The site code is basically international, the way to check a keyword’s worth is pretty standard, so apart from translation services, what is so important about local knowledge in SEO you may ask? Donal Langan, Senior Consultant SEO, Stream:20, writes…
Well, there are a whole host of things to consider that will affect the optimisation of a site targeting another country, let alone a site that targets multiple countries.
While many people will look at technical issues, often overlooked is how your target audience will interact online. You need to identify search trends relevant to that country, your audience may search differently (use more/less words per search; focus on left/right side of page etc.) than you expect.
The local online audience may prefer certain types of sites, which might affect who you’d want to get links from. The actual infrastructure of their connections might mean broadband take-up is minimal and so sites that rely heavily on animation and video may never load! The more local information you have about online behaviour the better.
Then of course there is the whole issue of language and script, do you optimise a site for special characters (umlaut, accents), can you actually have these in a domain name? Does a significant percentage of your target audience use international keyboards rather than ones specific to their language? For example in Germany the correct spelling of Football is “Fußball” but generally in Germany more people will search for “Fussball”; so you need to cover both spellings.
I wouldn’t bother going for domains with special characters, even though this has been available in some countries since April 2010, it is not for the full set of special characters and any users without a special keyboard may be affected. As far as search engines go, they are getting better at adjusting their results for variations of special character use or non-use. So in the above example, if you search on “Fußball” on Google DE, it will also return results for “Fussball”.
A main reason not to just rely on direct translation of Keywords you want to optimise a site for is that you need to have the local language usage knowledge. An example would be while some countries more commonly search for “Shop” other countries may mainly search for “Store”. Looking at search trends and insights for various countries is essential, and you really do need a local to sanity check your keyword lists!
Whereas Google is the dominant search engine in many countries, you shouldn’t just assume this is the case when optimising for a Search engine. There are countries where it has very strong challengers to consider when optimising a site. In China Baidu has around 73% of the search market, while Yandex has about 50% of all searches in Russia. These would be the search engines you would need to rank well in and know what factors they rated. So, make sure you register with all relevant local search engines and optimise for the major ones.
Then there is the strategy of getting a country specific top-level-domain (yoursite.de), versus folder country split (yoursite.com/de). It was always thought that the best strategy was to have the local country domain, but many global brands now use the directory method. E.g. www.apple.com/de & www.apple.com/uk
This is used to support the global nature of their businesses, but I would still recommend owning the country domain and just putting a redirect in place to hit the correct directory. You should also try and host your site in the targeted country, so that the IP address shows as coming from that country.
As we know, inbound links will make all the difference in your site’s ranking in search engine results, so not only have local language on your site, but also get links from quality sites from within that target country, using local language anchor text. Once again local knowledge is essential to get those relevant quality local links in. Remember that you can specify your preferred region in Webmaster Tools.
Having a physical local address in plain text on the footer of each page will also help a search engine think of your site as a local site. I haven’t even covered the problem of duplicate content on multi-national sites, but you can see that once you start looking to optimise for a different country, you need to start adjusting your SEO techniques and strategy to be successful.
By Donal Langan
Senior Consultant SEO
Stream:20
www.stream20.com