When it comes down to run multilingual sites a number of issues arise. You need to have a truly multinational staff to be able to deal with all the intricacies that International marketing, local internet legislation or simply cultural nuances, come with it.

Being organised is key, so there are three initial steps to take if you want to target a foreign market with your website:

1. Assesing the market (keyword research, available payment methods in the target market, legislation hurdles,  competition analysis, etc)
2. Planning a local strategy, ideally being flexible enough to customise it for that market, not just rolling out your native market one into it.
3. Implementation and optimization

Assesing the market

Assesing the market is going to require some local knowledge. Every niche has its own peculiarities regardless of culture of language (for example weight loss will mainly be a female dominated demographics whereas videogames will focus on young males) however, when you want to dig deeper into the local differences you will need someone with certain knowledge of it. You can go the expensive way, and commision a full market research, or you can just bring a language student in and teach them how to do it. In any case you will need a local.

This local person doesn’t need to be a trained Internet marketer. You can teach keyword research to someone in 15 minutes. Once they have done the keyword research they can apply it to the translation of the site, making sure that they will use the keywords that are being used by their compatriots while searching.

Once the keywords and the general usability of the translated copy has been assessed, taking a look at the competitors that are ranking in that query space in the most popular local search engine (it could be a local version of Google or a different engine alltogether, like Naver, Baidu or Yandex) will not be difficult. Teaching them what to look at in the competition analysis, both onpage or offpage is essential, or you can just ask them to gather the data, take some notes about the content of the competing sites and let a senior SEO make sense of it.

Planning a local strategy

As mentioned before you will need to map your strategy with the local search engines and their characteristics. If you want to optimise for the Russian market, and therefore for the local engine Yandex, you will need to put an emphasis on massive link building. If you want to target Brazil, a content strategy will take you far, because of the lack of properly optimised content in that market. Those are all optimisation peculiarities that you will need to find out about, either reading blogs in English written by specialists in those markets, or getting your intern to read the local blogs and sources and debrief you.

Implement and Optimize

Armed with your keyword research, your market assesment and your local optimisation tricks, now you can flesh out the localised content, taking into account all the research you have done.

After that, usual promotion techniques will be carried out. It will be a slower process that with your native market but the learning process will allow you to be able to improve in the future.

The usual question I get asked when someone was to undertake a truly international web project is how to be truly global. Are there any multilingual seo guidelines to follow? What are the multilingual search best practices?

From my experience, both in-house and on the agency side, there is not one-strategy-fits-all multilingual seo standards. The question that usually arises is: how to be truly global? In my mind,  there are a number of things you can do to internationalise your business through the web. These are some ideas:

• Create a multi language website and undertake a thorough process of multilingual seo
• Launch an International PPC campaign with or without localised landing pages
• Lay out a global PR strategy by using native agencies or liaising with a multinational firm
• Tie all up with a good global analytics package, that can support different character sets

However, if someone were to ask me for a simple “step by step” tutorial on multilingual seo, to get things started quickly, I would go down to the basics. Without having nailed down these basis, any other, more sophisticated endeavours can be futile otherwise. So let’s get started with that:

Website Geolocation

In order to target a specific market in a specific language the site needs to be deemed local enough by the Search Engines. Google and other search engines have been giving us some tools lately that help to overcome this issue, however the signals that these tools provide might not be strong enough for a site to rank in a local version of the search engine. The website geolocalisation checklist would be:

• Country specific local domains terminations (TLDs). Local domain terminations are a very strong signal to indicate that a site is targeted to a particular national audience. Matt Cutts recently created a video where he explains what I knew all along: CCTLds are the strongest signal for rankings in local search engines.
• Define geographic location via Google Webmaster tools. One of the most effective of the geotargeting tools I was mentioning above, could be to set up geographic location on Webmaster Tools. This will give Google a strong signal about whatyour target audience is. However, this only applies to Google, neglecting the local search engines that sometimes have big share markets.  The Russian search engine Yandex, http://webmaster.yandex.com/, and Baidu http://open.baidu.com/, the chinese main search engine, both have similar tools.

• Local hosting. There is little evidence to prove that hosting a site in the target country helps to improve rankings for those local versions of the search engines.  If the web page domain is a neutral TLDs (.com, .org, etc) and the site hasn’t set up a geographic location on Google Webmaster Tools, search engines might IP reverse lookup the site to find out what the server location is and hence determine geographic bias. However, in my experience I have never seen any particular advantage that would justify the, sometimes, huge cost that entails.
• Country specific inbound linking campaign and PR. In my experience, all the previous signals can be surpassed by a healthy local link profile. Reason being, that is the signal which is more difficult to manipulate and shape. In order to get links from local TLDs to your new localised site you will need the assistance of a local link expert or to be able to engage in a PR campaign that will attract links naturally. Some foreign markets are not very sophisticated at SEO and it could be difficult to get links.  A local PR Strategy can help but always trying to go beyond just sending press releases through local wires. There is a need to create content with optimised localised text, syndicate to local image and video news , tap blogs and forums , etc. For all this, you will need a native speaker to help you.

