Last week there was a post on the DC Web Women listserve from a fellow DC “web woman” who asked an international SEO question. She was wondering if the English translations for her company’s new site design would help them appear better internationally. They were planning on having those English pieces of content machine translated into a variety of different languages.
Beyond the fact that machine translation often creates interesting results, marketing your brand internationally and tackling international SEO or ensuring that it will appear for your target audience as they look for your brand and the services you provide via search engines and/or their favorite social media platform is MUCH more complicated than that.
I’ve created a list below of the 6 major high level issues a brand needs to address when creating an international online marketing plan.
1. Results are personalized for each user I’ve previously blogged on the Ketchum blog about how search and social experiences are now 100% personalized to the end user. This increase in online personalization also impacts your international marketing. Google (and the other search engines) orient results based on the user’s:
- geographic location
- language used
- previous search history
- social networks and connections
- Google+ interactions
- and about 40 other personalization factors.
2. There are different popular search engines and social profiles in each country
Google is largely dominant, but in Russia and other Slavic countries, the major player is Yandex. In China it’s Baidu, in Korea it’s Naver. And the social landscape also changes per country. Web Certain creates a great report each year about the major search and social players in each country. And like everything else in the online marketing space, the most popular social media platform per country often shifts year to year.
3. It can be a challenge to get your pages indexed in each country’s search engine Being displayed for your target audience per country starts with ensuring that your content has been included in that country’s search engine. In many cases, page load speed and whether the search engine spider can easily access your site impacts whether international sites are even included in a search engine’s index for that country. In particular, Baidu’s crawler is really slow and the best practices for appearing in China is often to have the site hosted within that country.
4. Without help, search engines can be confused about which page to serve for which user
There are also a host of other technical issues that need to be addressed when tackling international online marketing. One of which is ensuring that the proper copy of your content in the target audience’s language appears for them based on their country and language. Google rolled out new rel=”alternate” and hreflang=”x”coding to assist with easing the search engine confusion when selecting which version to display for a particular searcher, but often adjustments within Google and Bing Webmaster Tools are also needed.
5. There are human beings evaluating your rankings
Beyond technical considerations there is an other factor to consider when working on international SEO. Google, Bing, Yandex (and maybe some of the other large search engines per country) use human raters to evaluate their search results – real human beings who evaluate whether your page deserves to be ranking for that keyword in the first place. They take a look at whether you have quality content that addresses the innate question that the keyword represents – this means that each piece of copy needs to be written by an in-country translator who will adjust the copy accordingly so that the nuances of the language provide the answer that the user is looking for.
6. Smartphone use requires mobile landing pages
Marketers should also consider that many countries are even more engaged on smart phones than we are here in the US (though we now have over 50% smart phone adoption across all demographics) and to appear in mobile search brands need mobile optimized pages – in all of the languages for which they want to appear. This matters the most in Asian countries where most Internet users access the Internet via their phone.
International search is complicated. Are you currently trying to tackle a marketing plan that includes marketing internationally?