Lucky for you, most everything you need to know about multilingual and multiregional SEO is listed in this post. So, even if you are a first-timer, you now have a cheat sheet that can guide you down the right path. Please keep in mind that multilingual and multiregional SEO are always changing — so, make sure to verify your strategy with the most up-to-date materials before making any drastic decisions.

SEO and Online Marketing are getting bigger all the time. Make sure you know how to correctly optimize for multiple regions and/or languages

What Are Multilingual SEO & Multiregional SEO?

Multilingual SEO is the practice of offering optimized website content in a variety of languages. Multiregional SEO is the practice of creating optimized website content that is tailored specifically to multiple geographic regions.

These two strategies often have overlap, which is why we are covering them both in this post. They also tie in with other aspects of online marketing, such as conversion rate optimization, pay per click and content strategy.

First, Ask Yourself: Where Are You Targeting?

The first thing you need to do is determine what regions you are targeting. Next, you need to decide which languages you are going to make available to those regions. This is critical, because it allows you to lay out the entire project.

Domain & URL Structure

After you determine the language and regions, you need to choose your domain and/or URL structure strategy.

Google’s Official Webmaster Central blog states, “It’s difficult to determine geotargeting on a page by page basis, so it makes sense to consider using a URL structure that makes it easy to segment parts of the website for geotargeting.”

I strongly agree with this — if you can map out the right location structure first, the rest of the project will be much easier. But, before we start to map website architecture, let’s take a look at the pros and cons of each URL or domain option. (Note: The information below is taken directly from Google.)

ccTLDs (e.g., example.de, example.fr)

Pros (+)

• clear geotargeting
• server location is irrelevant
• easy separation of sites
• legal requirements (sometimes)

Cons (-)

• expensive
• potential availability issues
• more infrastructure
• ccTLD requirements (sometimes)

Subdomains With gTLDs (e.g., de.site.com, fr.site.com, etc.)

Pros (+)

• easy to set up
• can use Webmaster Tools geotargeting
• allows different server locations
• easy separation of sites

Cons (-)

• users might not recognize geotargeting from the URL alone (is “de” the language or the country?)

Subdirectories With gTLDs (e.g., site.com/de/, site.com/fr/, etc.)

Pros (+)

• easy to set up
• can use Webmaster Tools geotargeting
• low maintenance (same host)

Cons (-)

• users might not recognize geotargeting from the URL alone
• single server location
• separation of sites is more difficult/less clear

URL parameters (e.g., site.com?loc=de, ?country=france, etc.)

Pros (+)

• none (not recommended)

Cons (-)

• segmentation based on the URL is difficult
• users might not recognize geotargeting from the URL alone
• geotargeting in Webmaster Tools is not possible

We’ve now outlined the pros and cons of the most popular methods for geotargeting in a URL or domain; but, which is the best option for you?

The answer to this question always depends on the goals of the website and who you need to target through SEO and other integrated marketing methods to reach those goals. Top-level domains are a strong indicator to Google, so they can be a good option. However, subdomains and subdirectories have their advantages, as well. We’ll explore those in a moment.

Important Information About Top Level Domains

Some domains are generic and others are location-specific. According to Google, these are the generic top-level domains (gTLDs) which do not specific a country. Google treats the following as gTLDs that can be geotargeted in Webmaster Tools.

Generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs)

.aero

.biz

.cat

.com

.coop

.edu

.gov

.info

.int

.jobs

.net

.mil

.mobi

.museum

.name

.net

.org

.pro

.tel

.travel

Regional Top-Level Domains (rTLDs)

According to Google, these domains are associated with a region, but they treat them as top level as well (much like .com or .org).

.eu

.asia

Generic Country Code Top Level Domains (gccTLDs)

Here is a list of the ccTLDs. Keep in mind that Google is always changing this list. Also, this list is specific to the Google search engine.

.as

.bz

.cc

.cd

.co

.dj

.fm

.la

.me

.ms

.nu

.sc

.sr

.tv

.tk

.ws

An Argument For Subdomains Or Directories

In my opinion, your best option for a large website is going to be either a directory or subdomain structure. From an SEO and analytics tracking perspective, things can get very messy when you have multiple top-level domains. I recently worked on a large client that had a mix of these strategies and it was pretty tricky.

