The problem solved by the new tag is indicating your preferred “default” content when you are returned for searches in countries that you haven’t created localised content for. This is especially important when you consider the increased bounce rates, low conversion rates, and poor click-through rates (CTRs) that come with losing control of your preferred URL for Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

In their webmaster blog post, Google uses the example of defining a non-location-specific URL (in this case, a “select your country” page) as the default page for visitors for whom localised content has not been created. This is likely to be the most common usage for the “x-default” hreflang attribute — it would certainly be my recommendation for multinational Web architectures.

There is, however, the question of what language content to use as your default, and how you can bring a little quantifiable information to play to determine your best choice overall.

Choosing Your X-Default Default Language For Cash Money Gain

Let’s say you are a FTSE 250 retail business, operating globally, but not fully rolled-out online to all of your target markets.

You’ve spent time avoiding the obvious default homepage handling mistakes of language assumptions and preferred locations, but still suffer from high bounce rates for non-target territories.

You can handle distribution globally via your logistics and local partners, leaning heavily on affiliates in second and third tier countries.

But you have only been doubled-down on online retail for the last 4-5 years and are (still!) in the process of trying to maintain critical server responsiveness (aka: don’t throw an error during checkout or anywhere else at peak sales times) while migrating to a new internal system needed to protect personal transaction details, ensure security, and comply with auditing standards.

Implementing hreflang architectures is, then, hard, i.e., developer time is limited, you can’t easily bring in more staff who would know your CMS straight off the bat, and you already have a two-year critical development process path.

Your SEO agency has stepped in with sets of hreflang sitemaps to implement initial localisation, though they will quickly go out of synch as your stocking changes through your sales cycles — so, they will need to be frequently updated until a dynamic generation change request is implemented (in 6-9 months).

So, it’s important, when you make a decision on your default content, that it’s not going to change for the next 12 months, at least. What language do you choose?

Easy: whatever is your largest “gap” audience language. (Note: This is not just your head office location language — or, more accurately, it may not be.)

Calculating Your Localised Language “Gap”

What, precisely, do I mean by “gap” language? It’s your largest customer language not already localised to via hreflang tags or sitemaps.

To calculate this, we need to understand total language market share in all locations you can currently reach via internal logistics or partner reselling, and subtract your hreflang localised locations.

To further refine this list, we can then consider the market share of the search engines that recognize the x-default hreflang markup. Significantly, the partner search engines are Google & Yandex (not Bing or Baidu, as yet).

Compiling the initial language list is straightforward, though it does entail a bit of research; see my post on estimating traffic opportunity globally for SEO to discover some potential resources to help you get started. You get bonus points for incorporating the per capita income metric at this stage, too.

You can also take a more simplified approach and refer to nationsonline.org’s most spoken languages chart to make a decision which doesn’t take into account online populations and disposable incomes, but which does include second languages (vital for understanding the right target language in certain countries, such as Saudi Arabia).

Some common outcomes of best default language are: Spanish (a worldwide language like English), Russian (take Russia’s online population, key city per-capita incomes, and marketplace target for “Western” brands, and you have a compelling case), and, of course, Chinese — specifically, Mandarin.

Why not English?

In my experience, usually the predominantly English language speaking countries have already been localised-to using hreflang sitemaps — the alternate language choices above have typically been under-appreciated by multinational brands and represent largely undeveloped online markets.

This is not always the case, of course. It occurs often enough, however,  that it pays to stop and ask the following question before you set your multinational campaigns to default to English language content: am I targeting the best default language for my overall online ROI?

So, like all good Web marketers do, I got revenue involved in the equation. Want to know how to understand the revenue opportunity available to your brand globally? Read on…

Calculating The Size Of The Pie

First up: what’s the current global reach of my client?

To understand that, we get involved with the Audience reports in Google Analytics. (If you’re not using GA, you really should. With the advent of multi-touch attribution and custom channel cost centres, there’s no longer any reason not to jump onboard.)

Depending on your multinational architecture (if you’re interested, check out my thoughts on the best multinational structure for SEO), you may need to run against a master ‘Global’ profile, covering all of your existing domain names for a fair comparison of any gaps. See this post on common analytics mistakes made by multinationals for how to set up that tracking structure if you’re not already using it — it’s a lifesaver for this type of work.

Set your time period to be a full year and also run to at least the last three months to ensure you’re looking at up-to-date info. This is important for relevant outcomes and to avoid seasonal trends skewing the graph. Switch into eComms figures, select for 100 results and export as a CSV. Next, we want to segment-out brand traffic.

Segment-Out Brand Traffic

Yep, we don’t want to colour our estimation by incorporating data into our model which represents people to whom we can’t attribute new business driven by online.

Generic search terms represent a demographic which isn’t using search as an extension of their bookmarks to navigate to the client site. We want to see what performance we have which is bringing in: new business, new eyeballs on the website, new future converts to the sporting achievements of our sports franchise client.

