Social Media, social behaviour in the web in general, has arguably been the most significant phenomenon in the Internet world in 2008. Google zeitgeist compiles annually some of the highlights from Google searches around the globe and it is not a surprise to see the supremacy of Social Networks within the list of the top 10 countries with the highest number of Internet users.

Social networking in 2008 has spread like fire worldwide but the most interesting factor to highlight is that almost half the list of the most searched social media sites are based outside of the U.S.

Let’s take a look at the Social media penetration in China. Within the top 10 most popular searches we can find online sharing video channels such as Youtube, Youku or Tudou. We can see that video marketing techniques could be very effective in that market.

In India, Youtube, Facebook, Orkut (which is the most popular Social networking site there) populate both the list of most searched and fastest rising queries. In Brazil, Orkut is the most popular query rivalling with football related information and online games.

Interestingly enough, European countries with high number of internet users behave very differently in the popularity of social media sites. In Germany, Facebook shows up within the top 10 of fastest rising terms but also Yasni, a site to find out about personal social media data, Jappy, another local social network, as well as StudiVZ and Schuler VZ. However, Italians seem to adopt facebook as their one and only social network and although French rate Facebook and their local social medias source Skyrock as very popular, what really dominates the top 10 are music related sites. On the other side of the spectrum, Spain has 8 social media related sites in the top 10 of fastest rising terms in 2008.

In social media, importance of early adopters is paramount since they are the force that make the sites go viral. After a year when the role of social media has started to be accepted as a window of opportunity to tap into the Internet audience in their points of communication, we can say without risk that the Internet is now the Social media Internet, and that despite cultural disparities and degrees of adoption, the Internet world is shifting to more collaborative ways of communication. Companies like Facebook have seen the opportunity, and plenty of other local sites have got on the bandwagon of social media interaction, catering for the needs of their local audience.

Will 2009 be the time of the monetisation attempts of all those companies? Will many of them be weeded out by the ubiquitous Facebook or they will survive with their local approach? I will keep you posted.

Last year there was a big controversy about what qualifies as Advanced SEO. This is not the aim of this post but in my opinion Social Media Marketing,  high level Information Retrieval understanding,  analytics based SEO analysis, local and mobile search and ultimately International SEO are the cornerstones of advanced search marketing.

As in any new more advanced SEO disciplines that are catching on, lots of dilettante practitioners try to capitalise on the popularity of the new concepts. That is the candid version of the story. The more harsh and probably honest version is that plenty of snake oil salesmen and scammers are starting to target the multilingual arena.

There are several signs to try to spot when it comes down to separating the wheat from the chaff in the international search field. Those are some of the most conspicuous :

1. Translation companies doing website localisation and SEO. Nothing again translation companies. They have their market and they work very well for legal documents, business translation and the like. However, translating is not localising.  In order to localise a website in other language you need to be a native speaker first and an Internet marketer second. More than translating, localising is creative copywriting, requires keyword research abilities and on-page SEO expertise. It is the similar issue that a few years ago happened with webdesign companies trying to get on the SEO wagon. It didn’t work very well.
2. Empty promises. “We promise High SERP rankings”. One of this translation companies offering Multilingual SEO approached us recently asking us for help. Obviously they didn’t have the know-how to do things by themselves so they were pursuing a partnership. When we mentioned the limitations of any SEO work they turned around in a rage mentioning the sentence above. Anyone who has been in this industry for a while knows that you can’t guarantee rankings.With personalized search more and more ingrained in search engines algorithms and increasing competition for generic terms, SEO is a different discipline now that it was 2 years ago. Vacuous promises are not only deceiving but irresponsible. Funnily enough, this particular company’s site was being outranked by one of our clients for the main keywords targeted by them on the main page, keywords that were not even our main goal for our client. It is clear that some companys come “talk the talk” but can they “walk the walk”?
3. Lack of basic insight about the international markets. There is a company in the US that has been lately strongly focusing on promoting their multilingual search services.  The on-page overoptimisation of multilingual seo related key phrases is sometimes hard to digest on their blog posts. However, keyword stuffing is not their main problem.  Stating things like that consumers speak English in Spain but shop in Spanish is gross ignorance and makes me feel embarrased for them.
   As a Spanish native myself, I can guarantee that very little people speak English even within business environments, as anybody going to Spain for holidays can certify, and although we claim to be fluent in our CVs very few people has basic conversational English skills. This kind of misleading information coming from an allegedly expert in the subject matter can harm more than ignorance when it comes down to targeting international markets.
4. Lack of basic International SEO knowledge. A SEO company offering multilingual services in the UK, that recently got a major deal with a big american company to provide their services in different languages, mentioned in its corporative blog, not too long ago, that to have a local domain name and local IP address in order to list on local search engines wasn’t important. Vanessa Fox, previous Google Engineer, explains very clearly how search engines determine location relevant search results, putting at the top of her list country specific local domains. This is something that is consensual belief for all the experts in International search engines matters, which leaves this firm in a very bad place.
5. “We will submit your site to thousands of local search engines”. That is a classic. Not much to mention about that. Run for the hills if that is part of the promotional materials of a multilingual search marketing company.
6. One thousand links and SEO for £100/100€. Multilingual search marketing is difficult. It requires not only general market expertise but also linguistic abilities and insight on search engines and platforms that go beyond Google and Yahoo. If companies in the US charge £750/h for just consultancy add all this additional expertise to the equation. Anyone who claim to be able to optimise and manage multilingual campaigns online for those prices are just going to take your money and run.
7. Local offices worldwide. That is a tough one. Although not being necessarily a bad thing, having to synchronise people from different locations, working cultures, timetables, time zones, different command of the English language, etc is a challenging endeavour.
   Additionally, in order to be able to combine and integrate efforts from different agencies across the world the companies need to make an additional investment if the results are meant to be cohesive enough for the project brand. Having a multilingual, multidisciplinar team under the same roof that can bounce ideas and add different insights is a much more cost effective approach.

