eCommerce Marketing Horror Stories 👻🎃
I’ve worked with high street brands and major Silicon Valley tech firms in helping them grow their digital footprint and expand into new countries.
When you’re an international business, and your product/service is available to all, you need a website that is optimised and localised for different languages, markets, and expectations.
Part of this is making sure that Google, and other search engines, are able to deliver the right localised version of your website to each market (such as the Spanish version to Spanish speaking users). This is achieved through correct technical strategy and implementations, from which great content can perform and convert.
International Search Engine Optimisation
International SEO is more than just spinning up content in different languages and implementing href lang tags correctly. It’s about understanding how people search in the different countries and the organic competition.
It’s also important to understand that there are differences between the how Google works in different countries, as Google.co.uk will rank sites differently to Google.fr and Google.de. For the most part with correct href lang tags
This is why it is important to conduct keyword research independently for each country, understanding how to optimise each version of the site to best suit its target audience, and understanding how your target audience searches and what they expect of a webpage and their online experience.
Yandex, Baidu, Naver, and Yahoo.
Whilst Google reigns supreme in the majority of world markets, this isn’t the case in select countries.
In China, users interact with smartphones and the internet (as a resource) differently to the Western world. Baidu is the primary search engine here and behaves very different to Google.
In Russia, Yandex and Google hold high market share percentages, with the Russian search engine coming out on top on both Desktop and Mobile. When it comes to optimizing for Yandex and Russia, I’m considered one of the leading Western SEOs – and current editor of RussianSearchNews.com.
In Korea, in addition to Google there is Naver, and Naver’s many assets such as Cafe – and in Japan, there is the difference in user behaviour and Yahoo to contend with.
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