These are some of the most significant signals that Google and other search engines will look at when it comes down to determine local intent for a particular site.  As part of these multilingual SEO best practices series, we will talk about optimising multilingual templates and undertaking local PR and link building campaigns.

1. Email Marketing.Top 10 tips of how email can help SEO:
   1. People share content with email, much more than social media (80%). Make friends with the CRM guys (if you are reading, you know who you are : ) ).
   2. Make capturing email addresses a priority
   3. Identify social media, users and influencers
   4. Target social end user with unique content
   5. Publish your newsletter to Twitter & Facebook
   6. Provide a newsletter archive either on your website or outside domain
   7. Use Email surveys and analytics to get a better understanding of your users
   8. Email can help you to convert visitors into buyers
   9. Email can help conversion (look at multitouch reports to see the impact of email in the bottom line)
2. Conversion rate optimisation. Top 10 tips on CRO:
   1. Make a plan:
      • Research and analysis (“why are people not converting”?)
      • Brainstorm solutions
      • Develop + text
      • Review and Expand
   2. Use your treasure map.
      • Determine the products or areas that make most money
      • Look at the main landing pages
      • Set up funnels
   3. Guerrilla usability testing.
   4. Survey customers
      • What concerns did you have before booking?
      • Why did you choose to buy from us?
      • Would you buy from us again?
   5. Address objections head on
   6. Design and automated salesman
      • How would you sell face to face?
      • Use the same language
      • Compare the online buying process to the offline buying process?
   7. Optimise the decision process
   8. Start a swipe file
   9. Failed tests also win, learn from your mistakes.
   10. Get links talking about CRO

Q & A

Colour for buttons? Not a big deal

Proximity to Call to Action.

Surveys: pop ups or static? Both.

3. Design and SEO. Lots of stuff here but particularly interesting in:

• Infographics and design. How:
  • Decide a colour pallet
  • Include graphs and silhouette
  • One font fo title and another(clearer in body)
• Development
  • CSS3. Border radius, box shadows, font face
  • Typekit for fonts, investments
  • Html 5. Easier video embedding, hooks to video events & atttributes; easier audio embedding
  • Canvas and SVG. Starting to be crawled by Search Engines

  When can be used? Problems with browser compatibility.Check your users browsers.

Sam Crocker did deliver a great presentation at SMX advanced, looking forward to this one.

Why, competition analysis?

• Defence vs offence axis. Monitor SERPs, replicate competitor links, get a link from competitors, etc

The goal: leadership and defend what you have but the attack is how you win

1. Competitor stalking.
   • Yahoo pipes. Using feeds and filter by keyword getting an output for you to see
   • Undisclosable
   • Watching your competitors subdomains: inurl:*.hostelbookers -inurl:www
   • Find staging sites. Search  dev.*.com
2. Turn defensive tactics into offensive.
   • Step 1: Find 404′s on competitor site
   • Step 2: Find who is linking to these pages
   • Step 3: De-dupe and outreach
   • Step 4: Track changes in a competitor
   • Step 5:Competitor downtime. Track it, if it is down for long enough, contact the people linking to them.
   • Step 6: Competitor testing: Website analytics system profiler. Firebug. Go on incognito mode and see the changes
   • Step 7: Speed. Webpagetest.
3. Defend.

• Be careful with staging sites.
• Keep your eye on job boards, LinkedIn and patent applications to see what competitors are doing.

As usual Sam doesn’t disappoint, great presentation.

Q & A

What would you recommend to irritate competitor stalking? Not much ethical boundaries about this kind of stalking.

Dynamic IP scraping: how to avoid it?

Will Crtichlow talks about one of my favourite topics, reports and data visualization.

So, what is the point of reports?

• To find answers
• To cause change
• To build a relationship

1. Finding answers. Reports to find solutions to problems. Digging into data and showing actionable insight is the sexyest thing in a report.

Ranking reports are good for diagnosing issues not for monthly reporting. Benchmarking is the key for this kind of reporting, search engine visibility as a metric, Richard Baxter’s post.

