Last week, I was lucky to join a number of great speakers at the iLive conference in Riga, Latvia. As with all conferences, I learned a lot. (I simply can't relate to those who go to a conference and say they've heard it all before.) I learned at least as much from the people I met and chatted with -- as well as from the people of Riga and Latvia -- as I did from the conference itself. Latvia -- A Country With A Population Less Than Houston, Texas Latvia is a very small country with a population of just over 2 million people -- around the size of a smallish Chinese or American city. The co [...]

Related Topics: All Things SEO | Channel: Local | Search Marketing: Multinational | SEO: Local

The lowly keyword phrase seems to be getting more attention these days. Last month, I spoke at SMX West about big data and co-optimization, then finished up at the International Search Summit with global keyword research and management. 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 ind [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Multinational Search | Search Marketing: Multinational | Search Marketing: Search Term Research | SEO: Keyword Research

Brainstormings are wonderful things, and we creative types really love them! But, the writing is on the wall for brainstormings in international content marketing! 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 strategie [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Multinational Search | Search Marketing: Multinational

SEO and PPC fans often find themselves in different parts of the building, on different floors and sometimes on a different planet. This shouldn't really be the case, but is. 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 decision [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Multinational Search | Search Marketing | Search Marketing: General | Search Marketing: Multinational | SEO - Search Engine Optimization

Last time, I was talking about the analysis of click through rates by position based on data from Google's Webmaster Tools and I promised we'd look at a wider range of countries. The chart below shows you exactly that data extracted from a wide range of webmaster data to give some relatively consistent averages. The data covers many tens of thousands of clicks. At first sight, you can see a fairly regular pattern (something we found across most European nations) and since the results are presented in largely similar ways by Google wherever you are, there's a certain inevitability to that. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Outside US | Google: Webmaster Central | Multinational Search | Search Engines: Outside USA | Search Marketing: Multinational

As "online marketing" evolves, you'll note I've used a generic term there rather than SEO -- the titles and descriptions of what we do on a daily basis change as does the focus of the effort. Both "Panda" and "Penguin" in their different ways have had a dramatic influence on how important people think "content" is. That's a huge revelation, of course. Never before had any of us figured out that the giving people access to rich information in the form of "content" could have any relevance whatsovever. (Don't forget my British upbringing and look for the huge irony there, just in case you thi [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Content Central | Google: Panda Update | Multinational Search | Search Marketing: Multinational

Handling established campaigns across multiple countries can quickly become a case of handling overwhelming quantities of data interspersed with never-ending menial jobs, preventing the SEO from developing their strategy to squeeze yet more value from their campaign ROI.

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | How To | How To: Analytics | Intermediate | Multinational Search | Search Marketing: Multinational

Does Google really "get" international? There are clearly some very clever people within Google who do -- but the corporation's behavior bizarrely still tends to suggest a silicon valley tech company that's a little insulated from the non-English speaking world. Take, for example, the "Global Market Finder" tool which you can find here. This tool was originally conceived in the UK and then made its way into the Google mothership. The idea behind the tool is that you can enter a keyword or several keywords -- and it will then automatically in a matter of seconds rank the markets where the [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Multinational Search | Search Marketing: Multinational | Search Marketing: Search Term Research | SEM Tools: Keyword Research

Google has been moving lots of goal posts for us all recently and the "Hreflang" tag is a case in point. A succession of Google speakers has presented the latest "Hreflang" thinking at International Search Summits @SMX throughout 2012. On each occasion, the presentation and explanation was different from the one before. The bad news is that keeping up with the changes has been tough, but the good news is that Google has actually been listening to the multinational market place for once! But Don't Canonicals & Hreflang Tags Belong Together? Susan Moskwa presented first when Google was [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Outside US | Google: Webmaster Central | Multinational Search | Search Engines: Outside USA | Search Engines: Yandex | Search Marketing: Multinational