There are no standards in the SEO industry and when we dig into more specialised search marketing disciplines the needs for knowing exactly what is value for money is essential if you don’t want to end in the hands of industry hustlers.

If you have any question contact me on twitter on http://twitter.com/oscarcarreras

One of the most important things about last November International Search Summit , was to be able to learn about the special idiosyncrasy of different cultures when it comes down to surfing the Internet. The success on obtaining European rankings might depend on understanding culturally related differences of the country/market targeted.

This proves to be essential when we are planning to enter the Russian market.

Eugene Lomize from Yandex talked on ISS about the Russian Internet audience and its special characteristics:

• Don’t speak, don’t read English
• They don’t trust online communication, prefer direct communication (phone, etc)

He discussed some data about the Russian Internet audience using as source Gallop media:

• Russian Penetration rate. Close to the 45%
• Broadband penetration is improving steadily
• Russian Internet Demographics.  75% of Internet audience is Russia lives in Moscow.

As you should know already, Google is far from being the main search agent in Russia, with Yandex enjoing a comfortable lead. Leading Russian Search engines in 2008 are:

• Yandex. Share has decreased slightly. Audience growing exponentially
• Google.ru
• Mail.ru(using yandex search technology). Steady share. Mail hosting is their main service.
• Rambler. Decreasing as a result of their deal with Google

Russian search advertising market. The Russian Internet advertising market has increased exponentially since 2001when contextual and display advertising started at a similar point but both have evolved very differently:

• Russian Contextual advertising much higher in terms of spend than display ads
• The current economic crisis will see contextual advertising to  increase slowly and display to decrease

Russian Paid search platforms:

• Yandex 60%
• Google 32%
• Begun 9%

There are specific peculiarities with Yandex paid platform. Let´s name some:

• Yandex uses a bid system based in units (unit=30 rub)
• Begun bid system is also based in rubles
• Minimum order yandex 300 rub. Above 21000 rub you get a personal manager(also English speaker) that will help you with keywords, bidding, etc, but not landing pages. Begun Minimum order is 140 rub
• Editorial moderation. (alcohol, tobacco, medicine). Yandex is very strict in its policy about this kind of products; Begun however is much more tolerant.

To sum up, Yandex seems to have been able to lure both Russian marketers and Internet users. My explanation would be their ability to understand Russian language much better than Google, or have shaped their algorithm around the nuances of the slavic languages. Although Google keeps growing in Russia, if any company wants to do online business in Russia, or simply raise brand awareness among the countries or Russian confederation, Yandex Direct, Yandex paid service is the tool to use first in order to maximise reach.

If you have any question contact me on twitter on http://twitter.com/oscarcarreras

In this blog we always welcome any data that could shed light about the current status of European SEO and PPC and the International Search Summit gave us very interesting insight about the European Search landscape.

Alex Burmaster from Nielsen online was talking on topline trends, organic paid an secure, and other interesting statistics.