From the same filters already used, add a secondary keyword dimension, filter-out all variations of the brand using the advanced filter (including typos, domain terms, ‘Not Provided’ and ‘Not Set,’ etc.). Then, set your results to 500 and export the CSV.

You’ll find that you have a dominant country or two in the top 500; and, to achieve our estimate, we only need to get a rough steer on opportunity. Thus, we will now create a table of the performing domains by duplicating the tab, selecting all and ‘Removing Duplicates’ in Excel.

Then, use SUMIF next to each domain to match against the domain name and total up our traffic from each location.

We can then compare total visits from the first spreadsheet to this figure to get a rough ratio for non-brand to brand, which you should now use as a factor against the first CSV report to present a ‘non-brand’ column.

As a note on this process: for very large sites, the limit for our sample set of 500 (GA’s limit) may be too restrictive, in which case, run a separate report in GA in Traffic Sources, filtering by the location flagged in the dedupe stage above, as well as by brand, to get a more accurate non-brand factor. For most sites though, this step is overkill in terms of the final estimate’s value as a guide.

Now, we have a total for the top 100 currently performing countries, and a factor telling us what proportion of that is brand and non-brand.

What’s The Opportunity?

To take revenue, and likelihood to generate revenue, into account, I used three resources:

1. Internet World Stats’ compendium of online population figures by region, in which I dug out the detailed stats for each region  and compiled it into a master spreadsheet (for example, here’s Europe’s stats).
2. Wikipedia’s summary of BEA’s data on per capita disposable income.
3. I weighted countries by language. The franchise is obviously based in one country – English language speaking in this case – so it makes sense that as part of a rollout of their international marketing efforts, some weighting for ease of content dissemination is taken into account on the model.

Then, simply drag the data from each of these items into different tabs on your spreadsheet and normalise the country location data (use TRIM and run VLOOKUPS alongside each to mark True/False for it being listed in the other tabs; use a filter and filter the false rows to identify what the mis-match is). Common cleaning up is normalising the likes of ‘The Ivory Coast and Coté D’Ivoir, and so on.

Once that’s done, you can extend the original Google Analytics tab data to include the online stats for the country, and calculate a ration for the ‘Gap’ between current traffic and opportunity. (I calculate this for both Brand and Non Brand to allow for filtering of targets for online marketing targets, and offline brand-raising marketing campaigns.)

Then, do the same opportunity analysis against the per-cap disposable income figure and (the important part!) relate the per-capita gap to the online population gap to give you your final, greatest traffic and revenue opportunity figure.

The language weighting, I applied by using conditional formatting to VLOOKUP against the preferred countries, allowing them to stand out regardless of the filters used to segment the country opportunities in the spreadsheet.

There you are — now, you know your market opportunities in a very broad-brush fashion, and in an easily replicable format for other websites. Obviously, I’d suggest you dig further into the nuances of your client’s market before making final decisions on where budgets should be allocated; but as a starting point, it’s a great way to flag up some under-targeted locations for businesses that truly aspire to be multinational.

Oh, and if you fancy getting a little more involved in this modal, I’ve further refined it to drill into the analytics data on a city-by-city basis to suggest local PPC budget underspends and achieve micro-multinational targeting.

1. Majority Of 18-34 Demographic Will Use Their Phones To Make A Purchase In 2013

In August 2012, eConsultancy surveyed this metric, and found 42% in the US and 44% in the UK had made a purchase with their mobile.

For 35-54 year olds, the numbers drop off to 28% and 21%, respectively, and for 55+ ages, 13% and 8%. This significant drop off for older generations results in a much lower overall purchase metric of 28% and 25% for the US & UK, respectively, although this is still over double the 2011 figure.

As highly developed markets in both per-capita income and online saturation, the US & UK are bellweather markets for the rest of the developed and developing world. So, while we can say with some accuracy that 2012 was finally the year of the mobile for e-commerce, the reality is 2013 will be the breakthrough year in terms of mobile’s importance to to full retail mix for most markets.

This means that well-optimised mobile sites — and, for optimal SEO, that means responsive designs using the same URL architecture as the desktop and tablet sites — will deliver significant revenue gains for their brands.

And of course, responsive designs, in addition to preferential treatment from Google, will also allow brands with existing mobile-only URLs to consolidate via 301s and compound their domain SEO authority for stronger desktop performance: a major win-win scenario.

2.  Catering To In-Store Mobile Activity Will Reap Major Dividends In 2013

In the tail end of December, comScore released research showed that in the teeth of Christmas shopping through the last quarter of 2012, 44% of UK smartphone users performed at least one shopping activity while within a physical retail store.

The stand out items were: taking a picture of the product, texting/calling friends about the product, or sending the product picture to friends; and this has taken most of the headlines when discussing the data. But for me, the most interesting aspect is the price comparison and competitive search performance openings available in the other common behaviours.

