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

For numerous clients sites that have been trying to address a more international audience we have discovered that disparities of rankings between Google.com and Google.co.uk are very common, even if the sites in question have a British IP address. Ranking better in Google.com for sites hosted in UK is a kind of glitch not unusual and traditionally UK sites have been disappearing inappropriately for Google.co.uk top rankings in benefit of Google.com. The algorithms are slightly different and the language commonalty doesn’t help. There is an interesting case of a .co.uk site about a small village in England that ranks much better in Google.com than in Google.co.uk despite the neutral domain code termination (.org) . After a deluge of complaints from British webmasters about this, Matt Cutts from Google had to lay out an official response that underlined the importance of the local domain.

We expererienced this very problem with a B2B client that was ranking very highly for very (VERY) competitive keywords in Google.com and nowhere near the top 50 in Google.co.uk. Being a company based in London, that was certainly hurting their revenue and they couldn’t work out why, since the domain (although a .com) was hosted in UK.

We suggested a few guidelines and a two-pronged strategy consisting of on-page/site wide additions and off-page tactics. We predicted that those changes would affect the geo-targeting in a reasonable period of time but the tactics took a while to make an effect. It is likely, and there is a buzz in Google groups about it, that google is working on tweaking their G-UK algo to fix this problem but we shouldn’t count with it.

On site suggestions

1. Use an address within the country . Register to local business center. The caveat is that the client didn’t have a physical location in UK. We suggested to use the location of their virtual office in Central London as a point of reference.

2. Use localised meta-data  for country, language and geographical location on the site pages:
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Language” content=”EN-GB”>
<meta name=”country” content=”United Kingdom”>
<meta name=”geo.country” content=”GB” />
<meta name=”geo.position” content=”51.52171-0.14228″ /> The 51.52171-0.14228(latitude;longtitude)
<meta name=”ICBM” content=”51.52171-0.14228″ />

These meta tags haven’t proved to be necessary to geolocalise sites but it was worth trying.

3. Use HTML address tags in the site pages. The content in the address tag will show up on the page .

<ADDRESS>Client address.<BR />
London Post Code, United Kingdom.</ADDRESS>

Again there is no conclusive evidence of this making a difference but some people had reported good results so it was worth trying.

Off-site suggestions

We analysed thoroughly the client linking profile and found out that only less than a hundred unique .co.uk domains were linking to the site out of the 15000 links that Yahoo indexed. Having more links from UK based sites should logically improve rankings for Google.co.uk as well as reinforce localisation.  We launched a specific link building campaign targeting UK sites and using anchor text with “UK” as the very first keyword. f.e “UK [client niche] services“.The idea was to emphasize the location, UK, to see if that could have an impact on geolocalisation issues.

Conclusions

After a few months the site was ranking for 68 new entries within the top 200 results, improvements in almost all the main keywords of rankings for Google.co.uk and an increase of 130% more traffic coming from Google with respect to the previous year. It is hard to say which of all these changes had a more significant impact but in our opinion submitting to Google Maps is a must in order to improve local search and geolocalisation issues and the impact of local links can’t be overlooked either.

Any additional ideas you could add in order to fix geolocalisation issues in your local search engines results?

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