Content management systems can help you succeed with both international SEO and multilingual PPC where they deal with the differences or additions necessary compared with a single-language, single-country system. Sadly, retro-fitting a new system can pose numerous additional hurdles to your international roll-out just when you need to be thinking about other things, such as logistics and how you’ll deliver support. So if you’re specifying a new system now—and have plans to expand internationally later—it’s good practice to include “international” in your specifications.

Note that in this post I won’t be digging into what makes a good content management system per se, but rather simply looking at the “extras” that give a system, and your project, better international potential.

Including the world’s character sets

Your CMS will need to be able to specify, and help browsers render, those funny characters that all those folks who don’t seem to want to use a nice clean characterless language, like English, seem to need. I know this is stating the obvious, but when your name is “Atkins-Krüger” and you carry one of those funny characters around, you become very conscious of how many sites replace that “ü” with a question mark or a square block or something weirder.

Many languages have an accented character or two—in fact even English has a few borrowed adopted words which really should carry an accent. But some languages actually need to use those characters so that the reader can actually understand what is being said. In many cases, dropping an accent, or replacing a character with something similar, will not only destroy meaning,it could lead to some very unfortunate misunderstandings—rather like the days I explained in French to a group that a woman wanted to “avenge herself,” but sadly used words meaning “prostitute herself.” This is not a route to universal popularity. Trust me.

The way browsers interpret characters is actually set by the character coding which is buried in the source code of the pages. The best one to use on multi-language sites is known as “unicode” (what Google generally calls it) or UTF8. This isn’t a perfect solution as UTF8 is a catch-all character encoding and sometimes a local code might work better. But for most people checking that UTF8 can be managed by the CMS is a good idea.

It’s not always about the way the pages are presented to the user that causes problems. Sometimes the problem with a CMS is that its internal functionality either can’t edit the characters in their natural form (they have to be replaced with HTML codes) or that workarounds add to the workloads of the webmasters or site administrators. This internal usability problem causes you frustration, error and ultimately unnecessary cost.

Managing content across local domains

In popularity terms, choosing a CMS which cannot be easily rolled out to manage sites across multiple local domains is problem numero uno (note the fluid language switch). The number of workarounds, sticking plasters and downright programming wizardry I’ve seen to get around this one is amazing and could be the subject of a cartoon by Heath Robinson. As the subject of why you should choose local domains is already covered in detail here—today I’ll stick to the structural questions.

The key to this is that you really want to be able to manage all of your sites across multiple domains, potentially sitting on local servers all over the world and yet you want to be able to access them all from one login. You want to be able to share resources between the sites.

You also want to be able to manage the internal linking of the sites from that single interface and to manage the geo-selection tool which links one domain to all others on one single URL linked to from all pages.

Working with local hosting and the cloud

Everyone’s hosting strategy may be different depending on their global targets, aspirations and the nature of their site. Two trends, however, are quite apparent. First, more and more of site content will be delivered to users from the cloud using caching systems to speed up delivery. Second, more sites will want to host locally.

These two options amount to much of the same thing, which is really about getting close to the user. From a content management point of view, you really need to consider what your longer term plans are to make a decision on this. My recommendation is to always choose a system which can manage locally hosted content as you may need that for at least some of your markets.

Translation and SEO workflow

For international sites translation or localization workflow is a big question. Not that many content systems actually have a workflow tool included and even fewer are designed to deal with the very specific demands of translation workflow. This is what you really want the system to do:

• Identify translation opportunities
• Download original content to translation tools
• Incorporate SEO facilities
• Re-upload new content
• Allow quality assurance checks
• Publish page

Not many systems can do all the above. The trickiest part of the task will be to organize how SEO and translation steps are integrated. The best way to do this is to link it to a keyword map of all pages, so you know what needs to be targeted where and to link those keywords to glossaries to be used by the translators that support your SEO initiatives.

You may actually need to undertake an SEO localization review determining the way your organization will work before you challenge a system to invent this way of working for you!

Maintaining content in multiple languages

I have mentioned before in this column that a great many new international web marketers simply overlook or underestimate the costs they will incur on an ongoing basis just to keep their website up to date. Many international projects are approached with a one-off cost for localizing the website with no consideration of what happens when the original English content changes. This will probably happen around 24 hours after you sign the contract with a CMS vendor who doesn’t have all the international or workflow tools in place.

But social media is not just a “stand alone” feature. Many search marketing agencies already offer social media optimization services and the number of “social media experts” on Twitter is countless. The optimization done by the “experts” typically focuses on sites like Facebook, Twitter and of course YouTube. When it comes to Europe, however, there are many more choices.