Search Growth:

• Farly good growth in Spain and UK bigger in Italy, 0% in Switzerland
• Time searching : 26% in Uk around 10% in Italy and Spain but still a small amount of time

Organic vs Paid

• CTRs: Bigger in volume in UK and France. 13% paid CTRs(click through rates) in UK, 9 and 7 for Germany and France respectively
• Sectors: Travel, ecommerce, home & fashion in that order for UK and Germany. Main sectors in France is special occasions, travel and automotive
• Outperforming sectors with CTRs for paid search: Insurance, Gifts, Education Careers, Loans, freebies, credit cards. Insurance has more paid clicks than organic

Ctrs

• Sectors: classified goes to 13% CTRs, credit cards only 0.4

Next he procedes to go through European Search Landscape, studying the most popular engines across the main countries.

• Google, Google Image, MSN, Ask, Yahoo
• Ask and Voila decreased the average user time and Voila decresed visitors too although Ask and Trovit grew hugely in unique audience

Mobile Search:

• Biggest increse Spain but less volume, biggest volume IT, UK, FR, DE
• Male dominated more equal in UK
• Age demographics: 35 to 49 main sector in ll the countries. More equal in UK

It was surprising to see that the Italian Market is slightly more developed than UK for Mobile Search. Andy-Atkins Krueger suggested that since Iphone is unlocked in Italian that might have caused a bigger smartphones handset penetration in Italy in comparison with the other top European Markets.

If you have any question contact me on twitter on http://twitter.com/oscarcarreras

The second International Search Summit, held the 20th November in the British Library in London, was mainly focused on Paid Search globally, handling multilingual PPC campaigns internationally, usability for landing pages in different languages, main international agents internationally (quick warning, it is not only Google), and everything related to Multilingual Search Marketing. It was a fantastic way to learn about the European Search sphere, and how the new marketing techniques are starting to permeate the more traditional Marketing scene in Europe and worldwide.

First, Andy Atkins-Kruger, from WebCertain gave a quick lowdown about the windows of opportunities opened when a business want to expand internationally. European Internet statistics were analysed giving specific focus to the countries with more Internet users, FIGS (French, Italian, German and Spanish). Immediately, a throrough review of the main search engines worldwide was undertaken, mentioning Google for the Anglo-Saxon countries, Baidu dominating China, Yandex being predominant in Russia and other minoritary European engines like Seznam, etc.

To sum up Andy goes on about the key tips about Multilingual Search internationally:

• CPCs are lower in Engines different than Google. Baidu is a very good example of this.
• Never translate keywords literally. Those awkard looking translations will not convert in the local markets
• Long tail. The more detailed phrases that people search, Long tail differs in different languages. German has a much longer tail than English or Spanish f.e
• Main factors to take into account for Paid search internationally: keywords, landing pages, campaign structure, buy process, pay system, creatives, etc

Synchronisation is the key to handle International Paid search.

Next is Stephanie Kidder, E-commerce Sales and Marketing Director from Pinnacle, giving a WebCertain client’s perspective on the topic of International Paid Search.

Being a video company that exists in 6 languages with a 58% of traffic from outside of USA, the vital importance of the international paid search is obvious for Stephanie. She talked about the practicalities of doing International Paid Search and working with agencies:

• Revenue and budgets do not take language complexity into account
• Budget constraints
• Different products per country add difficulties to the whole
• Need of extra level of coordination

Website Localisation is the key to manage to reach these international audiences. Stephanie suggests different ways:

• In house: Mother tongue speakers at lower cost but not specialised on Paid search
• Translation agencies. Liberates internal resources but requires extra coordination
• Network of agencies. Local presence and language. Stephanie says that doesn’t work and cites and example of her own experience.
• Specialized agency. Mother tongue marketers who know the industry, costs and advanced coordinations are essentail. More cost effective.

What to expect from agencies:

• Benchmarks, kpis (key performance indexes), goals. Set them up and track them on a regular basis
• Consistency with keywords across countries
• Proactiveness:
• Updates, be involved, changes in a fast pace environment

Stepahnie argues that communication with the assigned agency is key and lays out how to implement it:

• Integrate PPC and SEO even if the agency caters only one of them they need to be consistent
• Flexibility to make changes
• Involve the agencies into the inner marketing campaigns

Stephanie was very pleased with her liaision with WebCertain as a whole and mentioned why:

• Brand terms. Those terms were converting very well
• Strong results in countries with less marketing presence
• SEO and PR to assist improvements
• Focusing on emerging markets

However, not everything is positive. She also talked about the downsides of expanding your products internationally:

• Google issues. Legal problems
• Difficult to generate sales in countries with big competition (germany)
• Non branded terms

Overall, these two presentations were destined to show the low-hanging fruit of International Paid Search, how you can easily target emerging markets for your products without a huge investment in infrastructure and the need of having to deal with different agencies.

If you have any question contact me on twitter on http://twitter.com/oscarcarreras