Bill Hunt is the President of Back Azimuth Consulting and work with clients to understand the voice of their consumer. Additionally, I am the Chief Marketing Officer of OC4 a start up Cloud Computing Consulting company.
Global Search Marketing: Your just a click away from the world.
Target users at the time of interest in their language.
Why go global? Demand is already coming to you (Log file analysis, sales and leads). Language and communication ability (Customer Service, Infrastructure – Channel Partners). Internet Usage & E-Commerce (Market Place Interests and Product Categories). New Markets & Demand for Products (Emerging Markets or Advancing Technology Opportunities).
85% of Small Medium Businesses indicated search engines offer them the best mode for market expansion. 65% of Fortune 100 generate more than 50% of their revenue outside the US. 70% of all Google queries are in a language other than English. Search is the least expensive mode of entry of any form or global expansion.
Google Export Tool…offers markets for consideration for selling products.
Objectives & Goals: Determine he business objectives for global websites and global PPC campaigns (Target Audience, How to measure the success, size and budget of campaigns, in house, out-sourced or hybrid). Create a project road map, research target markets and be prepared.
Key benefits of paid search: Instant visibility (works like traditional, web advertising – you pay, it appears). Contextally relevant. There are some challenges: Different market means different rules, people, culture, behavioral patterns.
Regional Challenges: Different outlets, Market Trends, Different Search Behaviors, Different Seasonal Behaviors (fiscal year, shopping, vacation seasons, different in products to push), Purchasing options (credit card, COD, offline), Content Regulations (Gov regulations, trademark).
Ongoing challenges: Ranking Reports, Campaign Maintenance, Foreign Customer Services, Legal / Contracts.
Key Elements of Search: Ensuring your site is search friendly which allows spiders to visit and index the content on the site. Ensuring your pages include the keyword phrases actually used by searchers. Ensuring the pages of your website are as compliant as possible with the search engine scoring algorithms.
Technical challenges with SEO. CMS settings. Geo-tarteting, ccTLD’s (Index Problem, Duplicate Content). Different Target Engines. Languages / localization (Right to left, Double Byte Character Set), Tools (multi-lingual), Domain / Subdomain, Hosting, Link building.
Leverage Templates for Scale: Maximize reach across the organization & globe. Focus on top level templates (optimize the templates when developed, ensure the optimal elements are pulled into the template correctly).
Barriers to getting a global site indexed: Popups can’t be indexed. Pull-down country maps can’t be crawled. Restrictive Javascript for language detection. Restrictive robots.txt and meta robots.
Country Detection Methods: Top level of domain, IP of server/host, detected language. Language Detection: Most engines detect top 3 languages automatically. 93% of European searchers restrict to language. Engines using Searcher IP detection to present local relevant content.
Geotargeting for Google: Google Webmaster Tools
Fixing Location & Language Barriers: Use correct Meta language tags. Use Correct Character Set Meta Tags.
Link Architecture: Link Equity is the amount of positive value your website receives from the totally of links or votes for your content from internal and external sources which is the foundation of Google’s scoring algorithm.
Localization Challenges: Languages (different spellings, different meanings). Currenties, Metrics, Address, Local Legal Requirments (Business & License Information, Hours & Locations, Return Policies).
Keyword Research. Don’t force US keywords on the local office. Don’t Translate English Keywords. Plurals, Accents, Spelling Variations. Cheap translation is just cheap translation. Translators aren’t optimizers…many don’t use the Internet. Few translators understand keyword research & integrate keyword research into their process. Review basic optimization techniques with team…teach them to understand key techniques and concepts. Help copywriters combine search techniques with marketing copy. Maintain keyword prominence and density. Often substitute words and phrases “it, our product, we”. Understand “correct word” isn’t always “optimal word”.
Ad Copy – Localize. Use titles and descriptions (messages , offers) that are appealing to local market. Check local competitors ads to make sure your ads are competitive.
Global PPC Management Tools: Search Engines have best global bid tools. Few tools work with double byte keywords.
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.