Europeans are getting more social minded every day. According to the Internet Advertising Bureau, Europe will be spending a lot more time interacting with social media in 2010. European companies are said to be using social media mainly for research purposes and to drive product sales. European users meanwhile are spending more and more time on the web and in particular on social media sites.

Facebook is the leading social network in the US, but it is experiencing rapid growth throughout Europe. According to comScore Facebook is the most popular social network in 11 out of 17 European countries. Other social networks are feeling the pain of the Facebook growth but still play an important role.

In other European countries local social networks are losing ground to Facebook, but are still playing a big part, especially when it comes to branded communities, blogger outreach, UGC, video distribution, reactive customer service and display advertising. They are successfully fighting back against the US giant. So which social media sites should you target? Let’s take a look at a few European countries and the social media sites that can be useful for online marketers.

France. French social network Skyrock lost a lot of visitors to Facebook, but is still a dominant player. It has 22.6m French users. 30% of them also use Facebook, but the majority can be found on this French site.

Spain. As in France, in Spain Facebook has become the biggest social network in the past year. Two years ago Tuenti was the most popular, but is now trailing Facebook. Tuenti has “only” 6.8m users where Facebook has 10.5—but why “leave out” 6.8 m users?

Germany. We have seen many times over the past year that you can’t treat Germans like you do every other country in the world, let alone Europe. In Germany the StudiVZ Group is still market leader. It must be noted however that its 13.8 million users come from three different sites.

The Germans have problems of their own. German law has very strict privacy rules. German sites have to set up a long verification method and are forced to have users opt-in. They also can’t share any information they collect with advertisers. Because of this, German social media sites face a lot of competition from Facebook, which as an American site doesn’t have to follow these rules in Germany.

Holland. One of the smallest countries in Europe has the most loyal fans when it comes to their home based social network. Hyves still has twice as many users as Facebook in the Netherlands. A remarkable number which can be largely explained by the deep roots they have.

In all the above mentioned countries Facebook has won ground over the past year. However Europeans are trying to regain ground by trying to be “different” from Facebook. Offering advertisers a more tailored experience than Facebook should make them more profitable and will help the local social networks gain ground.

The local networks do seem to have found their way back. Financial numbers show a growth. According to the Financial Times Hyves for example has made a profit over the past four years. The bigger local social networks will probably survive where the smaller ones will disappear.

When you are aiming for business in Europe and you want to use social media you would be a fool to ignore the opportunities the local social networks offer you. Again, as with optimizing your websites, it is very important here that you use local knowledge to get the best results.

I don’t mean to imply that geo-targeting isn’t important—see Bill Hunt’s excellent post on the topic. But what is beginning to concern me is the fact that, aside from the occasional mention of duplication, I cannot remember the last time that anyone actually raised a hand to ask me about managing content, at any conference I’ve spoken at—anywhere in the world.

Going global questions, in order of frequency

In fact, the questions are pretty much the same now as they were when Chris Sherman put me on one of the first international SEO conference panel some years ago:

• Should I use local domains or dot coms?
• Do I need to host locally?
• Do I need local links?
• Will my pages be duplicates?

Notice the content question? Quite right, not present. So let’s just run this up the flagpole and consider what this means. We’ve a successful site—tested in the US and consumers like it and buy from it in droves. Already, we’re seeing 20% of our sales coming from international markets. Great. So, the CEO has commanded that we should expand internationally. What do we do first?

Who wants to invest in global content?

First, we check the web analytics and discover that most of our export sales are coming from the UK, the Netherlands and Germany. Easy decision: site problem solved. Wait, how are we going to do this? Are we going to use our US dot com or do we need to go and buy local domains?

So there we go, we’re already diving deep into the challenges associated with launching our website relating to geo-targeting. So what happened to the content? I’m beginning to think that the answer to this content-attention-deficit is that all of the questions about domains, TLDs, duplication and even canonicals are coming from the same perspective—how to avoid investing additional budget into developing or expanding the content we already have?

Let’s just balance this out for a second before people become upset with me. I’m not saying that domains and hosting are not important or that they don’t play a critical role for many—heck, my company offers both as services. What I’m actually saying is that the balance isn’t right. Too many questions relate to content development avoidance and too few to what do I need to do to develop my site for my target market.

And by the way, deciding on which markets to target from your existing web analytics is a very poor way to decide which international markets to enter. There may well be much more in the way of significant opportunities from countries with a lower fluency in English that can’t understand your site. Plus, you may already be serving the majority of potential customers in the markets where you’re winning, so improving things for them may not be a high-payoff investment.

Why content is still king for international projects

Let’s take a few moments to consider four key reasons why content is still vitally important globally.

