Whether running a business out of the garage at home in the country or from an office amid the towers of La Défense, over the last few years internet marketing has become an essential tool. What the web does is to allow businesses to reach clients the world over, and at a very reasonable cost compared with offline integration into very diverse markets. For this reason alone, the biggest brands – from Pepsi to Hermès and American Apparel to Promod – have increased their online presence significantly, responding to the continual growth in the number of Internet users (over 11% annually) who are increasingly conversant with online shopping.
SEO (search engine optimisation) techniques enable you to benefit from organic traffic from local search engines so as to gain a high ranking on Google results pages, the upshot of which is a substantial increase in visits to your site. The most recent statistics show that 95% of searches entered into Google, as well as several other search engines, culminate in visits to the websites featured on the first search engine results page (SERP). More specifically, approximately 57% of searches culminate in a visit to the first site listed, 13% to the second, 9% to the third and only 4% to the fourth. Users spend around 160 seconds reading the brief description given by Google for the first search result, 130 for the second site, 80 for the third and a mere 40 for the fourth.
All of these figures demonstrate the importance of SEO, since these techniques are unique in being able to secure for a site that highly sought-after top ranking on Google. Businesses attempting to win over an international audience can easily employ these techniques as well as localise the content of their website, thereby targeting everyone in the world. Individually, Internet users all form part of different communities, each with its own particular preferences, habits and customs. This still has an influence on the way they make their decisions, perceive a product and surf the net. American women, for example, prefer sites that offer them downloads, whereas men have a tendency to disregard this type of content.
Localising Content and Design
Visitors to an online shop may buy something or they may not. The language of the site, however, is an important factor in the purchase decision. The majority of Internet users prefer sites that are written in their own language and this is also where they prefer to do their shopping, with over 50% of users only willing to shop on sites of this kind. This indicates that particular care needs to be paid to the content of a website; the translation of any site must take into account the differences between a language as learned in the classroom and that used on a daily basis in a given country. Selecting which keywords to use, for this very reason, should never be entrusted to automatic tools such as Google’s Keyword Tool. A professional linguist would be able to tell you whether car insurance naturally translates into French as “assurance voiture” or “assurance auto” for example, and come up with the most frequency search terms for your niche market.
The design of a website must take account of local sensitivities; thus, deciding which colours to use, for example, is very important. Internet users in the western world associate black with mourning, whereas white or even yellow has this significance in Asia; pink is generally disliked by most cultures, but certain niche markets swear by it and so on and so forth.
Localising your SEO Techniques
Once you’ve written your perfect copy and finalised the layout, the next step is to host it on a local server, since regional search engines have a distinct preference for regional sites. Similarly, the address (URL) of your site must be local and specific (e.g. www.mon-service.fr). Optimisation of the text and page headings, keywords, descriptions, etc. is vital, as search engines read this data and display them in their results lists.
Be careful to choose the most popular search engines for each country so as to focus your efforts. Yahoo, for example, has lost relevance in a lot of countries. Localisation of these SEO strategies will enable you to reach out to your audience: a lot of businesses use Pay Per Click offers, but this sort of advertising is very rarely read in some countries, including those in Central Europe. Link building campaigns, article placement and affiliation always need to be focused on your domain’s best sites.
Costs and Benefits
The most basic SEO techniques can ensure sustainable presence on the most popular search engine results pages.
This increase in the rankings is down to the adoption of link building strategies based on the content and authority (PageRank, Alexa, SERP ranking, activity) of the site and of the page which houses the link. In the past, businesses pursued this activity using social media (Digg, Facebook and the like) but found that this type of practice results in only a slight temporary increase in SERP rankings. Simple link building (e.g. exchanging links with sites in the same niche market as you) achieves good results when a regional site is launched, but its results are less convincing in terms of increased rankings, the stability of these rankings and the effort invested. Resorting to Pay Per Click is optional if the SERP rankings are very good, as organic traffic is far superior in terms of volume and number of conversions to that brought in by advertising. What’s more, it’s effectively free.
The costs associated with a strong online presence are of course a lot less than those associated with running international offices. The cost of setting up (and possibly translating) a website, along with hosting it, comes to less than 1,000 euros. Listing, however, is more often than not an ongoing activity. Employing one or several bilingual or multilingual SEO specialists is the best option for international businesses that favour online marketing; they offer stability, good knowledge of the business and loyalty.
Conclusion
By using these strategies, a business can easily set up and localise regional websites selling to anywhere in the world. Listing these sites will make them visible to some seven million people – that’s some seven million potential clients. Who could ask for more?
About the author: Christian Arno is founder and Managing Director of Lingo24, a UK translation company with over 4,000 freelance translators and a significant number of full-time home-based employees. Lingo24 has 120 full-time employees on four continents and had a turnover of £3.65m in 2009.