Research indicated 20.9% scanned a barcode, 17.7% compared product prices, 11.1% found coupons of deals, 7.7% checked availability, and (only!) 5.8% purchased online instead of making a physical purchase in the store.

All of these items provide opportunity for smartphone-optimised SEO or PPC campaigns to capture a sale from a customer already quite far down the purchase funnel, likely giving very high purchase conversion rates to the captured traffic.

A key strategy opportunity would be using PPC ad extensions — especially call extensions, sitelink extensions featuring offers, and location extensions — to target these specific user behaviours in your competitors’ stores globally wherever they have bricks and mortar locations (each target city can, of course, be isolated with location targeting in your ad campaign).

3. Brands Are Facing A Tsunami Of Tablet Traffic In 2013

Adobe released a research paper (pdf) in July 2012, covering tablet sales and traffic trends to 325 brands across North America, Western Europe, and Asia-Pacific. The headline numbers are:

• Tablet website share of visit growth has been 10x faster than equivalent smartphone growth in its first two years on the scene, and last year saw a 300% share growth.
• This growth suggests tablets will exceed smartphone traffic in 2013, and reach 10% of total traffic in early 2014

In addition, for the retail vertical, tablet conversion rates are 3x more ‘effective’ than smartphones, which demonstrates the value of their increased screen size and different usage patterns (in another study, this time by InMobi, 72% of tablet owners used their device while watching TV, and more than 50% used their table to access rich media content).

Also in the inMobi study, the preferred device for shopping for tablet owners was their tablet device by 46% vs. 41% for their desktop machines. So, given tablet sales, the dominant trend online is the major uptick in importance of tablet site experience.

Given that targeting improved smartphone experience, alongside improved tablet experience, this is not a technical, but rather a design and usability challenge, (it’s simply a case of targeting media queries to each device type supported with JavaScript user-agent detection for belt-and-braces implementation), tablet conversion should be right at the very top of any multinational webmaster’s priority list for 2013.

The recent closures had legacy presence in bricks and mortar on the UK high street (AKA: the UK’s Main Street or Mall retail profile) in common: HMV, Blockbuster UK, and Jessops. All had been considered institutions in UK retailing.

Since 2008, the list of once-stalwart bastions of the high street entering administration has been relentless:

• Base, the fashion retailer
• Toyzone
• Sleep Depot
• MK One (twice!)
• Miss Sixty
• MFI (furniture and fitted kitchens)
• Woolworths, the department store institution
• The Pier
• Officers Club (both high street fashion)
• Zavvi (formerly Virgin Megastores, of course)
• USC
• Land of Leather
• Threshers & Wine Rack
• Comet, the electrical goods retailer which also incorporates Dixons
• JJB Sports
• Clinton Cards
• Game
• Blacks Leisure (outdoor equipment and clothing)
• Habitat
• Focus DIY

There are many, many more, including brands which are smaller businesses but no less important to the health of the high street in the UK.

As a result, currently one-fifth of all retail property in the UK is empty. This has had a predictably chilling effect on the sector, and highlights the opportunities currently being grasped by online retailers and traditional brands which have embraced the Internet and changing consumer habits, notably John Lewis and Asos & Next, as noted in the linked Financial Times article.

Mobile Shopping & Online Channels Propelling Growth

Given the UK population is the world’s most committed online shopper, and is also much more saturated in browsing and buying online via mobile and tablets, the UK’s high street woes are portents of similar brand shifts in other countries worldwide.

That is not to say, or course, that such seismic shifts are not already occurring (with their own winners and losers), but that much greater shifts should be expected in all territories where broadband and mobile saturation is increasing dramatically (as in South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan, for example).

High speed broadband connections precipitate increased mobile smartphone & tablet retail online.

Where we see traditional retail dissonance brought on from online purchasing behaviours, the savvy search marketer should see opportunity in new markets for their brands’ (or clients’) ability to distribute multinationally and project a strong brand presence online to reach new territories.

So, here’s to a strong 2013 for new, ambitious and forward-thinking multinational brands with tablet and smartphone conversion strategies.

There are lots of ways to tackle the problem, but by far the easiest is via Google’s Webmaster Tools, now integrated into Google Analytics, which has the added advantage of being free, always a benefit to those working within tight budgets.

Interestingly, looking at alternatives to see what the paid competition offers results in very little opportunity. Truly multinational SEO tools are thin on the ground — and those that do offer multinational SEO reports as a feature invariably have a critical failing: they don’t search from the reporting country.

The majority simply try to replicate multinational SERPs by selecting the local TLD version of the search engine queried; an obvious failing for the likes of Google, which serves dramatically different SERPs to different IP locations.

Many other ranking tools hop onto a CDN to gather results, which can be effective for a limited set of countries, but falls over for any country without an exit node. Also, there’s an obvious problem with using CDNs or other cloud-based solutions (like Amazon’s EC2) — the exit IP ranges are well known; therefore provide poor IPs to get a neutral understanding of rankings for key phrases for search engine’s alert to scraping tools (the only way to naturally gather rankings).