Product benefits. If you are trying to reach customers in another market, you do have to take account of how their needs and wants relate to your own products and services. While the product may be the same from market to market, the perceived benefits aren’t necessarily so. Let’s imagine you have a fantastic new red sports car design which accelerates quickly from a standing start. Italians may well be attracted by its aesthetics, Germans by the quality of your finish and Brits by the fact that it kicks serious butt under your right foot. I’m exaggerating stereotypes that aren’t really that distinct, but you get the general picture. You do have to present your products—even the same products—in a way which appeals to the customers you’re targeting.

Keyword differences. I’ve written many times about keywords and the fact that they are “abbreviated thoughts” that cannot be translated from market to market or language to language. You must start from scratch every time with some proper research. I will get that point across fully one day! Of course, that means both content and SEO needs adapting to suit. You definitely need to weave in those keywords and (this may come as something of a surprise) they may actually be different for speakers of different flavors of English too. The same product to a Brit may not have the same appeal, in the same way as it does to a North American.

Pay-per-click quality score. If you’re using pay per click with Google AdWords, then you need to consider matching the content via effective landing pages with the keywords you’re targeting. The cost benefit of doing this is significant enough to help you justify your greater investment in content.

Localized links. International users need some quality content to link to. This is not rocket science and you’ll have heard it before for English-language projects—but don’t forget you really want to earn those local-language, locally-based links to help your geo-targeting. If there’s nowhere to point them to your overall strategy may flounder.

New issues of international web content management

Managing your content in Finnish, Slovenian or Russian is also going to pose you some challenges including:

Encoding. I recommended to switch to Unicode or UTF8 for the encoding of your whole site which means your content management systems will need to be able to cope. This may have an impact on your current content management system. Worst case, run your non-English sites in a different system to avoid updating your “old” one.

Content maintenance. Translating your site the first time is only the beginning. Don’t forget to plan—and budget for—keeping your content up to date in however many languages you’ve decided to operate in.

Content decision-making. When you add new content to your home language—probably English—you also need to develop a process for deciding which content you will localize into which languages. Unless, that is, you’re planning to simply run all content in all languages which of itself would be an unwise decision with almost certainly poor ROI consequences.

Careful selection of a content management system can help you manage your key processes, including localization and SEO phases. I’ll be writing about how to choose a content management system that can help with international SEO projects in a later article.

Content is geo-targeting too

Content matters for geo-targeting. For one thing, there are many languages which not global and are spoken in limited areas. Simply by adding those languages to your site you begin to reach that geography. Examples include Polish, Korean or even Italian. But it also matters because no matter how well set-up your domains or Webmaster Central settings, unless you speak to the target market in a way they will understand, they won’t use your site, recommend you or link to you—and they might well not buy anything either.

This is especially true with Google in English and Spanish speaking countries where it is getting difficult to find “global company” sites and products in the search results outside of the US.

I am seeing an increase in social media posts expressing frustration by searchers in markets like Australia, Singapore and India that they can’t locate companies outside of their markets unless they know the specific company or product name. A few even went as far to indicate they would stop using Google if this trend continued.

One of these comments was in response to a localization article I had written. An Australian posted that he was trying to use Google to find a high-end fly fishing rod from a specific US company, namely Orvis. He had read about their product in a magazine but could not remember the name of the company. No matter how he searched he could only locate Australian companies. He further indicated that this was becoming more common with many of the searches he had been doing. He was frustrated since global ecommerce had become the gateway to broader product choices not available in Australia.

On the other side are companies that had enjoyed being one click away from customers around the world. In the past few weeks I have received a number of questions from frustrated webmasters and desperate site owners about how to get their site back into Google local market search engines. With these questions often comes more confusion because of answers from “search experts” who are only guessing how to fix it or from engines and local agencies simply suggesting they use paid search.

I am less concerned about the companies that have a single language site who have the arrogance to believe that everyone in the world needs their products. It is the truly global companies like Apple, IBM and Nokia that sell in nearly every market around the world that are being hurt by this shift. These companies either have hundreds of sites or one very large site segmented to accommodate the multitudes of countries, languages and legal entities that represent the their multinational existence.

A typical local content detection filter hierarchy

Previously, local content detection was only a critical problem for queries in languages that were used by multiple countries such as English and Spanish. Recently, more problems are occurring with other languages like German, French and Arabic. For example, if you do a search in German, the primary result with be the best German language result that is also unique to the IP address of your location. If you enter a German language query in a German speaking IP address region like Germany, Austria or Switzerland you will see different results unique to your actual location. However, the same search done in the US or UK will simply result in the most relevant German language result regardless of location.

It seems to me that the most confusion is coming from search marketers struggling with understanding how Google’s local filters work. Let me try to clarify how they work and what companies should be doing to ensure they are getting the access to those markets they deserve.

