How Enterprises Should Approach Link Building
Contributor Bill Hunt recaps a session from SMX East in which Joe Oliver and Cody Cahill from Page One Power explain the different strategies required for success in enterprise-level link building.
Contributor
Bill Hunt's latest articles
Monetizing Site Search Queries
I believe that once everyone starts thinking clearly again after the last round of Penguin updates — focusing on their business rather than on ways to game the system or mass produce activities that are not scalable — we can get down to action that can actually move the needle. One such action? Focus on […]
How To Mine Your Local Market Site Search Keyword Goldmine
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 […]
Is Your Local Pricing Strategy Blocking Search Engine Spiders?
eMarketer’s recent report on Global e-commerce growth showed online sales globally exceeded $1 trillion in 2012. They further indicate that global e-commerce will grow by an additional 19% in 2013, with the Asia-Pacific region surpassing North America in online sales. This reemphasizes the importance of articles like Andy Atkins-Krüger’s recent article on international pricing strategies and […]
6 Tips For Increasing Search Team Communication
In my last article, Big Win & Fails For Global Search Marketing, I recapped some of the failures and successes in Global Search Marketing and identified the lack of communication and collaboration as the biggest failure. While it is the biggest challenge, it is actually the easiest to fix. When Mike Moran initially brought me […]
2012 Scorecard: Big Wins & Fails For Global Search Marketing
Rather than one of the typical year-end/new year predictions, I am going to use this space to rant about our industry and some obvious fails that should not be happening with the level of maturity Global Search has achieved. I see far too many problems, organizational dysfunction, and hear lame excuses and failures by companies […]
60 Minutes To Global Search Greatness Through Keyword Analysis
What if you could only spend one hour each week identifying some of your biggest opportunities and problems? What would you spend the time doing? That was a question – well, more of a “challenge” given to me by a few attendees of a recent Advanced Keyword Modeling presentation. While the many possible analysis were […]
The Tale Of Goldilocks & Global Search Budgeting
In the last few articles, we focused on minimums of keyword research and measuring performance, and now we can extend that process to budgeting. With search budgets, especially for paid search, we have three different options for budgeting. As the fairly tale goes, Goldilocks samples each of the bowls of porridge to see which was the […]
How To Expand Your Keyword Portfolio For Global Leads & Sales
Last time, we looked at the process of A Minimalist Approach To Global Keyword Expansion & Monitoring, which is the bare minimum a company should do in an overseas market. This essentially solves for the first phrase of the typical purchase cycle – Awareness. It is critical in a market where you don’t have a […]
A Minimalist Approach To Global Keyword Expansion & Monitoring
There have been a number of articles lately on keyword expansion and management but most of them seemed to skip over the basics especially at the global level. It is critical to make sure you include the brand and product sets for each of the local markets. As we have been importing data into our […]
How To Get Alignment Of Your Global Search Programs
I just wrapped up a strategy session in Europe with two different companies and wanted to recap some of the issues I encountered and how we are working through them. It was interesting that in both cases, their US programs were fairly advanced and organized, yet their local market programs were under-performing and in a […]
How To Implement The hreflang Element Using XML Sitemaps
After much confusion and frustration from multilingual site webmasters on how to properly use the hreflang element, Google announced new functionality to allow multilingual and multinational site owners to set the rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x” link annotation using XML sitemaps. This is a much better way of implementing it than telling webmasters to add hundreds of lines of code […]
Stop Blaming IT! How Communication Could Improve From The SEO Side
Last time, we talked about making your Global Search Marketing Ecosystem thrive and one of the key elements for success was effective IT Integration. Adam Sherk’s recent article on Nine Common SEO Road Blocks delves into some of the IT challenges. His article identifies three of the nine barriers being directly related to IT and […]
Is Your Global Search Ecosystem Thriving Or Dying?
Nearly two years ago, I wrote about creating a Global Search Center of Excellence and since have had the opportunity to keynote a number of company search summits, conference panels and then last week at the International Search Summit at SMX, I spoke for an entire session on how and why you should use your […]
Developing A Global SEO Diagnostics Plan
A positive trend I have seen over the past few months is companies adopting a dedicated SEO diagnostics person or integrating SEO diagnostics into existing web diagnostics protocols. I have seen a huge missed opportunity, especially with global companies, that don’t take the action to monitor page inclusions, duplicate content and redirection issues. It is […]
A New Year, New Markets & New Keywords
As we kick off the new year with replenished budgets, many of you are using your pot of gold to kick off new markets. Over the past few months I have surveyed over 150 companies on how they manage their keywords. The research will be presented in a forthcoming article. In the process, I received […]
Year-End Review Of Your Multilingual Programs
Year-end is a good time to review your programs to get them ready for the next year. Typically, this time of year things slow down due to the holidays you might have some time to focus on the recommendations below. Year-end Recap It is critical that you develop a year-end recap and send it out […]
Should You Have A Prenup With Your Global Search Vendor?