Data warehousing also rears its head at this stage, as tools that gather rankings for different countries via their own network of IPs and allow paid access to them force you to depend on their set key phrases. There are none that offer full access to run any key phrase in any country you select and return a truly local, untarnished ranking.

This kind of report is very valuable, as regardless of personalisation, the underlying ranking report shows the true performance of a page for a target key phrase, increasing its ability to significantly become part of the personalised SERP.

These reports are also critical to gain competitive intelligence on performing URLs and domains for target sets of key phrase terms that can allow for a range of strategic activity to improve your own SEO efforts such as gap-led SEO linkbuilding.

Google-Centric Solutions & Insights

So, we return to Google’s reports, showing impressions and clicks for your performing key phrases. How can we make this effective for multinational campaigns?

In the past, we used to have to segment our Webmaster Tools Verification into multiple, different locations to gain country-specific data in the very useful Impressions Vs. Clicks data of the Search Queries report.

Google Webmaster Tools’ Search Queries Report

Today, we only need that structure when geo-locating WMT accounts to specific countries (still important, though now also achievable using hreflang sitemaps), or if we have decided to use a multiple TLD approach to our international site architecture (something, I’d advise against).

That’s because Google has added the ability to segment the Search Queries report by country.

Google Search Queries Report’s Location Options

The only drawbacks to this data are: we are restricted by domains we control (so, no glorious competitive intelligence to be had here); and also, we can’t see beyond Google, which is very important in many countries where Google’s market share is comparatively weak (not least the US!).

Those caveats aside, when we view the same data within Google Analytics, our ability to segment data beyond the SERP into goal tracking and e-commerce returns gives us a very flexible, multinational SERP performance analysis tool that can be scheduled to deliver convenient reports at whatever frequency we like, for whichever regions we determine.

Google Analytics Geographic Summary for Search Engine Optimisation Report

Insights can quickly be derived for regions where SERP clickthrough has fallen dramatically, or overall impressions have dropped away. Critical region-specific landing pages can be identified quickly and scheduled for A/B testing should their conversion rates be sub-par, and so on.

With the lack of viable alternatives, Google’s Webmaster Tool Data is the best option out there for multinational webmasters, hindered only by a lack of competitive intelligence, which could be brought to bear for profitable competitor analysis.

However, with the extensive localisation controls provided in Google’s webmaster tools these days, is there still a case for multinational strategies using local TLDs for SEO benefit?

Are there any remaining benefits for local TLDs in Multinational Optimisation?

A History Of TLD Optimisation

Back in 2005, Google’s emerging webmaster guidelines advocated the use of local TLDs for content intended for a particular country. This meant, for example, that to target French language content to France, hosting it on example.fr would be beneficial as the TLD was the major factor considered when localising content.

At the time, Google also advocated hosting on an IP in the target country and made it clear that it was also essential to tag up content with meta language tags so Google could determine your intended audience most accurately.

All of these technical requirements were important metrics for their crawler localising content to the correct country version of Google.

Largely, this was because it was, at that stage, only possible to directly locate a URL to a location using Google tools for Google Local Listings (i.e., you could set a Google Map link to point to your domain, thereby tying that domain to the map location in Google Maps).

In short, there was no way to actively set geographic targets across multiple countries with any of the major search engines at the time. It was also true that intuiting the location on their part was a hard problem. Errors were rife, most especially for multinational brands.

Invariably, issues would arise for such brands with the intuited localisation of the homepage regularly being dragged across different countries with dramatic effects for incoming organic search traffic (imagine if your UK marketplace traffic lost 80% of its natural search traffic for a whole month while you battled to wrest control of it from Google US listings on Google.com back to UK listings on Google.com.uk).

Localisation was messy, hard, and frustrating for webmasters andsearch engines alike. Doing everything you could to make that localisation easier was a positive boon for your multinational SEO campaign.

Cometh The Hour, Cometh Webmaster Tools

In June 2005, Google launched its Sitemaps Tool into Beta, allowing webmasters direct input into how Google would crawl their sites. This service then morphed into the Google Webmaster Tool in August 2006, and new features began to be regularly built in — often tested in beta with high volume site webmasters. (Off topic, but does anyone else remember the impact crawl controls had back then? SEO had definitely never been so easy!)

Then, in October 2007, Google rolled out the ‘Set Geographic Target’ tool, finally allowing webmasters to dictate the target of their website content to Google.

At that point, Google began to remove guidance that using a different TLD was essential for accurate localisation across different countries. They did, however, maintain that they would “still make geographic assumptions based on the top-level domain and the IP of the webserver.”

They have continued to advocate using a local IP to serve content, though Google’s reasoning now is more dependent on improving poor site load times for domains served from a remote country.