Country code top level domain (ccTLD). The “cc” in “ccTLD” means country code and is based on the ISO 3166-1 standard which specifies a two letter code for every country in the world. If the site has a ccTLD like .co.nz then the engines will assume the content is for New Zealand. The same is true for someone using a .us domain. Content on this domain would be viewed as a United States centric site.

That is why most search experts will tell you to use the top-level domain for a particular country if you want to have a local site. Unfortunately, for both large and small companies, the expense and operational overhead is often cost-prohibitive to maintain multiple sites with unique ccTLDs.

Site server IP address location. When a site with a generic top level domain, such as .com, .net, etc., are not using a .ccTLD to associate to a country, the engines will use the IP address of the server hosting the site as a proxy for local designation.

This means someone with a .com address hosted in Germany would be considered primarily a German site. This is currently the main problem with multinational companies that use .com and then subdirectories for their country sites such as www.ibm.com/uk.

Note, that if you are using a ccTLD, Google does not factor in the server IP location as a secondary factor. This was recently confirmed in a Google Webmaster blog Q&A post on local site detection. The answer by the Google engineer caused a fair bit of confusion by those that did not read his response correctly. It is logical that if you are using a .fr domain the site content should be primarily associated with France and the location of the server would not be necessary.

The Google geographical targeting tool

A few years ago when Google launched this tool they saw a significant reduction in complaints from webmasters that they were not adequately represented in the local search engines—especially where they had a major market or physical presence. I have talked to a number of large and small companies in the past few months that either were not aware of this feature or had it set incorrectly.

To use it, simply create a Webmaster Tools account, then set up a sub account for each country. Go into the settings for each sub account and set the subdirectory location on the site to the appropriate country. For example, set .com/nz equal to New Zealand and everything in and under that /nz directory will be given the same weight as content hosted on a .co.nz domain.

Geographical proxy servers and local market links

I am seeing more chatter about using local market proxy servicing as an option for working around ccTLD and local hosting. This has been and option but it seems to be working less effectively in the past few months. Even with proxy servers you are still essentially hosting locally—but only a cached version of the site which is often not an option for an ecommerce company.

I have also seen an increase in promotion of link building services promising to get lots of links from ccTLD sites or sites hosted in a local market. The idea is to get the engines to think you must be locally relevant because local sites are linking to you. Be careful with this type of service since many of the links will not be from authoritative sites that are the only ones that seem to transfer local market link value.

How big is the potential problem?

Last year I reviewed the domain structures for the Global 1000 companies and found 85% are using .com/cc with a few even using cc.domain.com for their local sites. Further review of the IP locations found that many were hosted in the US or other central hubs with no company hosting 100 percent of their country sites in the local markets.

We have always thought of our websites as “global” since they are just a search result click away from a searcher in any country around the world. Unfortunately, that definition may not hold much longer since a multinational’s global site might actually be relegated to a single country without even knowing it.

I can only see this problem getting worse as the engines put greater emphasis on local content and the increasing demand of location-based results on mobile devices. I suspect the engines will start to do further refinements on what is truly local. If you have a global site or even a local site it would make sense to ensure you are monitoring the inclusion and ranking performance of your local content so you can take appropriate actions should Google not find your site globally relevant.

At a recent conference I watched a debate on whether it was possible to ghost write the CEO’s views in a Twitter account. I thought the discussion intriguing as I personally spent 10 years writing for CEO’s in the days when they were distributed to journalists in the form of a press release with a stamp on the envelope. I’m sure that many PR folks have done the same.

Forget ghost-writing, let’s translate

Nor did the approach proposed by the panel pass muster on my test as to whether it could be adapted as a service to solve the multilingual needs of clients, namely “can you deliver the service in fourteen languages?” Fourteen is roughly the average number of languages that multilingual SEO projects use. By asking if you can run a service in fourteen languages you start to make visible otherwise hidden barriers of language, management, logistics and, most significantly, cost. Having fourteen CEOs write for Twitter might work for some, but not many organizations will have either the resources or inclination to go that way. In fact, many organizations would not dare let their CEOs loose!

So, if you can’t write for the CEO in English, it must be equally difficult in French right? In fact, some CEOs are already carefully crafting their tweets and then having them translated or, worse, auto-translated without them batting an eyelid simply because of the “out of sight, out of mind” rule, which means if I can’t see it, can’t understand it and it’s not bothering me, and therefore it must be OK. This is like lighting a long fuse to a dynamite store and saying, “it hasn’t blown up yet..” (To be fair, this happens to be the commonest international SEO strategy too!)

Did you say my company sucks or what?

Does this all mean that no-one is effectively undertaking international social media campaigns? Definitely not—there are some examples of great strategies but it is certainly not the norm and many corporations and small businesses are struggling with the issue.