Nearly all search vendors have some sort of agreement, and the larger the client, the more complex the terms of service will be with procurement as well. Most of these focus on the standard stuff: how long, how much, scope and what happens if their vendor screws up and the relationship needs to be terminated. […]
Search Marketing Learnings From The Nordic Region
I just returned from a week in the Nordic region of Northern Europe speaking at conferences in Stockholm Sweden (SMX Stockholm) and Oslo Norway (SEM Konfrensen) which became the 35th country where I have given a presentation. While I am more well known across Asia, I really like attending these events from time to time. […]
How To Manage Expectations When Kicking Off A Global Search Program
In my last article, we reviewed my 5 Best Practices for Kicking off a Global Search Program. This article generated a number of questions from people about Tips#1 “Setting Expectations” and Tip #2: “Reporting Structures and Cadence”, so we will drill down into them this time. Without a doubt, setting the mutual expectations for a […]
5 Best Practices For Kicking Off A Global Search Program
Last time, we looked at the 9 Key Considerations for selecting an International Search Agency. Let’s now jump forward beyond the procurement and vendor onboarding nightmare and assume we have our stable of partners in place to launch our program. The following are recommendations to ensure your project gets off to and stays on the […]
9 Key Considerations For Selecting An International Search Agency
At the last International Search Summit in San Jose, one of the most common questions I received was how to hire an international search agency. My standard answer was… “it depends on your needs, your organizational structure, budget and ability to deploy them effectively from either a corporate, regional or local office.” For the sake […]
Do You Own Your International Search Program?
One of the outcomes of the Google Farmer/Panda update has been more executives asking the question: “Is my agency doing any of those tactics for my program?” Interestingly, a byproduct has been a number of multinationals who have realized that they really did not know what their local market agencies were doing and are now […]
Are You Ready For The Indian Internet Explosion?
I just returned from a few weeks in the major cities of India doing seminars, meeting with various emerging technology companies and my development team for some yet to be disclosed tools. I was constantly amazed with how fast the Internet, online business and broadband connectivity is growing. I have been to India a number […]
Unfortunately, There Is No Manual For Multinational SEO
That was the response I gave a few hours ago to a packed room of attendees in a full day workshop on Search Marketing here in Delhi India. During the afternoon workshop that was more of an open Q&A site clinic format, the majority of the questions were about multinational SEO. While I was able […]
Global Search Marketing: The Year In Review
It has been a busy year in global search, and interest in multinational marketing seems to be expanding more rapidly than most expected. Today, I’m going to look back of some of the changes this year, and in my next article will talk about some new trends for 2011 and how we might be able […]
From Russia, With (Search) Love
Over the past few months I have had the opportunity to learn more about the current digital market and advertising opportunities in Russia from Preston Carey who is heading up Yandex’s new business opportunities outside of Russia. While China often gets the attention for its growth and opportunity, Preston showed me that Russia can also […]
Create A Global SEO Center Of Excellence
My last article on Integrating Search into the Localization Process prompted a few emails from people asking what other areas are important to the process, and how they can integrate them into the SEO process. My recommendation has always been to develop a search council or search center of excellence (COE) that fosters collaboration between […]
Is SEO Integrated Into Your Localization Process?
For many, the question posed in the title of this post seems silly, often resulting in either a confused expression, or a “how dare you ask that question” look from localization managers. Yet over the past few weeks I have spoken to a number of localization and SEO managers at Fortune 500 companies who still […]
Understanding The SEO Challenges Of Language Detection
Last time, I reviewed how to effectively manage multilingual content segmentation by looking at ways to use directories, parameters and other methods to optimize local market content. Once we have our content sorted, the next challenge we have is how to direct users—and more importantly, search spiders (crawlers)—to this content. The purpose of this article […]
Effectively Managing Multilingual Content Segmentation
No, this is not another top-level domain vs. sub domain article but one that goes more to a deeper problem global companies are having with a haphazard approach to their local language content management. I have seen far too many global companies large and small cobble together local language sites that make Frankenstein look like […]
Little Known But Powerful: Google’s Export Planning Tool
Google's Export tool was developed to help businesses identify overseas market opportunities for expanding their business. While not perfect, it does allow companies new to international marketing to discover potential markets by leveraging multiple Google tools to translate keywords then weigh market potential based on search volume and average cost per click data.
Are You Harming Your Local Country SEO Performance?
Are you negatively impacting your global search efforts? There are many issues ranging from lack of resources, server restrictions and egos that are hurting a company’s search exposure in local markets. This article will breakdown some of these issues and how you can eliminate them.
Elevating The Global Importance Of Content
Shortly after my last Multinational Search post (Global Vs. Local: How To Let Google Know How To Treat Your Site) I was taken to task by a few readers complaining that supposed global experts only talk about domains and hosting for international sites and not enough about content. Ok, fair criticism, that article was written […]
Global Vs. Local: How To Let Google Know How To Treat Your Site
As the search engines rapidly move to offer more locally focused search results, those managing large global, single domain sites are facing more and more difficulties in getting them indexed, detected as local, then ranked in the local search results. This is especially true with Google in English and Spanish speaking countries where it is […]
2010 Is The Year Global Search Marketing Finally Arrives
I typically don’t jump on the annual prediction bandwagon since too many cycles are spent defending some of the crazy things I come up with. However, I will go out on a limb and predict that 2010 will be the year of global search marketing. I have been advocating the use of the internet to […]
Are Your Language Detection Methods Blocking Search Engine Crawlers?
At a recent international search marketing conference in London the most frequent question asked by the audience was “How do I get my content found and indexed by global and local search engines?” During the breaks I talked to a few people who indicated little or none of their local market content was being indexed […]
Integrating SEO Into The Localization Workflow Process
There’s a significant opportunity for marketers who take time to understand markets beyond their home territory and deploy search programs that allow them to connect directly with consumers in their native language. “In their native language” is the make or break part of succeeding in a new market, yet too many companies fail to even […]
How To Get Into Baidu, The World’s 2nd Largest Search Engine
ComScore’s announcement in early July that Baidu had become the second largest global search engine caused a fair bit of chatter in the industry as well as getting the attention of global marketers. ComScore further reported that Baidu had more than 8 billion searches and 145 million unique visitors in June meaning Baidu’s market share […]