512-879-6366
For some businesses, it may be necessary to have a global online presence, meaning they want their website being found on search engines around the globe. Even for small businesses in the United States, the necessity to reach Mexican, Canadian, or British audiences is a necessity. With different languages, cultures, and even technological barriers to overcome, this can be a pretty daunting tasks. Here are a few tips, taken from SearchEngineLand’s very helpful guide, on how to better optimize your SEO campaign to reach global audiences.
1. It’s not All about Just Translation -Localization, the process of turning your website or product accessible to a certain country/language, stems deeper than simply changing the language. While there are many automated systems out there (ex. Google Translate), the results are usually very poor and can hurt your marketing strategy. Straight translation can often cause confusing content in other languages, not to mention the variety of different cultural influences that go into languages. Spanish websites directed towards south americans may have completely different meanings, sayings, and even grammar, versus those directed towards the Spain.
2. Social Media still Works Overseas – Don’t just restrict your social media usage to your main country, Europeans and Asians have been shown to be very interactive when it comes to social media. In addition, by interacting with consumers in different countries, you’re engaging in highly valuable market research. The feedback your social media team can get out of these interactions can allows you to customize each localized campaign in order to improve your business globally.
3. Use TLDs - Buying up specific TLDs for your country, like .co.uk, .es, and .fr allows you to better protect your brand and presence in that country. As soon as you break into a different market and gain some sort of traction, you can be almost guaranteed that someone else will buy your domain name and use it to their advantage. Buy them before they can. If you plan to use the domains separately and hosted individually on servers, make sure to assign geo-targetting via Google webmaster tools in order to tell Google where the site is intended to be seen in the google ‘universe’.
4. Research Website Layouts for Each Culture – Make sure to research the browsing tendencies of each country before designing landing pages and websites for them. For example, it’s been shown that the Japanese market actually enjoys reading more information before engaging in a service or website. This is in contrast to American browsing habits, where bullet points, headlines and small paragraphs are shown to convert better.
5. Use Specific Country Folder and Redirect Accordingly – It may be too expensive for some businesses to have multiple domains and websites hosted across multiple servers around the world, so a good option to fix duplicate content and multiple localized sites is to create sub-folders on your domain for each country (ex. /uk, /espana) and have your localized TLDs remap to those sub-folders. Within the domain, you may be able to use canonical tags for any duplicate content you’re using across same language countries. It will also allow you to share the appropriate link juice across your domain and country sites, helping you rank better.
