Eli Schwartz — December 8, 2017 — December 8, 2017
After a couple years hiatus while I lived in Singapore, I was once again privileged to speak at Pubcon Las Vegas. I had been attending and later speaking at Pubcon for nearly a decade, and I can say with certainty that if you can only attend one digital marketing conference a year, Pubcon is the one to go to. Pubcon has the most wide ranging and helpful content, and year after year I leave the conference with notebooks full of new ideas and things to try.
I had the distinct privilege of participating in a panel on international SEO alongside Ira Kates from FanXchange and Patrick Stox from IBM. The panel covered the full range of building the foundation for an international SEO campaign up to reporting. My role in the panel was to set the stage for when it is time to build out an SEO campaign and how to get that campaign off the ground.
In the panel, I defined international SEO as the process of building SEO campaigns for an audience that is outside one’s usual locale. In general, search is very personal and “Google suggest” results will differ between every city, and not surprisingly, this is even more exaggerated with different countries.
As one can see, suggested queries for Netflix will vary significantly between various countries. In the US people search for “Netflix sign in” while in the UK they look for “Netflix login”. Additionally, many people even search with a country suffix like Netflix UK or Netflix Malaysia.
As I shared, the reason international SEO matters is because nuance is marketing is critical. No one wants to pull out their credit card and buy if the website seems off to them. Language and images have to convey a sense of authenticity to users. It is vital to really know your audience: Know what kind of devices people use, know how they search the internet, and how fast bandwidth is their country. With that knowledge you can build or modify effective campaigns for your international audience.
Once you are bought into the need to do international SEO it is time to dig in and start conducting keyword research for the SEO campaigns. When it comes to keywords for international SEO, getting the right set of words right is even more essential than traditional English SEO. Google’s international results lack the depth and advanced filtering that we have come to expect to see in US results. For example, common synonyms like “vehicle”, “auto”, “automobile”, “car” in Google English will always surface similar results, but in other languages Google’s algorithm may not be aware that they are all a search for the same concept. Choosing the keyword with the most search volume is crucial. (Note: due to changes in how Google localizes results, a VPN must be used to see actual international search results.)
When it comes to building your actual international SEO keyword list, here are my favorite tools:
• Google’s Keyword Planner – does a great job of allowing user conduct keyword research on specific languages and countries.
• Wikipedia – this is a great resource for finding important words related to your product or site. Anything that is crosslinked or appears in the footer should be considered a critical word
• Ahrefs – this is one of my favorite SEO tools and they have some very powerful international features for finding keywords and potential competitor.
• Finally, one of the best ways to find keywords is to discover the keywords real users are searching. Keywordtool.io scrapes Google suggest as well as other platforms like Amazon and YouTube for words that actual users have searched. These suggested keywords are great fodder for keywords in an SEO campaign.
Once you have keywords you are ready to embark on actual optimization. As Google is less robust in foreign languages use those keywords carefully. Best practices that went out of vogue a decade ago can be useful in international SEO. In international SEO you should pay attention to things like adding singulars and plurals, keyword density and even building Q&A for user generated content.
However you build your SEO campaigns, don’t forget to focus on what is important. It doesn’t matter what you have translated if a native speaker thinks your content offering is weak and unprofessional. You might be successful in generating the search engine traffic, but that won’t lead to conversions down the road. Always keep the focus on user experience.
To see the actual slides I presented have a look here:
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