Ensuring your website gets noticed in a foreign market can be tough work. Local competition, linguistic barriers and cultural differences can all contribute to the success or failure of your website’s international reach.
Here are three top tips to ensuring success in the competitive global marketplace:
- First and foremost, search engines from Google, through to Baidu in China, to Yandex in Russia, prefer local. In order to do well in competitive markets you need to analyse both your local and global competition in each target market. For example, some search engines prefer sites hosted locally, with country-specific domain names.
- Don’t base keyword research on translations of English, either for PPC or SEO. Oban recently found that there was a ‘perfect’ German translation of a technology term but it had only 140 searches a month on it. OBAN Multilingual’s German team identified a term that was actually being used which had over 40,000 searches a month.
- Social Media can be a great marketing tool; however, it is used very differently across the globe. In China QQ.com is by far the most popular social networking site, whereas our good old friends Facebook and Twitter are banned. To maximise the effects of social media marketing, make sure that your social media strategy is specific to the region and market you are targeting.
When it comes to taking your website to a foreign market, the one key fact to always remember is that localisation is the most important part of international search engine optimisation and marketing. Every country uses the internet and search differently, and the differences can be huge. By researching the culture, the language, and the political and religious practices of a region, as well as the internet trends, businesses will be able to develop an effective and successful marketing strategy for the market they are aiming for.
Author: Greig Holbrook, Oban Multilingual: International SEO
Thanks for such a great information….!