In December 2011 (yes, four years later!), Google rolled out their hreflang link element (albeit after an initial flirtation with canonical tags alongside) to allow webmasters to dictate to Google the intended audience for their content in more granular detail and with one, significant, change: while previously Google had treated multiple domains targeted to different countries as duplicate if they were largely the same content (or just basic translations rather than uniquely written content); now, even totally identical content would not be considered duplicate if it was intended for a different country.

This is true for site architectures that sit on a single TLD, or sites that span multiple TLDs intended for different countries. Google followed up by pointing out that there is no inherent benefit to using a local TLD if your content is accurately localised.

At this point, looking objectively at the ideal site architecture for a multinational campaign becomes very interesting. Given the decoupling of TLD from localisation in the eyes of Google, it means that for most markets where Google has dominant marketshare, there is no SEO justification for using different TLDs in your site architecture that aren’t superseded by the new flexibility and power of the hreflang tool.

And, in fact, you’d likely be actually damaging your SEO campaign with a multi-TLD strategy because you are then forcing each TLD to attempt to perform on its own merit in non-Google search engines, a strategy which would require your client to commit the same amount of linkbuilding resource to each target country as would need to be applied to a single domain for the same level of performance in a single-TLD campaign.

Of course, the argument could be made that you’d risk the same issues experienced in Google pre-hreflang tag in the likes of Baidu, Yahoo!, Naver, Bing, Ask & Yandex; but, the reality is that localisation for those engines can largely be controlled by delivering from local country IPs — meaning the use of a Content Delivery Network (CDN) with exit nodes in your target countries would cover off your localisation as well as deliver significant page speed benefits (and so therefore also boost your performance in Google: hey! It’s win win!).

Supporting your single-domain strategy with accurate HTML language tags is also best practice regardless of localisation issues, and will cement your localisation in those non-Google search markets.

In short: whether you prefer subdomains or directories, a single-TLD solution has SEO benefits that simply can’t be achieved with a multi-TLD solution, and should always be the route taken if it is a viable option for your company.

A Final Word On Local TLDs

Of course, one important element deliberately not touched on in the preceding argument, is the user benefits of local TLDs. For example, a German speaker searching from Germany using Google.de is frequently argued to be more likely to click on a .de TLD result than otherwise.

This certainly rings true, but it’s also important to consider other factors that come into play in that scenario: every element of the snippet will have an impact on the CTR here.

It’s surely much more important to ensure you have a correctly written German title attribute and meta description featuring the search term (so it is triggered) and a strong call to action (to encourage clickthrough) and to feature the search term in the URL (reinforces the page about your search term) than fixate on the difference between .com and .de (just three characters out off all the other variables).

In addition, I’ve yet to see a study which normalises for brand recognition bias whenever the assertion of local TLD preference is made. On the other hand, multiple heatmaps are available which show how little attention is given to the URL in the SERP snippet, or any part of the URL in the browser address bar.

The update was announced by Matt Cutts on the 28^th of September, and it’s been covered in some detail by Barry Schwartz on these very pages, so I won’t go over old ground again. Instead I’d like to focus on the implications of this update on multinational search, which are in fact pretty profound.

Exact Match Domains will start losing out to bigger brands across the world after the latest Google Update.

The EMD Update’s Effect On Channels & Countries

Dialling back the importance of exact match domains, despite only effecting 0.6% US English search terms, will still have a strong impact in the Retail, Travel, Gambling and Finance verticals.

This is simply due to a higher proportion of exact match domains with sufficient supporting SEO having strong visibility in these channels. Why? They are the most competitive channels for SEO in the Americas (and much of Europe and APAC, to be fair).

As a legacy of older-school SEO, exact match domains have often had strong single keyphrase rankings for high value generics in each of these verticals. In many cases, the domain gets consolidated into a traditional big brand’s SEO strategy.

In some cases it becomes the heart of the strategy: consider B&Q (a UK based hardware store) which operates entirely on diy.com (although, their handling of the domain is very poor: visit http://www.diy.com/ today and you’ll receive a 302 to a unique landing page, very bad for SEO, and a fundamental building block of basic SEO that’s missing from their strategy).

Regardless of their slightly shaky SEO foundations, B&Q can expect to see a hit taken across a number of top level generics from the DIY stem that will be responsible for a significant chunk of their non-brand generic traffic (although they may internally consider DIY to be a brand term).

Despite being an extreme example, B&Q’s story will be repeated for many thousands of exact match domain, ultimately, in every conceivable language (including, of course, Klingon) across the globe.

The impact of that re-ranking, for big brands, across the key verticals will be significant.

Big Brands To Benefit From Google Update (Again)?

Largely, exact match domains tend to be held by independent operators.

Either affiliates, professional SEOs operating entrepreneurial online-only brands, or domainers who have opted to maximise the value of their domain holding through content creation strategies (many of whom, of course, have been crippled by Penguin).

The upshot?

Into the spaces held by these ‘lower value’ EMDs will come the more established brands. Many will represent bricks and mortar businesses which have already seen an uplift thanks to the Venice Google update.

