First off, don’t worry – I was actually enjoying my honeymoon and was not working. However, when you’ve been doing SEO for as long as I have, it’s hard to turn it off.
So while in Australia on my honeymoon I came across a few striking examples of why international SEO is often challenging.
Internet speeds are not always what you would expect in other countries
Australia is a developed country and my husband and I fully expected that the speed would be comparable to the US. That was absolutely not the case. When we did hop onto various public WiFi (every few days or so) to check email, we found that the speed was awful. In Port Douglas I wasn’t really even able to get Pinterest to load. What if you had launched an image heavy website for a campaign and expected that to work?
Even in English speaking countries, keywords can be different
One of the most obvious ones that stuck out to me was the word “hire”. They used it in relation to “hiring” cars or boats or bikes. In the US, we use the term “rent”. This did not apply to apartments. In that case they used the term “rent”.
Local colloquialisms to aid in familiarity and increased conversions.
We noticed while in Australia that they use two terms in conversations ALL the time. Those phrases are “no worries” and “too easy”. I’m not asserting that you would HAVE to create copy for sites in Australia that used those terms, but you would certainly seem more Australian if you did.
International SEO without an on the ground presences is becoming impossible. It’s not “too easy”.
Hopefully these examples illustrate how hard it is to create and market a site in another country without a presence on the ground – even if the country speaks English and follows American culture like Australia does.
As a side note, I would encourage everyone to plan a trip to Australia to unplug from technology.
While we did occasionally (over the three weeks we were there) plugin to the Internet, those moments were few and far between, and some areas (like Ayers Rock and the Daintree Rainforest) are largely unplugged/low Internet areas.
And when there is a high possibility of running into a large birds like the cassowary in the wild (like I did), you should really spend more time wandering around the rainforest than plugging into the Internet.