Bill Hunt is currently the President of Back Azimuth Consulting and co-author of Search Engine Marketing Inc. His personal blog is whunt.com.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 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.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]