Google's recent quarterly financial statements sounded pretty rosy overall. Many have much to celebrate in the figures. Stockbrokers and city analysts were much more worried about Google's cunning share split. I haven't seen a single commentator consider the US versus the rest of the world. Well, here it is! Let's take the raw sales performance first. Below is a chart which looks at the rate of growth of the US, UK and then the rest of the world. You can see that the dramatic peak of two quarters ago (mainly from the international markets) has disappeared and things have returned to steady [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Outside US | Multinational Search | Search Engines: Outside USA | Search Marketing: Multinational

In previous posts in this column, I've covered the intricacies of multinational search from a technical SEO's standpoint. Leveraging multinational markup while clearing up in-site duplicate content and avoiding multinational homepage calamities is no easy matter to coordinate for big site SEO. Bringing all of those strategies to bear, and then also attempting to integrate a mobile site strategy would seem, on the face of it, to be a difficult task. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Mobile Sites, Feature Phones & The Smartphone Revolution We are fortunate to be li [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Mobile | Google: SEO | Multinational Search | Search Marketing: Multinational | SEO: Mobile Search

Did the headline catch your eye? I really wanted a teaser headline for this post which would entice people to read and discover the details of a new global search engine -- but for that message, a teaser alone just wasn't credible. But when I added the word "Apple" to the headline, it completely changed its dynamics -- just like Apple does every time it enters a new business area. So, I must be talking about Siri right? Wrong. I agree actually that Siri is a really important development, but Apple has much more up its sleeve than just Siri. What Does Apple Have Up Its Sleeve? On the 23 [...]

Related Topics: Apple | Apple: Siri | Channel: SEO | Multinational Search | Search Engines: Outside USA | Search Marketing: Mobile | Search Marketing: Multinational | SEO: Mobile Search

Wall Street wasn't terribly impressed with Google's figures for the last quarter of 2011 announced after the bell last thursday. To a normal person, you would think that generating $2.71 billion profit and significantly beating your own previous quarters would be a cause for celebration. But these aren't normal people and this isn't a normal market and share values immediately dropped by 10%. Nor is Google without blame. I started digging into Google's figures expecting to find that Google had actually seen a fantastic success at the end of 2011 - but had miscommunicated this with the city. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Multinational Search | Search Marketing: Multinational

Resolving indexing or duplication issues are usually top of the list when working with a new domain, but how can you achieve the same level of performance once the obvious SEO wins are in place?

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Rich Snippets | Google: SEO | Google: Web Search | Multinational Search | Schema.org | Search Engines: Outside USA | Search Marketing: Multinational

For online marketers, Russia offers two appealing qualities: It's one of just five countries in the world where Google isn't the market leader, and Russia is now the 2nd biggest online market in Europe in terms of users, having passed the UK last year. Yandex is the market leader in Russia, with a 64% market share, more than double Google's 22% share, according to Russian statistics service LiveInternet (Dec. 2010). In addition to reaching native Russian speakers, Yandex (Yet Another Indexer has been aggressively expanding globally, now reaching 56 million users from all over the world. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Search | Search Engines: Yandex | Search Marketing: Multinational

Globally, Russia is the eighth largest market of Internet users, and as we know, Google is playing second fiddle to Yandex, which is currently the main search engine in Russia with well over half of the market share. Yandex makes hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and provides a broad range of online services (email, free hosting, PPC advertising network (Yandex Direct), maps, news, weather, and dictionaries). Comscore ranked the web property first in Russia with 34.9 million unique visitors in August 2010, It is also the 25th site in the Alexa Top 100. What's more, Yandex is the de [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Multinational Search | Search Engines: Yandex | Search Marketing: Multinational

Not so long ago, there were only a few companies out there that bothered to customize their websites for foreign markets. Those who chose to do so made minimal effort—they simply translated their English copy into the local language and started doing business. Their incentives to create more sophisticated, tailored offerings was minimal; with so few companies doing it, there was no competition for e-business or Google rankings. This, however, is no longer the case. In the past, only the big players could afford to invest the time and strategic resources needed to localize their w [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Search | How To: SEM | Search Marketing: Multinational