With companies now servicing customers in different countries and different languages, a website can’t just be created in English and forgotten about. Making your website accessible to your entire customer base is critical to grow your business, and helping the search engines index your site is a very important job. We’ve written this about the importance of distinct multilingual and multinational campaigns.
Does your site target different countries and/or languages? Are you using subdomains or directories to do this? Or are you using different top level domains (TLDs)? Is your content directly translated? Or perhaps you have duplicate English pages targeting different countries? If any of these apply to you then you may have large amounts of what Google would class as duplicate content. Read on
In this episode of the Internet Marketing Podcast, Kelvin is talking with Bas van den Beld about the do’s and don’ts of international search. They’re going through the importance of remembering the differences between the search engines operating in different countries, as well as how the different markets within Europe require different strategies.
The travel industry has enjoyed a huge increase in ecommerce over recent years with the rise of hotel, holiday and flight aggregators. In most recent times this trend has moved towards an influx of holiday and travel price comparison sites.
Some of the major travel providers have had to adapt to the recent economic climate and amplify their keyword profiles with the goal to rank for terms such as cheap holidays, last minute breaks, low cost flights and so on.
Furthermore, large international sites have to apply these keyword strategies and apply them globally in various markets, which have their own languages and keywords.
So, the question is – Can we simply direct translate our keywords? Will high search volumes of certain keywords be reflected within international search engines? Will there be any English terms that remain? And finally, what surprises are there with regards to keyword trends?
This experiment will be based on the terms surrounding ‘cheap flights’ and will include trends in the UK, France, Italy and Spain.
Our Digital Insights Manager, Graeme, recently gave this presentation at the 2012 Travel Technology Show. The presentation is a best practice for growing your online business, increasing the reach of your brand and re-thinking the way you design your website for foreign markets.
In this special episode of the Internet Marketing Podcast, Kelvin is joined by SiteVisibility’s Digital Insights Manager Graeme Benstead-Hume and Lee Hayhurst, Travel Weekly Group head of News and Travolution Editor to discuss International SEO.
They are discussing search trends and the opportunities and threats of exporting your search strategy model to other countries, including whether to translate your site content directly, whether you should have localised domain names, what to do if your analytics data shows that you have a lot of visitors from abroad and the importance of having native speakers who understand the local culture on your team, among many other things.
If you’re interested in this area of search, you can join us on February 7th, 2012, where Graeme is speaking at the Travel Technology Show
Welcome to the wonderful world of multilingual SEO, where the right words get the right results! At SiteVisibility I have had the opportunity to deliver multilingual campaigns for a number of our clients, and I would like to share with you the true challenges that it presents.
Clients look to expand their customer base by offering their services and products in different markets. This means that the content and text surrounding these products needs to be targeted in those specific languages.
Saying that is the easy part, doing it is another matter. The process of constructing multilingual content is a combination of two worlds; accurate and native quality translation, as well as best practise SEO tactics. The phrase ‘simple translation is not enough’ resonates loudly within multilingual SEO.
Keyword research clearly needs to be adapted, requiring a different thought process:
What am I looking for? How is this translated? Is this term used? Is there a more relevant term? And is the English term more commonly used? Here is a quick example of why you should never be tempted to use an automated translator Read on
In this instalment of the ABC’s of SEO, I wanted to hit on a few subjects around international SEO. Increasingly businesses are looking to tap into foreign markets and search is obviously a very powerful way of doing just that.
Do Google Favour Local Domain Suffixes?
There was a conversation recently in our LinkedIn Discussion Group about domain suffixes and their effect on rankings. Colin asked whether having a foreign domain such as .co (registered in Colombia) makes it more difficult to climb search engine results pages in the UK. Google will prioritise relevant domain suffixes, but there are many other ranking factors. Look around, international sites can still rank really well. Some businesses really benefit from having these bespoke URLs, such as bit.ly or del.icio.us.
Having local domain suffixes is generally thought of as best practise, but there are other things to consider to maximise your performance. Google also score geographical relevance by checking where the server of a website is based, so it could be worth ensuring that this is the country in question. Additionally, a geographic location for a site can be specified on Webmaster Tools.
In this Question and Answer session, Kelvin and Andy are discussing the best ways to decide to you sub-domains, sub-folders, or domains for one company’s international sites; how to make a new employee’s first week in SEO the most beneficial it can be; which WordPress forums to use when trying to share information between the main site and a forum; and how to best promote the chance to win something, whether through an email list or through the Pay with a Tweet system.
How to avoid your sites fighting over the same content – Credit
Recently we’ve been trailing the attribute to deal with some of the common problems which occur when developing two different websites, each targeting variations of the English language.
In the following example we’ll talk about a site currently in the UK launching an American equivalent, which was the exact problem our client had. Read on
So your boss has told you to launch a new international website in a different country, but where does it live? And which is the best way of doing it from an SEO perspective?
When launching a website for a new audience in a new country there are three main options to consider, each have their pros and cons but hopefully by the end of this article you’ll be able to make an informed decision.