I’m not normally a vocal apologist for Google, but although this update could easily be classified as yet another update which promotes big brands at the expense of startups or local businesses, in this instance I feel that would be a major misunderstanding.

In the case of the EMD update, Google will provide a significant quality improvement by weeding out lower value SERPs dominated by EMDs which offer little to no original value.

These SERPs undermine the efforts of the ethical SEO to promote working with Google to gain SEO improvement. By dialing back the dominant value given to EMDs, Google’s taken a positive step in the right direction (there are many more to take, of course!) to improve rankings for the user, and is validating the ethics it asks us white hat SEOs to stand up for in public.

When you look at delivering significant returns across a range of countries, this truism is even more pronounced: despite all the advances in SEO strategy over the years, without a killer linkbuilding strategy you won’t compete at the very top level.

Achieve Lasting Link Value

The guts of a solid strategy, for me, revolve around achieving excellence in two areas of your linkbuilding strategy:

1. Capturing links from as diverse a range of relevant domains as possible.
2. Ensuring your links will persist over time.

Especially in light of the latest announcement of new refinements to Google Panda from Matt Cutts, it’s crucial to deliver uniqueness and organic patterns to your linkbuilding strategy.

This means getting links from domains which aren’t part of the regular channels of linkbuilding like globally recognised PR hubs, but instead from niche areas tightly aligned to your target market and from each individual country you operate in.

So the challenge when working to these criteria is systematising an approach that can be scaled out to your local Web teams that doesn’t show up on Google’s radar as ‘systematic’ (otherwise: here be dragons!).

My advice here is always to take a leaf out of classical marketing’s book and look to your competition. More specifically: double down on competitive gap analysis.

In traditional marketing, after analysing your audience and marketplace you deliver a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) report on each competitor as part of a process feeding ultimately into a grand strategy to leverage weaknessess, copy (and improve upon) relevant strengths, and position yourself generally to pose as much of a threat and capture as much upside as is humanly possible from each competitor.

As a marketing exercise, it’s hugely valuable and can crystallise a businessess competitive edge brilliantly. As a method of approaching linkbuilding for SEO it’s undoubtedly more powerful than any other approach in play today.

Applied to multinational campaigns, in particular, it is devastatingly effective in driving SEO performance, quickly.

Multinational Gap Analysis For Linkbuilding

Here’s how the process breaks down:

1. Develop you customer profiles to define a list of key searcher types and their associated search parameters and behaviours (by country). Assign a value to each and use this as a seed to develop a prioritised master keyphrase set representative of your target market in each operating country.
2. Use a SERP (Search Engine Result Page) scraping tool localised to each country (must search from IPs within each country to handle Google Venice localisation [and term-based localisation]) to grab search results for, say, the top 100 results for each target term, in each country.
3. Calculate a score for each result, taking into account search engine marketshare (if tracking beyond just Google, as I’d strongly recommend), competitiveness (number of competing results [easy], plus relevant associated bid frequency in paid listings [harder], backlink profiles of each performing URL [harder again, but all perfectly automatable]), ranking position, type (text, video, image, news, etc: basically each Google Universal type).
4. Calculate a domain score for each domain uncovered for keyphrase sets by country. At this stage you may want to weight your ranking based on the type of ranking achieved (i.e. you may have captured a #1 position for a news listing which will be gone next week so you should factor down for that).
5. Rank the domains by performance, and grab the domain backlink info from Open Site Explorer, Majestic or similar (I prefer OSE for what it’s worth).
6. Sort the backlinking domains by their backlink profile, applying a filter for known poor, penalised, or low quality domains (or just trust the inbuilt metric from your linkscape tool).
7. Dedupe against your own domain’s backlink profile.
8. The first time round: hand review your prioritised hit list of target domains linking to the top performing domains in each country, categorising to different domain ‘types’ as you go.

That’s the research phase over. Pat yourself on the back, and go grab a cool drink. Next up is the hard work.

You now have a current & unique list of the most valuable, relevant, domains for a unique keyphrase set, in each target country, ordered by value for search visibility.

You now need to set about gathering links, working down in order of value, from each domain.

Implement Your Plan Of Attack

The actual action you take will be unique each time, although there will be an element of categorisation according to the ‘type’ of domain (news sites, industry resources, prominent local social media profiles, recognised forums, second-tier / local PR hubs, independent bloggers, industry bodies, etc, etc, etc).

Once you’ve been through the hand review process a few times you’ll have a defined set of ‘types’ which will broadly indicate the action to take to gain a similar backlink in future and allow you to budget your team’s time effectively (it takes much less time to pull together a response to a comment in a forum than it does to build out a blogger outreach pack giving unique assets and insider access to encourage coverage from preferred blog authors).

You also have a systematic approach to multinational linkbuilding that can be handled within a common architecture of the global team pulling together the research phase, then distributing to each country team with highlighted opportunities to be chased up each week/fortnight/month.