Take social media tracking tools, for instance. There’s a wide range of fantastic tools on the market for tracking mentions and sentiment in the online space. The problem is that they are all designed to help managers who speak the same language as their customers or audience. It’s all very well realizing that someone says, “company B sucks” in English but what if they said, “Empresa B es pésima” in Spanish, “firma b ir kaktu kantoris” in Latvian or “” in Mandarin—then what would you do? If you can’t track effectively, how on earth can you manage a campaign.

Listen up

Perhaps you will say, “The company will rely on its people locally or use local agencies in the target country…” There are two reasons why this doesn’t happen in very large global companies:

• Only a small percentage of “global” companies have their own company representatives in every country.
• Managing a network of local agency offices everywhere and having them report on the same basis is virtually impossible.

So, on the basis that the first step in any social media marketing activity is “listening” and finding out exactly what’s going on, most will fail on the launch pad. The only way to do this effectively, is to use the same tracking tools—choosing ones which work with any character set for any language—and then deploy a team of native-speakers of all the relevant languages to interpret the findings of your tracking and report back to you.

Now it’s talkback time

Once you know what’s going on the next challenge is to appropriately respond. If a brand or reputation is verbally under attack, this will take some careful planning and sensitivity to local cultural issues. However, the rules of response—transparency above all else—are in many ways easier than those required for active promotion where the scope to fall over oneself are greater.

Many social media promotional campaigns are based around success in English, then “translating” into the local language. They don’t begin at an international standpoint. For instance, suppose you started a post on a social media site with the words, “Google, following the success of its advertising during Superbowl….” your post will fall on deaf ears for many outside the US and is very difficult to “translate” (I’ve never understood how bowling managed to be such a big deal for Americans anyway!). The result is your post or tweet referring to “Superbowl” may have to be rewritten. The best option is to begin from a neutral perspective ignoring the local (US or UK) cultural context.

Successful social media strategies also require a high degree of understanding of the differences in importance between social networks locally. You cannot target Brazil without including Orkut nor work in Russia while ignoring Vkontakte. Then you need good properly developed keyword and influencer research to orient your strategy. Not surprisingly both of these require native understanding of the local language.

International social media definitely poses many challenges but there are solutions. Fortunately, its very difficulty means the door of opportunity is wide-open for those who choose to give it a gentle but well thought out shove.

First, lets take a look at some of the differences between Europe and the US. What do Europeans miss out on compared to US users? Let’s take Bing and Google’s universal search as examples. In Europe only the UK has the “updated version” of Bing. The rest of Europe is still looking at Live Search, only with a Bing logo placed on top. According to Microsoft, France and then Germany will soon get “true” Bing search, but other countries might be forced to wait even longer.

When Google launched universal search it took a while before Europe was able to enjoy its pleasures. Slowly but surely universal search results have appeared in European versions of Google, but there are still many queries which do not have universal search results. And what’s more important: most Europeans haven’t optimized for it yet.

So, what does it matter that Europeans sometimes have to wait for developments to reach the old continent? So they wait a little, who cares. Well, waiting for a development which is already out somewhere else can also offer some benefits. Benefits which US sites focused on Europe can also use for their own good. Two of these benefits are learning and being first.

Learning. When a product is launched in the US but not in Europe it’s important to keep your eyes open and learn. You can actually learn from what happens in the US and use it for your own benefit: what works and what doesn’t? When the product then comes to Europe you can immediately do the right thing.

Be the first. If you know something works in the US you gain a huge benefit—the benefit of being first. Since some updates, products or possibilities in search engines are not yet available in some countries most website owners won’t bother with optimizing for them. But that’s the wrong attitude! Optimize for them now and you will most definitely benefit from it when the new features are rolled out in Europe. You’ll be the first who will have optimized and therefore will gain the most.

A few of things to keep in mind

It is important that when you want to be the first or want to implement that what you’ve learned in the US in Europe to consider the following:

• Some things never get to Europe or Europeans just don’t like or get it. It could be that some of your efforts won’t get the wanted results because Europeans react differently than Americans.
• If you decide to wait for the service to actually land in Europe, be sure to figure out which countries do have the features. That the UK has them almost never means the Netherlands has them too.
• Be sure to look at legal issues. You have to know what the legal consequences could be. For example Google now has some issues with Google Analytics in Germany and with Streetview in Denmark. If Denmark really decides to ban Streetview any investment you make will be useless.

But in general it really comes to this: the early launch in the US offers chances to get the head start in Europe you don’t have in the US.

If you’re running a successful US English-language site and you want to replicate your business model in other markets, what is the first thing you do? Localize the site in a different language? Of course you don’t. The first thing you do is you try another English language market. If at the same time you add other languages, which do you choose—Polish? Probably not. You generally choose a language such as Spanish, French or German—globally important languages with many speakers and spoken in many countries. Mostly, you avoid “language” altogether and stick with English!