According to Google:

If your time and resources are limited, consider buying one non-country-specific domain, which hosts all the different versions of your website. In this case, we recommend either of these two options:

• Put the content of every language in a different subdomain. For our example, you would have en.example.com, de.example.com, and es.example.com.
• Put the content of every language in a different subdirectory. This is easier to handle when updating and maintaining your site. For our example, you would have example.com/en/, example.com/de/, and example.com/es/.

A directory structure would be my preferred choice, in most cases. It is very clean, and I like how the directories add to the overall authority of the entire site. This is basically the case with subdomains, as well; but, let’s be honest: subdomains are more “separate” than a directory structure as far as content segmentation is concerned.

ccTLD & Webmaster Tools Geotargeting

It has to be noted that the use of a ccTLD is generally a very strong signal for users and search engines; so, if you really want to target a particular region, there is nothing wrong with using a ccTLD. (Though, as mentioned above, you should be prepared for the fact that issues can arise with tracking, SEO and branding if you are using multiple ccTLDs — this is why many multilingual/multinational SEOs prefer directories or subdomains.)

However, it is not necessary to use a ccTLD in order to geotarget a particular country. Google Webmaster Tools allows for manual geotargeting of gTLDs (such as .com and .net) with the Set Geographic Target tool. To set up geotargeting in Webmaster Tools, follow these steps:

1. On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want
2. Under Site configuration, click Settings
3. In the Geographic target section, select the option you want

If you want to ensure that your site is not associated with any country or region, select Unlisted.

Google points out that it generally does not make sense to set a geographic target if the same pages on your site target more than a single country. This is because your geotargeting settings might limit the reach of your content.

Click here to view the embedded video.

You can learn more about geotargeting here.

Is Server Location A Factor?

Many people think that server location is a big deal for this multilingual or multiregional search, but the degree to which this is true has recently changed due to the wide adoption of new technologies.

According to Google, “Server location (through the IP address of the server) is frequently near your users. However, some websites use distributed content delivery networks (CDNs) or are hosted in a country with better webserver infrastructure; so, we try not to rely on the server location alone.”

This is something which has evolved over years; you can see an older video here when things were much different. I really wish Google would take these old videos down, as they throw people off.

Specifying Regional Landing Pages With The Rel=”Alternate” Hreflang Annotation

Now that we’ve discussed URL structure, server location, and geotargeting in Webmaster Tools, it is time to talk about hreflang markup. The rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x” annotation is used to help Google identify which URLs should be served to which visitors based on language and geographic location. This is useful when you have multiple versions of the same content that has been translated or otherwise adjusted to target users in a specific region.

According to Google, there are 3 ways that we can implement this markup:

• HTML link element in header. In the HTML <head> section of http://example.com/us, add a link element pointing to the Spanish version of that webpage at http://example.com/us-es, like this: <link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”es” href=” http://example.com/us-es” />
• HTTP header. If you publish non-HTML files (like PDFs), you can use an HTTP header to indicate a different language version of a URL: Link: < http://example.com/us-es>; rel=”alternate”; hreflang=”es”
• Sitemap. Instead of using markup, you can submit language version information in a Sitemap.

Out of the options above, most go with the HTML link element, the sitemap or both of those items.

It is important to note that there are specific hreflang supported values for language and region. For example:

• de: German content, independent of region
• en-GB: English content, for GB users
• de-ES: German content, for users in Spain

For more information on supported values, visit the Google Webmaster support article on the topic.

The X-Default Hreflang Attribute Value

So, what happens when someone visits your site from a country that you don’t have a landing page for? Perhaps you’d want them to land on a generic home page, or a page where they can select their country or language.

Thanks to a new bit of markup from Google called “x-default,” you can now specify a default page for users outside your target regions. When specifying your region-specific landing pages with hreflang, you would use the value “x-default” to indicate which page is the default in situations where you don’t have a region-specific landing page. Thus, you might have a cluster of HTML link tags that look like this:

<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com/en-gb” hreflang=”en-gb” />

<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com/en-us” hreflang=”en-us” />

<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com/en-au” hreflang=”en-au” />

<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com/” hreflang=”x-default” />

Above, http://example.com would be the default page for users outside of Great Britain, the United States or Australia.

