearly the intent of the user. So, [something that makes my tires stickier for winter] would be a good candidate for your product.

Next, all you need do is compare and contrast different markets — noting that you have to have a very good understanding of the meaning of terms in different languages — so, you can’t just match keywords one-to-one to each other. But, you can gauge which regions have the greatest interest in your solution from your candidate list of potential markets.

Expanding Your Findings

Then, some deeper in-market research can take place to supplement and enlarge upon your findings — but at least, you don’t need to do that in 60 countries and can start to narrow down to the targets which are really interesting!