When you localize a web site into a single country language, such as Polish which is principally only spoken in Poland, or Hungarian, which is principally only spoken in Hungary, you significantly reduce the likelihood of a duplication problem to nil—even if the content you started with and the content you publish are the same. So, a single-nation language means no duplication problem.

SEO in the US and UK is the same—and different

Many of the not-yet-international US sites that select a new market to target seem to choose the UK. This makes sense, of course. Despite what George Bernard Shaw said (”England and America are two countries separated by a common language,”) the UK is closer in culture and language to the US than many others (except of course that we drive on the correct side of the road). It is also wise to enter a market via a nation that you pretty much understand (sic). You would also expect SEO requirements for the UK to be pretty much the same as the US—apart from having to change some “z’s” to “s” of course.

Quite rightly marketers and chief executives say to themselves, “Whatever happens with our export test, at least things are running OK at home so the risk is not too great.” Sadly, the catch with choosing the UK as your first new market is that if things do go wrong, it could well be on your domestic US site that the troubles emerge.

The blame game starts

And duplication issues are not so easy to spot. The big problem with duplication issues is that they are not necessarily huge in impact—they just hold you back and you start to look for all sorts of possible causes. Performance just isn’t what you expected, and everyone starts looking for someone—or more usually—something to blame.

Here’s a recent client conversation that illustrates my point.

Client: “Things were going great but in October we just didn’t see the traffic growth we were expecting—in fact it was lower than our direct access growth.”

Andy: “Did you make any changes in October?”

Client: “No nothing at all. Oh apart from we launched the Irish site, of course.”

Andy: “And how similar is the Irish site to your US site?”

Client: “It’s very different as it’s very small—we don’t offer as much to Ireland, so that can’t be it, right?”

Andy: “The home page?” Client: “Sure the home page is the almost the same as the US but….”

In the wrong place at the wrong time!

It would be true to say that many people put sites into pigeon holes and only consider the problems of the Irish site in Ireland or the UK site in the UK. The connections between sites is not where most folk look first—but they should.

Don’t forget also, that frequently the issue with duplication is not that the site doesn’t rank—but that the “wrong” pages rank in the wrong place. The classic example is that you’re trying to sell something (say downloadable software) to Brits in dollars because the top ranking page for your key search term is from the US. Now Brits don’t think money is actually money unless Her Majesty The Queen is present—so dollars just don’t sell as well and the great British Pound page, which would sell, is down on page three or four of the search engine results pages—or not showing at all.

Using “modern” solutions

One thing you cannot do is simply shuffle paragraphs around on the page to “deduplicate” things. Nope, Google is wise to that, deeming each significant block of content on a site a “shingle,” and hides those pages behind that “Some pages were omitted” link at the end of results. A recent case of a translation agency with multiple sites and a duplication problem boiled down largely to a couple of paragraphs—they just happened to feature on all the home pages of their nearly 20 sites.

More modern solutions are worth looking at to help. You should, of course, adopt local country domains to assist the search engines identify which site belongs where. You can plug into Webmaster Central and tell it where to stick your pages and to help with things there’s now that cross-domain canonical tag available. All useful in extremis. I’d suggest though that you get under the hood and look at fixing the root causes of your duplication problem first, rather than relying on these workarounds. Otherwise the next time you come to make changes someone will forget the canonical tag or change the URL name or something and that will put you back exactly where you were before. Duplicated.

I have been advocating the use of the internet to reach overseas markets since 1994 when professors and students laughed at me while defending my business school thesis on that topic. A year later, an international marketing journal published an updated version of that paper. This time I was even more out there advocating the pure craziness of using search engines as the mode of entry.

Shortly after publication, I was invited to speak in Wuhan China as part of an international trade delegation from California. There I met the CEO of a transportation company who was looking to find used city busses to import to China. Searching for “used busses” on AltaVista, via the painfully slow China Online satellite internet connection in the business center of the hotel, we found two companies, one in California and the other in Italy, sent emails and the next morning had quotes from both companies for the exact busses he wanted.

This experience was the highlight of the trip for many on both sides of the transaction, since it changed the whole concept of how they would source products in the future. Unfortunately, I did not have the foresight to spin out an Alibaba or Global Sources. What made this simple action so special was a traditional import/export company had been trying to source these busses for six months with no luck and we were able to it in less than ten minutes.

Today, nearly 15 years later, the opportunities for companies to expand into new overseas markets, using search, are even better than I imagined. The first place companies’ look to source products is the internet or one of the global sourcing companies already referenced. We can point to hundreds of companies, large and small, that are leveraging this great opportunity for expanding their businesses.

