We already talked about website localisation in this blog and it is a topic that I would like to revisit since it is a not very talked about issue in the SEO arena, and it is a huge sticking point for most sites I get to analyse in my daily routine, which seem not to be able to get it right.

Localisation is not translation, involves taking a product and making it linguistically and culturally appropriate to the target market. The fact that some SEOs settle for direct translations when they have to target local markets never ceases to amaze me.  These are the same experts that advocate to use the language of the customer for the English copy, and strongly encourage to make keyword research the cornerstone of the optimisation campaign, and are very sophisticated about it. I even heard from some SEO gurus that using the Google Translate feature will help you target local markets. What the h***? It is a very Anglo-Saxon, narrow minded way of thinking.

It is understandable why these SEO experts try to downplay the complexity of applying SEO across different markets without losing sight of the corporative message. They don’t have the knowledge, and proper localisation can be quite expensive. However, if done right, you can get much quicker results than for US/UK sites and much better conversion, since the competition is less fierce. In addition, sometimes there is no need to go for a site wide localisation if you are not sure about how a specific market will welcome your product. Multilingual Paid Search is the answer. PPC can be a great way to identify opportunities in different markets and you can test the effectiveness of localised keywords before rushing into a complete website localisation.

Your options could be:

• Localise and adapt existing PPC campaigns. The English terms would be seeds to use as a reference to find out the specific local keywords utilised in the specific market you want to target
• Localise one of a few key pages and use them as landing pages. You will be able to determine conversion rates and assess wether or not the copy and the keywords selected are actually appealing to the target culture.
• Localise conversion driven landing pages and bid for more transactional terms. This is a cost effectiveness tactic although takes out of the equation important assets such as brand awareness or informative driven queries. Targeting only keywords and landing pages with high purchasing intent will get quick ROI and let you prioritise spend.

The main challenges to encounter while localising for Paid Search is character limitation and proper landing page localisation. Some marketers try to drive traffic with high volume, localised keywords but pointing them to English pages. They get discouraged when the bounce rate goes to the roof and the Cost Per Click is even more expensive than in the US. Well, no surprise here; they are going against the basic rules of Google Quality Score with no correlation among the keywords that trigger the ad and the landing page content. Not to mention that people who search in a specific language will almost only convert in the same language.

Some factorss to take into account:

• Google characters restrictions for single bytes languages: western countries
  • Headline 25 characters
  • Body 1st line 35 characters
  • Body 2nd line 35 characters
  • Display url 35 characters
• Double byte languages: Eastern languages ( f.e Japanese, Chinese, Korean)
  • Headline 12 characters
  • Body 1st line 17 characters
  • Body 2nd line 17 characters
  • Display url 35 characters

The main PPC localisation challenges have to do with the different idiosyncrasy of specific languages. English copy doesn’t flow the same than Latin based languages nor Germanic. English tends to be 30-40% shorter than roman languages, the specific character restrictions dictated by search networks make impossible to use machine translation tools, some languages lose characters in punctuation and currencies need to adapt to the local market.

In order to carry out an effective localisation you will need linguist and internet marketers to abide by Google restriction rules  and that can take into account search engine optimised landing page copy and place industry specific keywords prominently in the key  page areas: title, headings and copy . No machine translation can help, it can actually make the process more long winded, so the need for the use of professional linguists experienced in localisation is paramount.

And remember, give them time to be creative. If you find difficult to create copy for your ads in English, make it compliant and compelling enough for your users, the process of adapting that copy into other languages is ten times more complex. On the bright side, making your product reachable worldwide makes these efforts highly profitable.

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