Quick Note On Base On-Page Elements

When it comes to the meta information on these pages, it is generally a good idea to vary them based on language and region. Make sure to have a template, or unique content, depending on how large your website is, and consider altering the following elements:

• Title
• Description
• Keywords
• H1
• H2
• Copy
• Images
• Products
• Internal Linking

User IP & Use Agent Detection

User agent detection is the process of detecting the device a person is using and delivering content based on the best practices for that device. IP location detection is the practice of detecting the location of a user and delivering content based on what is more relevant for that IP location. If you implement this correctly, there is a good chance you will lower bounce rates, increase conversions and show the user what they are looking for more quickly.

This is a very common practice for mobile optimization (as we often detect location and device), but it is also important for multilingual and multiregional SEO. Google supports both HTTP redirection and JavaScript redirects. You can watch a video on this topic here.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Below are some notes from Google on the topic.

Using HTTP redirection

HTTP redirection is a commonly used to redirect clients to device-specific URLs. Usually, the redirection is done based on the user-agent in the HTTP request headers. It is important to keep the redirection consistent with the alternate URL specified in the page’s link rel=”alternate” tag or in the Sitemap.

For this purpose, it does not matter if the server redirects with an HTTP 301 or a 302 status code.

JavaScript Redirects

If HTTP redirection is difficult to implement, you can use JavaScript to redirect users to the URLs pointed to by the link rel="alternate" tag. If you choose to use this technique, please be aware of the latency caused by the client side of redirection due to the need to first download the page, then parse and execute the JavaScript before triggering the redirect.

There are many approaches to implementing a JavaScript-based redirect. For example, you can use JavaScript to execute the media queries your site already uses in the link annotations on the page using the matchMedia() JavaScript function.

Outside of the detection and redirects, you also want to make sure your website has good internal linking and navigation so that the user can find the pages that match their demographic.

Rel Author & Rel Publisher Considerations

It is interesting; now that rel author and rel publisher can easily be implemented on any website, people have to stop and think about whether they should implement it. This is a huge topic, so for the purposes of this post let’s just consider a few elements from the mutilingual and regional perceptive.

Rel Author

If you implement rel author across an entire multilingual or multiregional website, you run the risk of positioning a figurehead for your brand in the search space which may not relate to everyone you’re targeting. If you are considering implementing rel author, think about whether or not it makes sense to have one person’s presence associated with all of your results. If it does not, consider if it makes sense to break the rel author implementation up by region, language, or on an article-by-article basis.

As rel author becomes more advanced, we could see regional sales managers attached to certain location segments of the website. There are some problems with this, however. For example, generally, you need authoritative Google+ profiles — and even when you have them, it takes some time before they show up in the SERPs. Rel author can make sense for the right multilingual or multiregional website, but there needs to be a clear strategy in place.

Example Rel Author

Rel Publisher

Rel publisher is an easier sell than rel author, although I do think there is room for both on the right multilingual or multinational website. Rel publisher causes a very nice Google+ page along with updates to be displayed in search results — and, you can segment your updates based on circles. So, as long as you have a good language and region circle strategy in place, the rest of the rel publisher strategy should be fine.

Example Rel Publisher

Bing Multilingual & Multiregional SEO

When it comes to Bing, they love the language meta tag. But, they also pay attention to HTTP headers, top-level domain and reverse IP lookup.

Bing Language Meta Tag

Use the “content-language” meta tag to embed a document location in the <head> section of your documents:

<meta http-equiv=”content-language” content=”en-us”>

The “content” attribute is comprised of a 2-letter ISO 639 language code, followed by a dash and the appropriate ISO 3166 geography code. For example:

• de-at: German, Austria
• de-de: German, Germany
• en-us: English, United States
• es-ar: Spanish, Argentina

Alternatively, embed the document location in either the <html> or the <title> element using the same format:

• <html lang=”en-us”>
• <title lang=”en-us”>

HTTP Headers

For more information on setting HTTP response headers please refer to:

• In IIS7: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753133(WS.10).aspx
• In IIS6: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc732442.aspx
• In Apache 2.2: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_headers.html

Top Level Domain

According to Bing, “Out of the top level domain categories distinguished by the IANA, only the country code top-level domains (or ccTLDs) influence the document location. For an overview of the currently assigned ccTLDs, please visit IANA’s website at: http://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/.”

Reverse IP Lookup

As we mentioned, for each document added to Bing, the search engine does a reverse IP lookup to determine the documents location; so, this is a small factor in Bing indexing.