So what is giving me so much hope that the time has finally come? The first sign came this summer when comScore released its Global Search Marketing report indicating that there were over 100 billion searches per month globally. The eye opener to many was not just the volume of searches but the realization that North America’s volume was third behind that of Europe and Asia. Both regions have nearly 10% more searches than what’s occurring in the US.

Companies have taken notice of the opportunities and are aggressively working to capture their share. In November I spoke with twenty or so global Fortune 100 search marketing managers who all indicated their top initiative for 2010 was to get a better handle on global search marketing. They want to understand how to manage it, execute it and get more opportunities out of it. Many of these companies are finding search marketing (paid and organic) to be their best modes of entry and delivering the highest yields. Many of them admitted to using search query volumes and leads generated in the local language or country as a proxy for overall market opportunity. They are especially happy that they can do it without huge advertising, focus group or other research investments.

International search marketing is not in demand just from big companies. Conversations I’ve had with international trade advisors from around the world all indicated there has been a significant increase in interest from small and medium sized companies on how they can leverage search and the internet to reach new markets. The US Commercial Service’s Export.gov, the government department tasked with helping US companies export their products, has had so much demand for web globalization and localization services that they are even putting on their own eventthis summer in Boston to help companies learn how to optimize their sites to better interact and sell to overseas audiences.

Whatever the reason for this increased desire to go global, be it increased awareness, Google’s global domination or a bad economy forcing companies to think outside their natural boarders for business, site owners are scrambling for information about going global. No matter what the reason, the reality is that the time for global search marketing has finally arrived. Search consultants, agencies, conferences and organizations like SEMPO need to seize this great opportunity and offer services and information that will position them as a go-to entity to help companies looking to expand to these new and exciting markets.

Facebook’s popularity surge reminded me of a conversation I had with a search engineer who had earlier worked at AltaVista when it was the number one search tool. He explained that he had decided to leave AltaVista when the writing on the wall became clear that newcomer Google was headed for preeminence. This search engine upstart had taken the number one search term spot at AltaVista, he said, for nine consecutive months. Time, he decided, to move on.

Battling over advertising dollars!

Of course, Facebook and Google are different animals and serve different purposes. But the audience is the same, the advertising dollars are coming from the same budget—and Microsoft owns more than 10% of Facebook, so Bing will likely soon be more visible for integrated web search. So Facebook could potentially rob Google of advertising dollars if it globally performed a better job of delivering performance advertising.

Google and Facebook actually have a lot in common. Both are California-based businesses funded by venture capital which have taken the online world by storm. Both started out without really knowing how they were going to make money initially giving services away “free” to build audience. And both sought to win the US market first before expanding and focusing on the rest of the world.

If it’s a great idea, move blisteringly fast

When Google moved to take on the world, it discovered not only had it been “emulated” in other markets giving local players the first mover advantage before it, but certain strategic oversights hampered its progress. Google didn’t acquire its own local domain names outside of the US until several years after it started, for instance. Both Google and Facebook have also used some form of crowdsourcing or volunteering to undertake localization for broader markets.

What this demonstrates is that if you have a great idea with global potential and you intend to go there,you’d better move early and fast because it’s very easy for local players to use your great idea and to become a threat to your own progress in your future roll out.

The same pockets of resistance

Both Google and Facebook have suffered most in similar markets—generally these are the furthest away linguistically from their start point. Google has not yet conquered Japan, Korea, China or Russia where Yahoo, Naver, Baidu and Yandex respectively all have number one spots, even after a decade of dominance by the big G elsewhere in the world.

Facebook claims 350 million users worldwide and is the global number one social networking site—but that fact hides a lot of important local detail. In Russia, Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki have 69% of the social networking market share combined—according to comScore, which also points out that Russia social networkers are particularly engaged. Meanwhile, Facebook trails with a skimpy 2% share of the social network space in Russia.

Fringes still for Facebook

Netratings data puts Mixi in Japan at a 15% share of the Japanese population whereas Facebook is nearer 2% despite a recent jump in users. In China, where Facebook has had Google-like censorship difficulties, Qzone has over 200 million users (ouch), 150 million of which update their accounts at least once a month. And those figures relate to a site where many services are not free!

Figures for the share of advertising budgets between Google and Facebook by country aren’t readily available—but it’s a reasonable assumption to make that Facebook is significantly further behind in non-US markets than it is in the US, so a quick answer to the question posed by the title of this post would be that right now Facebook isn’t troubling Google much at all. But what of the future?

“If you want me to buy, speak my language”

Facebook could take charge of the next decade if they make all the right moves, but so far some of these are missing:

• Deliver an effective and cost-effective advertising system
• Rapidly roll out the embryo web search feature
• Localize the site in a more friendly way for local users

On the localization front, Facebook has done the essentials. But it hasn’t gotten real close and cozy to its users. Even subtle things such as not using local domains (some of which it owns), with a double-termed language-country subdomain (Japanese-Japan is at ja-jp.facebook.com and German-Germany at de-de.facebook.com) just look like the database builder’s solution rather than what the users really needed. Some of the localization results have also been a little clumsy—though getting better now. But Facebook is truly the one-size-fits-all solution.

