By Chris Lee

The Internet is a truly global marketplace. Companies investing heavily in search engine marketing (SEM) traditionally focus their search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts in the English language. But what happens if businesses want to trade outside the Anglophone world?

To learn more about internationalising SEM strategies NMK caught up with Greig Holbrook of SEM specialist consultancy Oban Multilingual. The company has 26 teams spread across the world researching local search behaviour, vocabulary and trends.

What are the key challenges facing British firms looking to market overseas online?

Understanding how different cultures engage with the Internet is an obstacle anyone entering a new market needs to overcome. Around 70 per cent of Internet users don’t search in English, and therefore having knowledge of how other nationalities do search is vital. When linguistic traits and nuances come into play, as well as cultural, historical and religious factors, it’s not a matter of simply translating a website to target a foreign market.

What strategies can UK firms use to overcome them?

Localisation is the key to any successful international/multilingual SEO strategy. Having a thorough understanding of the Internet and search market you’re entering is crucial.

Keywords and phrases typed into search engines can be written according to regional spellings and maybe misspelled – or even words that an English speaker may never associate with the topic. For example, in Italy, search engine users use the term ‘last second’ when searching for holidays and travel related websites. This is similar to the English phrase ‘last minute’, but not necessarily a phrase we Brits would associate with travel.

Also, developing an SEO strategy for domestic and local search engines will work more effectively than a ‘one-size-fits-all’ strategy. Google may be the main contender in the UK and USA, but when you start to look outside of English speaking borders, the search landscape becomes much more varied. In China, for example, people are far more likely to use Baidu, and in Russia it’s Yandex which is the market leader in search. British companies need to bear this in mind when entering an overseas market as the rules for SEO are not the same for every search engine.

Need it be a costly process?

As with SEO campaigns in the UK, there is not necessarily a ‘golden route’ or ‘quick way round’ to running global SEO campaigns. Depending on the objectives and targets of a campaign, the resource of both time and investment needs to be sufficient in order to achieve quality results that will stick. Trying to cut corners or do a job halfway seldom produces results in SEO and often is more damaging than anything else.

However, with proper research there can be ways of achieving quick wins in combination with long term goals and with a steady and efficient approach this doesn’t always have to be an extremely costly process.

With content, for example, is it a case of using translation teams to optimise your content in other languages or is there a way round this?

For content which will reach out to your target foreign market effectively, it’s important to write good copy. For optimum results, it should be written from scratch by a native speaker of the target language, featuring local keywords, not English keywords which have been translated.

A well implemented multilingual SEO strategy shouldn’t involve any short-cuts, and translation almost always throws up problems and is essentially a false economy.

What are your top five tips for good international SEO?

1. First and foremost, search engines from Google, through to Baidu in China, to Yandex in Russia, prefer local. In order to do well in competitive markets you need to analyse both your local and global competition in each target market.

2. Don’t base keyword research on translations of English, either for PPC or SEO. Oban recently found that there was a ‘perfect’ German translation of a technology term but it had only 140 searches a month on it. Oban Multilingual’s German team identified a term that was actually being used which had over 40,000 searches a month.

3. Social Media can be a great marketing tool; however, it is used very differently across the globe. In China QQ.com is by far the most popular social networking site, whereas our good old friends Facebook and Twitter are banned. To maximise the effects of social media marketing, make sure that your social media strategy is specific to the region and market you are targeting.

4. In terms of website elements, preferences can vary hugely in different countries. Colours, text size, and graphic placement can all affect the success of a website in an international market. Testing site variations with a cultural multivariate tool can determine which elements work best with which audience.

5. Link building is a crucial part of SEO. However, different search engines look for different aspects of link building in order to determine the ranking of the page. Google, an established and highly intelligent search engine, focuses on the quality and relevance of the links, but some domestic search engines, which aren’t as developed as Google, may look for a high quantity of links, something that Google actually penalises for in some circumstances. Once again, it’s important to understand which search engine you’re optimising for and develop a strategy specific to that one.