This style of ‘Command and Control’ linkbuilding structure is precisely suited for larger brands and businesses with a lot of hierarchy to cut through to get backlinks generated that will be of value, unique, relevant, and long-lasting.

And yet, superbly, this also delivers an organic (diverse, growing) backlink profile on the right side of search engine guidelines which protects your team from the vaguaries of Panda, or any other algorithmic update in future.

Why? Because there is no consistent pattern to the process output, and the input will always be governed by what’s being favoured by the search engines over the long term.

Here is part one of a two-part guide to some of the key automations our team uses to keep on top of the game internationally.

Segmented ‘Micro’ Reports

Based on the effectiveness of simple spark-line graphs and minimal data points in relevant context, micro reports should give you a quick, visual view of the campaign state of play within the context of the preceding week and the same period last year.

Result: Fast, flexible reports on key metrics with no clutter and no analysis(!).

Regardless of the metrics measured however, the report should be comprehensive in covering all areas of the campaign – so include things like click data from the last email campaign, for example – and should not include any dialogue: save that for monthly review reports.

Here’s my absolute minimum weekly KPIs for keeping an eye on just SEO & PPC multinational campaign ROI (I’ve left out Affiliates, Social, Display, etc for simplicity’s sake but can revisit if there’s enough interest).

For all reports, run for the total campaign, and for each target country in your campaign.

1.  Total Organic / PPC / Total Visits

• For each channel and country: 12 month sparkline; last week’s timeline with previous week and YOY comparison lines; percentage non-brand in the week and average for month vs. same month last year.

What you’re looking out for here: sudden slips, particularly in the year on year numbers. Most verticals have a distinct annual trend. Are you outperforming it when it counts? Are you simply seeing a rise because there’s always a rise?

Also, you should always look to increase your non-brand percentage because it will drive a higher proportion of new visits, growing overall sales rather than cannibalising traffic sales initially driven by another channel.

2.  Top 25 Non-Brand Organic / PPC Keyphrases Driving Visits

• For each channel & country: table w/ term, 12 month sparkline, visits, +/- week, +/- month, +/- YOY month.What you’re looking out for here: new breakthrough terms, and high value performance terms slipping.

Again, take seasonality into account, especially for organic. PPC YOY comparisons should be further investigated if dramatically different: has budget allocated to the term changed: why? Is it intentional, and if so was it based on CPC or CPA? Was it a valid decision or should it be reviewed?

3.  Top 25 Non-Brand Organic / PPC Keyphrases Driving Converting Visits

• Similar to the above point, only this time also pull in revenue generated +/- week, +/- month, +/- YOY month for converting traffic fitting the criteria.

4.  Top 25 SEO ‘Opportunity Keyphrases’

• For each country: term, rank, impressions, clicks, ranking URL, URL <title>, URL Meta Description.I define an ‘Opportunity Keyphrase’ as a relevant search term which has high potential traffic associated with it, that my site is currently ranking outside of the top three search result terms, but within the top 10 (inclusive).

Why are these terms worth giving special attention to?

Simply because we know that SERP clickthrough rates go up exponentially as you approach position one in the SERPs, therefore for high traffic terms, moving from position 4-10 to 1-3 will have a significant bottom line impact to your traffic.

Every URL flagged in this report should be scheduled for onpage auditing of its SEO around the highlighted term, and should have an internal and external linkbuilding strategy executed over the following week.

Of all the micro reports, this is the most useful to also send to the local country teams to act as a guide to upcoming optimisation work, but also as a reminder of the importance of core areas of optimisation (after they implement the recommended work, inevitably you’ll see the terms switch up into top three rankings on a well set-up domain).

5.  Top 25 SERP Conversion ‘Opportunity Keyphrases’

Similar to the above report, except this time our focus is on SERP results where we are performing in the top three, but are not converting impressions to clicks well enough. This time, we should be scheduling a local copywriter to review the <title> and meta description for suitability in converting searchers on the highlighted search term in their country.

• Conversion Funnel ‘Points of Failure’
  • I call this report the ‘Points of Failure’ because a well set up conversion funnel should strive to achieve 100% conversion (although this is of course impossible!). For each country, a straightforward recreation of a funnel (a la Google Analytics’ Goal Funnel) for new site visitors with +/- week on week, and +/- year on year is sufficient to get a good feel for where progress is being made (or not!).If you’re running major funnel optimisation then include page load speed info for your funnel URLs.
• Site Speed

For each country: run for sitewide, and top 25 slowest URLs, avg. page load time, +/- week on week, and +/- year on year. Watch out for erratic results week on week as well as any sudden drops. Both are indicative of a struggling server and require further investigation into server capacity and tolerance.

Obviously, you’re striving to ensure you get as fast as possible page load times – certainly for the DOM execution to improve user experience. But remember, Google uses ‘Headless’ page execution to incorporate JavaScript execution into page rendering times so pay particular attention to parallelising your static assets and ensure you follow every best-practice piece of advice out there (page speed is nothing new!).