It’s true that you could make the same criticisms of Google—it’s only in recent years that they had engineers based in Russia to help deal with the complexities of the Russian language, for instance. But I would argue that social networking is much “softer” than search and that means that cultural issues become more critical success factors.

If Brazilians are at carnival do they really want to network socially? Yes they do, in droves—but on Google-owned Orkut rather than Facebook. That’s their choice—and if Facebook really wants to become the global number one everywhere it will have to go further in understanding local choices partly because it is a social network. Until then, Google is pretty safe—and thinking carefully about positioning itself more closely to local users.

Europe is a continent which is very mobile minded. Compared to Europe, the American mobile market is underdeveloped. Most of Europe’s markets had exceeded 100% penetration at the end of 2007, with more than 750 million mobile subscribers. And the European mobile market still continues to grow.

76 percent of those mobile users are in the top 10 European nations. You would expect countries like the UK and France to be on top of that list. However, the UK market, with 73.1 million subscribers in 2007, “only” amounts to nine percent of the market, making it the fourth European country on the list. The largest market in Europe is Russia with a share of 22%.

Moneywise, that translates into some very interesting numbers. In the UK for example mobile ad spend was worth about $46 million dollars in 2008. The revenues were divided almost equally between mobile display ads and paid search. To give you an indication of how fast mobile is growing: 2008 mobile ad spend will be almost double the spend in 2007. KPMG has predicted revenue growth of 33% for 2010 for the mobile entertainment industry.

Not everything is great though. As I’ve explained before Europe is a very fragmented continent. Every country has its own rules and regulations. Having these different regulations makes it difficult to get a grip on the market, and the money. For example, if you travel to different European countries and you try accessing your mobile webpages through your phone you are bound to receive a huge invoice when you get home. The home network operator usually adds a mark-up of 10 to 25 cents per minute. So when traveling most Europeans now try to access the web as little as possible.

However, things are changing. European politicians in the European Committee are trying to open the telecommunications markets through liberalization measures. They want further deregulation. This year Neelie Kroes, a Dutch politician, will assume the position of European Commissioner for the digital agenda. She will likely be an activist to spur telecoms to get Europe more online. Kroes until recently was the European Commissioner for Competition, where she got Microsoft to stop “pushing” Internet Explorer in Windows.

The first signs of the new politics can already be seen. Recently a new telecom law was approved. This rule, which caused some debate because it had also some cookie/privacy regulations in it, has to be integrated in EU countries’ laws before the end of 2012. The law is meant to get the telecom providers working the same way in every country and its meant to get the competition straightened out and with protecting European citizens from paying too much for telecom services.

Meanwhile Europeans continue to be online using their mobile devices. Most Europeans use iPhones to go on the web. The iPhone browser is the most used mobile OS, followed by Symbian. Android only has about 2% market share but the new Nexus phone and the other Android phones will without a doubt help the Google mobile OS quickly gain market share.

The Nexus phone will most probably be received with less excitement in Europe than in the US however. Unlocked handsets are pretty common in Europe. Therefore the Nexus will be one of many devices on the market. However, the iPhone and the Nexus do represent a “new way” of mobile usage, with most people focusing on apps instead of web surfing and e-mail. Mobile collaboration is emerging in Europe, and this is driving the mobile industry and makes social networking using the mobile phone more common. Applications like Twitter-apps, augmented reality apps and mobile banking will see more usage in the coming year and will help the Europeans get mobile online even more.

So how about search engines? Mobile search numbers are in Europe not much different than the numbers on the non-mobile web. Last year Google was the most used mobile search engine by far with a market share of over 96%, except for Russia where Yandex dominates.

So what can we learn from all of this?

• Going mobile should be a no-brainer. If you want to reach the Europeans chances are mobile is a good way of doing that, with especially rich opportunities for branding and advertising.
• Ecommerce is an interesting opportunity. New applications make it possible for mobile devices to do financial transactions.
• If you want to reach the audience, be sure to reach them using applications.
• Get your websites mobile-ready—and search friendly. Europeans use search on their mobile phones like they do on the non-mobile web, which means they use search a lot.
• Mobile paid search is increasing.

So is Europe how the mobile future will look? Perhaps, but even with its high mobile use Europe can learn a thing or two from the Far East where mobile is even more integrated. But because Europe has resemblances to the US in the way people live and work, it is an interesting continent for search marketers to look at. In this case Europe doesn’t come in after the US, but before.