2. Causing Change. Will recommends a data visualization source.  Tufte is one of the gurus of data visualization. Tips:
   • Spark links in Excel
   • Small Multiple data points
   • Stacked data is difficult to comprehend
   • Boss reports: Quantitative scale
   • Conclusions: Remove chartjunk, story or analysis, long terms trends, create context with data visualisation (don’t use pie charts)
3. Build a relationship.
   

Tips:

• Use emails no reports for building relationships
• Give away the puch line in the title and main paragraph. The rest of the report might not be read
• Use colour coding to show progress in projects

What would Will like to do?

• Monitoring, alerts & data warehousing
• Data presentation skills
• Getting better at: weekly (actions, blockers, changes), Monthly( summary, efforts, etc)

Q & A

What tool would you have ideally that doesn’t exist yet? New referrers, new keywords.

Ranking 7th in Google.co.uk for Davide Corradi

My good friend Davide Corradi dared me to rank for his name without using any of the typical on-page optimisation techniques we are all aware of.  His reason to do this, was his surprise when in my previous post, Google ranking factors distribution graph,  I stated that on page optimisation factors accounted only for a 15% of rankings.

How did I do this? Well, it just took me one hour. My friend Davide is a great SEO, but all the web properties and social profiles where his name appears in, lack a good number of different domains linking to these properties with right anchor text. My challenge was to make the test page to rank for “Davide Corradi” without using the word in any of the highly scoring areas that all SEOs know about: title, headings, alt tags, bolded and italic words, etc. After creating the page, which took me literally 1 minutes, since it hasn’t got any content, I linked to it from the home page of my blog, and added this page to the blogroll to get an additional sitewide link with right anchor text. Internal linking is not enough to rank for a keyword that has nothing to do with your topical theme, but it is a good start to tell Google that this page was going to be important in the site architecture.

After this, I decided to fit a few links with “Davide Corradi” as the text link, in the first paragraph of other web properties that I created for a previous test. These web properties have no PageRank and almost nof links to them, they have nothing to do with the topics associated with  “Davide Corradi” (pizza, pasta, rock music, and bad dancing : ) , but I knew that as long as they were cached, it should be enough.

Additionally, I got a couple of links from two more established pages, nothing too high in terms of PageRank, but with enough authority to give it a bit of a push.

I did a couple of things more that didn’t work. Like creating a keyword rich blog pointing to that page. However, this blog hasn’t been cached, so It has no impact on this result at the moment.

In all fairness, we have to be just with Davide because there are a number of things that make this test flawed:

• “Oscar Carreras” is a much more competitive key phrase than “Davide Corradi”. A previous president of the chamber of commerce in Argentina is called “Oscar Carreras”, and there are more results competing for that query
• My blog is older than Davide’s and has more link equity than his. Authority factors of the page being inherited from the domain, were a big part of my ranking distribution factors post, as part of the query independent link metrics bit within the graph. That kind of proves my hypothesis, but being right doesn’t make the test juster.
• The problem with on-page optimisation is that is a one-off activity, and you can tweak it as much as you want or increasing the keyword density or even trying some semantic techniques (synonyms, related keywords, etc), but in the end there is not much else you can do. Off-page optimisation is a never ending process and even hitting the first place doesn’t make you stop. Your competitors will keep getting links and overtake you if you stop

In conclusion, this was an interesting test, and I wonder if I could get the page to rank first for “Davide Corradi” if I keep working on it. I didn’t use any of the numerous tools in the link builder tool belt, such as directories submissions, article syndication or even requesting links. If this page hadn’t been in my blog, I could have gone more “black hat” on it and use a few shady link generation techniques. That would have made it rank first very quickly but it would have probably be banned straight away. I also wonder if removing the only instance of the key phrase “Davide Corrradi”, only words in the cited page other than the boilerplate ,would make any difference; and if only with the power of the links, with no keyword match within the copy, the page could also rank for the query, the same way that Google did for “caffeine” in the past.  I could have also exposed the page to social media outlets like Twitter or Facebook to see if the social graph algorithms had some impact on rankings, as I hinted in my previous post too, and as my friend Davide did, but I didn’t think that could strictly be considered off-page techniques, so I ruled it out.