A Note On Duplicate Content

One issue that comes up a lot in SEO is duplicate content. Basically, if you have duplicate content on your website or share content that is housed on another site, it forces Google to pick the “winner,” if you will, only ranking that page. When it comes to multilingual and multiregional websites, this can become an issue — you will often have multiple versions of the same content for different regions and languages.

The good news is, if you implement the rel=”alternate” hreflang link element and x-default hreflang annotation correctly, duplicate content should not be an issue. In the past, SEOs would use rel=”canonical”, block pages with robots.txt, etc. But today, the alternate/x-default is the best option.

Summary

Mutilingual and multiregional SEO is always changing. I expect this to be an expanding topic as we move into the future of this crazy Internet world. One thing that I love about how things are evolving is that if you pay attention to new strategies for search, you are going to get other amazing ideas to improve your online business.

For example, if you are taking the steps to build out a better multinational and multilingual strategy for SEO, you are probably working that same strategy into your other online performance channels. The key is making everything work together and pay off.

Other Great Resources On This Topic

• http://searchengineland.com/11-considerations-for-international-seo-117798
• http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html
• http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/08/how-to-start-multilingual-site.html
• http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=62399
• http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/region-tags-in-google-search-results.html
• http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/where-in-world-is-your-site.html
• http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077
• http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192&topic=2370587&ctx=topic
• http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2620865&topic=2370587&ctx=topic

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.”

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?

Based on the recently released 2013 Search Marketer Survey from BrightEdge, it appears as though global search marketing activities might finally be top of mind for search marketers:

One of the areas getting a significant boost in interest is the discovery of keywords relevant to global audiences. The BrightEdge  survey of Enterprise Search Marketers indicated that 50% of search marketers believe understanding global keywords will be more important in 2013 than in previous years, with nearly 20% indicating it is “Much More Important.”

Identifying Keyword Opportunities

Back in August, I provided my Minimalist Approach to Keyword Expansion based on product/solution stemming. This process involves making a list of what you do or sell and expanding it to include buy cycle terms and logical adjectives.

Reviewing your organic traffic by keywords through site analytics tools is a another great resource for identifying opportunities. These are words that are already bringing visits to the page, so creating targeted landing pages for those keywords (or further optimizing the existing pages for conversions) can give you a boost. However, this cannot be your primary tactic, since a lack of content or optimization may result in a lack of rankings for key phrases, missing out on significant opportunities.

A practice that is not as popular as it should be is to pull words from your localization glossary. These are guides that translators use to identify the approved local variation of words. Note: while linguistically correct, these might not be the most popular variations.

All three of the above are sound approaches, and when coupled with some quick paid search tests to validate market interest, it makes for a quick and easy method for prioritizing content creation.

Mining Local Language Site Search Query Logs

Since we have added site search keyword data to our Azimuth Keyword Management System, many of our clients have been able to leverage local market site search data as a source for keywords. These words are great indicators of local market interest since users did the search on your site, meaning they already associate with your company and your product or service.

In one case, the client actually found that 65% of site search queries for a set of keywords came from paid search visits in which the visitor was directed a landing page with a too-narrow focus — meaning they had to use site search to find what they wanted.

Giving Answers To Questions

One of the users of our keyword management tool recently shared some data with me on a data mining exercise they did, wherein they had delved into their site search data looking for questions. These simple queries containing the standard “who,” “what,” “where,” “when” and “which” modifiers resulted in over 27,000 questions from a surprising 600,000 queries.

Unfortunately, in 60% of the cases, there was not a result or a clicked result. Over two-thirds of the questions came from outside the US, which helped them identify specific problems not only with marketing but also with messaging.

Further mining revealed that 15% of questions and about one-quarter of the search volume to be monetized. Popular questions were related to upgrades, annual passes and discounts, etc. By creating a page that not only answered the question but also had a conversion element, they found they could typically convert 10 percent of those searchers. This meant a potential of just over $4.5 million in incremental revenue. Note: they did not have content for 60% of these questions, so that is where they focused their opportunities.

Based on this analysis, they went on to prioritize content creation, creating targeted pages designed to answer these questions based on revenue potential, volume and language overlap for scale. How many questions are you not answering that you should be?

There is no shortage of data available to global marketers; unfortunately, the problem is often the lack of resources to mine and model it. Don’t try to boil the ocean and do all countries, but scrape the surface and generate small-scale success that helps support your business case for better alignment, integration and awareness of consumers’ needs and wants.

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!

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.

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?

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.

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.