By Chris Lee

Creating and managing an international Web presence is a major challenge for organisations with a global reach. Not only do they have linguistic and cultural considerations to factor in, but also achieving consistent search marketing over multiple territories can make managing a global Internet strategy a real headache.

NMK caught up with Andy Atkins-Kruger, managing director of international search marketing agency Web Certain, to learn more about handling a successful global Web strategy.

What are the main challenges companies face when building (or updating) their global web presence?

The first challenge and probably the issue which is most responsible for subsequent failures is the research and planning stage.  Making the right choices at the outset is absolutely key.  The error which many make is to look at their Web analytics and to say; “We’re seeing a lot of interest from the Netherlands, so I think we should launch our site in Dutch”. It may be the case that most of the non-UK or non-English visitors are from the Netherlands but many Dutch speak good English so the result of targeting the Dutch may be to spend more money in localisation and promotional efforts with exactly the same level of sales as before.

The other error is to target by population size.  Many organisations choose to have Germany and France as two of their early new target markets because they are the largest markets – other than the UK in Europe. This is a bad strategy because those two markets are also highly competitive and there may actually be more attractive countries which are smaller – but much less competitive.

The key is to use a balanced scorecard approach where you score target markets for their attractiveness including what you know from Web analytics plus some estimates to size the market available to you in those countries, the scale of the competition and your own business’s ability to deliver and support customers in those regions.

The second major challenge is selecting a content management system or content management approach of your website which delivers content in multiple languages effectively as most systems are not set up ideally to achieve this.  And then there are issues with localising without destroying your SEO (search engine optimisation) efforts since localisation and SEO are not natural bedfellows.

Do surfing habits differ between countries/continents/language groups or is it all about the content/presentation?

Surfing habits between markets do vary but I’m very much from the school which believes that universal human needs are the same everywhere and it is the different environments – including education and language which differ. How this helps marketers is to make it easier for markets to understand and deal with the differences particularly as it relates to Web promotion and the structure of the web site.

For instance, if the brand concerned is not well-known in the new target market (whilst it is well-known at home), then it’s not surprising that people in the new target market spend more time on the Web pages looking for information about the company.  Also, if the training of people is that debt is a very bad thing (Germany, for instance), then payment methods will be affected. Private health care won’t sell as well in Italy as Germany, since Italy has a national provision and Germany is all based around insurance.  The shape and form of the language can also influence how people think about things too differences between formal and informal versions of “You” for instance which are still important in many European languages. At the end of the day, all human beings have the same basic needs.  Work on supporting their basic needs and the rest will be much easier to deal with.

What’s a good case study of where an international organisation has got it right (in your view) with its global Web presence and why?

Actually, the number of companies who have really got this right globally is still very small.  There are many examples of firms who have filled in parts of the puzzle but very few who have done it all.

FTSE 100 Companies have done a simply appalling job of international Web marketing.  Perhaps they are large enough brands not to have to worry but you have to question how much additional value could have been added by tackling this relatively inexpensive way of promoting the business – inexpensive, that is, by other forms of local advertising in those individual markets.  

Airlines are amazingly bad because they have most to gain.  Typically they tend to think about their home market and translate for the destinations they fly to.  Very few airlines actually deliver a good website presence at both ends of their global networks. In general, you can say that the biggest global companies actual underperform in this fields. Only the travel sector springs to mind as a sector in which large firms have done a good job overall of internationalising sites, including such people as Expedia, Tripadvisor and Hotels.com.

But the real stars are the small businesses who once again have demonstrated flexibility and speed of action to deliver success in wider international markets.  And it’s still the case today than middle market businesses have great opportunities and can run faster in an international direction.  They have most to gain the big boys have most to lose and almost certainly will find some market share chiselled away from them over time.

How disciplined are firms at optimising their sites across different geographies?

It would be unfair to say that firms are not disciplined at optimising their sites. The biggest problem lies with senior management not recognising that they need to change strategies and to restructure their hierarchies to deliver effective and wide global success.  If the marketers in charge haven’t yet recognised the opportunity, how can a switched on lowly SEO Manager make a real difference? Crazy things happen. For instance, I know of several cases where firms have deployed revisions to their Web pages in multiple languages for SEO reasons and then just a few weeks later someone has made a slight change to the page so the content had to re-enter their localisation processes with the result that all SEO efforts were overwritten and lost.

What are your top tips for a successful global presence?

For the top tips can I refer readers to this: http://searchenginewatch.com/3641421 - which was written for the same session in Chicago and so is still appropriate for SES London.