You may find it useful to build testing tools using PhantomJS for more robust Page Speed reporting tools.

Until Next Time, Happy Micro Reporting

So that’s my bare minimum micro-report suite recommendation. Everything in here can be automated and the data can be largely gathered from Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools for that purpose.

Hopefully you’ll find the micro-report useful to spot sudden changes in activity across a range of data points, and come to appreciate its use as a bellweather for the campaign. It should, of course, not replace more considered monthly reporting containing insightful commentary and action points.

Part two of this post (next month) will cover Alert Triggered Reports, and how we can use automation to save us at critical campaign moments of crisis.

Google's Trusted Stores Program

Indeed, in the announcement on their official blog, Google highlighted the conversion optimisation improvements delivered by inclusion in the program: a 2.3% increase in sales for Wayfair, and a whopping 8.6% increase for Beau-coup.

Before looking at the program in more detail, it’s informative to ask why such a massive increase for Beau-coup was achieved and only a modest, but still hugely significant (in terms of bottom line revenue) improvement was achieved for Wayfair with the same change?

Simple: Wayfair is a well known online brand and the 50th highest revenue generating US website online according to Internet Retailer (as noted in Google’s post).

In short: it’s got a lot of trust.

Beau-coup are less well known and have more to gain from associating with another highly trusted brand in Google which, despite often getting (often unjustifiably) bad press from industry insiders, is a brand well respected by the general public, and which recently scored amongst the top three most trusted brands in Australia, and was recently highly rated in the difficult Indian market.

But where is this brand trust coming from? And can it be leveraged for international SEO and Conversion Optimisation performance?

Developing Brand Trust Internationally For Profit

At its core, developing brand trust is not complex: brands develop trust by being seen to make a positive public promise and delivering, consistently, on that promise.

It’s the execution of delivering on their promise that causes so many brands to become tarnished.

In the multinational sphere, that execution is many times more complex than when operating in a single market, so it’s that much more important to focus on core promise delivery. The first step of that is to know and understand what your brand promise actually is.

Amazon has regularly scored top in surveys on brand trust since 2010, and their promise is deceptively simple: offer convenience (one-click shopping), value (free shipping), and comprehensiveness (the largest online inventory) in a personalised package (industry leading recommendation engine).

In reality, delivering on each aspect of that promise is a major challenge and has only been possible by being at the very forefront of web technology since the early days of the Internet.

It’s for this reason that many see Amazon’s brand value as 100% defensible – up there with Coke in their ability to emerge untarnished from even the messiest of brand cock-ups.

So, you may not be able to build Amazon’s level of reputability in this lifetime, but what practical things can you do to build your brand trust?

Quite simply: start making promises and stick to them.

Here’s some starter points for eCommerce sites:

• Do you offer a moneyback guarantee? Say so on your site. Use a seal. Be visible.
• Do you store credit card information? No? Good! Let your shoppers know.
• Do you keep personal account information safely stored? Excellent. Tell me how.
• Am I on a secure server when asked to enter credit card information? Naturally! Point it out & make sure you have an authentic SSL certificate for the domain (and sub-domain!) your eComms system is on.
• Are you registered with any industry watchdogs? No? Get registered and use their logo.
• Do you guarantee delivery? No? If you’re using FedEx or another guaranteed delivery service then you should: their promise is your promise.
• Do you offer a no-quibble returns policy? You absolutely should. It’s a top ten requirement of online shoppers, and a guarantor of their trust in your brand.
• Do you make it simple for shoppers to checkout? Is it quick and easy? Let me know before I start if it is, and don’t then bombard me with interstitial pages offering irrelevant upsells (I hope you’re reading this GoDaddy).
• Do you support trusted payment systems like Google Checkout/Wallet and PayPal? You should: they are a guarantor of trusted payment processing and their use implies your credit card payment system is similarly secure.
• Are you gathering feedback from happy customers? Ask them if you can share it with the world.
• What’s your company USP? Why do you exist in the market and what’s your differentiation from your competitors? Make this clear, simple & to the point and make it obvious on first glance at any page on your site.
• Finally: get involved in Google’s Trusted Store programme, it’s going to be big.

All of these points are basic 101 improvements that will also increase the brand trust associated with your website. The value of developing that trust is profound across every target country.

You’ll generate more repeat visits with a greater number of brand search terms driving traffic to your site via SEO & PPC. Given performing for brand in each of these channels is a cinch, that’s a valuable tool for developing the lifetime value of your existing customers.

Word of mouth is a valuable tool for developing new customers, and is most effective for trusted brands. Strategies like ‘Tell a friend’ functionality on checkout confirmation pages will be much more effective (and can be the single biggest conversion improvement you’ll ever make to an eCommerce brand).

Finally, as you deliver increased revenues and expand your SEO and PPC channels to target generic terms driving high percentage value new-visit traffic, you’ll find that traffic converting at a higher rate as they are presented with your brand promises easily, clearly, and upfront.