If you’ve ever watched Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
you probably know about his reoccurring bit where he mislabels a
foreign country only to point out how nobody has noticed the error. For
me, this is one of those “it’s funny because it’s true” type of
situations. I’m terrible when it comes to foreign geography.
This wasn’t much of a problem professionally until I was hired by a
client who wanted a website targeted to Germany. Sure, I’ve heard of
Germany. But I didn’t know how to market towards the average German.
Should the content be in German? Or is English okay? How is a site in Germany different from one in America? I had no clue.
Over the years, I’ve taken on more and more international clients. This
was never part of my business plan, but once I successfully completed
the German site more international orders started coming in. Even though
international sites seemed complicated at first, I ended up learning
the right way to approach them – no matter how little I knew about the
foreign country involved.
Here are some tips and tricks I’ve learned about internet marketing and international websites:
Determine the Type of Targeting
The business must decide what type of targeting they want. There are
two major types: country and language. There are specific reasons to use
each.
Country:
This is the ideal localization. This does require enough potential
users and search volume to justify. Typically, this happens with large
companies who already have an established customer base.
Language:
When Country isn’t the best choice, you should go with language. This
doesn’t mean Language is the second choice. Rather, Language is often
the best choice for a business in certain situations:
1) When location doesn’t have a high importance. This could be a
virtual business where you’re not providing a physical product or
service. Some examples would be a technology, business or content
creation company.
Two large examples of businesses which use language targeting are
Skype and
Atlassian.
2) When your potential customer base is of an uncertain size. If you
start with language localization you can then watch growth trends for an
area. Once certain levels of traffic and conversion are reached, you
can then move into country localization with greater confidence.
Measure Your Performance in Relevant Markets
Your web structure could change based on a variety of factors including
authority level, traffic and current rankings. If your client has an
existing web presence in the country (or a similar country) this is a
great place to start analyzing. Try to determine the following:
· The current web structure
· The current search visibility, traffic and conversion rate
· The overall success of the existing site
Analyze the Popularity of the Top Sites in Your Targeted Market
Find your competition in the market and take a look at what they’re
doing. First, you’ll want to identify and analyze their web structure.
Then you’ll want to take a look at their link profiles.
Their overall popularity at a domain and page level is important to
know. So is the percentage of links which come from local sites. To do
this, compare local ccTLDs and IPs to gTLDs.
Determine the Influence of Local vs. Generic Domains
If you’re not starting from scratch, you’ll hopefully have access to
search visibility and traffic data. You can use this data to analyze
cultural factors and preferences of your international audience. This
data alone is simply a starting point, so take it with a grain of
proverbial salt.
An international site’s performance will also be affected by:
· The visibility and authority of your brand locally
· The frequency of mobile verses desktop search
· The number of ads for the brand
· The general organization of SERPS for the niche
Communication with an International Client
I found this tricky at first. My contact for the business spoke perfect
English, but he’d never been to America. This definitely presented some
challenges.
Turns out, normal shorthand for design and structure are a bit
dependent on a common culture. I found an effective way around this,
however. I had my client pick two types of samples. I asked them to
find:
· Examples of websites which sold a similar product or service.
These are websites where my client liked how their competitors did
business. These were functionality samples.
· Examples of websites which we’re aesthetically pleasing. The
products or services sold on these sites were irrelevant. These were
design samples.
This helped me get a pretty good idea of what my client wanted. As with
any client, there was a bit of back and forth until we settled on an
overall look. But the initial examples provided a great common ground to
start from.
Keywords in a Foreign Language
I’m not going to lie. Analyzing and selecting keyword phrases in a
foreign language can be a bit rough. Now, no company is going to hire a
non-native speaker to write their content. But you might be called upon
to create a few keyword phrases.
You can still use the same process you’d normally use to find keywords.
Google translate can give you an idea of what those words mean, too.
This is about the best you can do. Your client should hopefully help you
from there, acting as a liaison between you and the content creator.
Around the World
The internet has made the world smaller. International business is
easier than ever before. Even if you’re not an expert in foreign
countries (and I’m certainly not claiming to be one, either) you can
still provide your internet marketing services to companies around the
world.
Sure, there might some language and cultural hiccups now and again. But
for the most part SEO skills are universal. With these tips and tricks,
you can expand your base of potential customers by leaps and bounds.