A few takeaways:

• Local domains don’t matter. My blog is hosted in the US and has a geographically neutral TLD (.org). The rankings are the same for Google.co.uk or Google.com .
• Google Caffeine infrastructure update is amazing. My page was created last night, around 22. Around 11 AM today it was already ranking 11. It took it around 20 hours to reach the seventh position. This couldn’t be happening if Google hadn’t computed the links I created so quickly. This was the competitive advantage of Mr Corradi, he only needed Google to index his page in order to rank, for me it was essential that Google would index the rest of the pages and calculate the value of the links and pass them on to the page relevance score for the query “Davide Corradi”. We, SEOs, have little excuses now and can’t tell our clients/stakeholders that it will take a few months for our changes to be seen and computed by Google.  Nowadays, the big G crawls the web every day.
• Anchor text is essential. My links wouldn’t pass any authority metrics test. They are coming from PR0 pages with very little inbound links to them.

I wonder if Mr Corradi will buy me a beer now. : )

Inspired by Seomoz Whiteboard Friday, I decided to create my new graph of what i think are the main Google ranking factors and its distribution in order of importance. Be free to chip in and add the debate.

Google Ranking Factors Distribution Graph

Unless you have been hiding under a rock or you have been making extra money in the stock market and got a fat bonus and retired to the Bahamas, as an SEO you might have heard about Google rolling out an algorithmic change based on personalized search.

There has been lots of articles around the topic, explaining how this algo update would work and what impact it would have on SERPs, but what does all this mean for us as SEOs?

For starters, we shouldn’t panic; personalization is likely going to only have an impact on rearranging top 10 results. In the post on Google Blog where the announcement was made, the example the engineers were giving was mainly based on CTRs (Click through rates) on a host(computer) level. Talking about it in simple terms, if your favourite hotel aggregator appears fourth for the query “hotels” and you keep clicking on that result disregarding the first three, during the next session is likely that Google will rearrange the results to show your apparently favourite site in the first spot.

So far, so good, if you were not in the top 5 for your selected query, personalization will have very little impact. You have a lot of work to do and the usual SEO work will need to be done to get to that privileged position.

If you are in the top 5 positions then things start to get interesting. Firstly, brand awareness will have a significant impact on CTRs. If your brand is well known, people will be more likely to click on your result and therefore the cookie hosted in the user computer will track those clicks and apply that data in the future. Marketing channels that seemed bound to die could be very useful to improve brand awareness and therefore CTR. There has been a lot of debate about the impact of display on branded and unbranded search, and ways to improve brand recognition, Social Media, display advertising, offline, etc, might now have more impact on results that they ever did.

Is that fair? Probably, not. Not only big brands have already been benefited by the Vince algorithm , but also they have deeper pockets and can engage in all these channels and reach more people. Not trying to be cynical here, but Google changes on the way they lay out paid ads or the way they consistently shrug off doubtful link profiles for big brands, makes me think that the companies that spend the most on Paid Search will benefit from more reach and more impact. I don’t imply that Google in particular, and search engines in general, will be purposefully biasing results towards big brands, but the algorithmic changes benefit big brands more on the whole.

I am getting off the point though. What I believe is going to be important now, is CTRs on organic results. In the past, when personalization wasn’t kicking in, search engines couldn’t use that data for the algorithm because it could have been easily spammable by click bots, but narrowing the dataset down on a host level (data tracked by the cookie), CTR suddenly gets at the top of your priorities.

This means that SEOs are going to need to work much more on how they present the results snippets to the audience. Titles and descriptions will need to become more compelling and stand out some way. Big brands might not want to experiment with it (at the end of the day, people tend to click more on their results) but not so big brands might try to play with ways to encourage clicking. I wouldn’t rule out SEOs testing the use of capitals in title tags, or special characters not seen too often (^ ¢ £ ¤ ¥ § ¬ ° ± º ø þ) or more marketing copy like copy using words like offers, deals, free, etc. I don’t think this will make results more relevant, it will probably make snippets very spammy like, but again SEOs don’t make the rules, Search Engines do. Additionally, these new ways to write titles will take up useful real estate from the 68 characters blue link and will make obligatory to target only one primary keyword per title. Additionally, link building with rich anchor text will be even more important because keyword prominence and playing with phrase based optimization will become more difficult in a more reduced title tag space.

So to sum up, these are my takeaways on SEO for personalized search:

• Ranking within the top 5 will be key in order to take advantage of personalization triggers. SEOs will have to work harder & quicker.
• Vince algorithm will work in favour of big brands that will have already a competitive edge
• CTR on organic results will be crucial. Factors such as brand awareness, multi-channel reach (display, social media, paid search, off-line), and snippet multi-variate testing will have to be taken into account.
• Link building will become even more important. Firstly to get into the first top results and secondly to make up for the lack of content based SEO techniques.

What do you think?

Now it has been solved but it was funny to see Google New Zealand to rank first for “Google Ireland” for a couple of weeks and “google.ie”. Even Bing got it wrong.

We have to admit it was a difficult query : )