A good place to start your global marketing efforts is to adapt your website to multiple international markets. But what good is a localized website if your audiences can't seem to find it? You've put a lot of time and money into catering your website to fit your customers' needs (that's great!), so why not take it a step further and invest in search engine optimization?
Because search engine algorithms are constantly shifting and getting more complicated, you need to prevent your website from getting buried in the sea of competitors' sites. Multilingual SEO (MSEO), in particular, can get a little tricky if you don't have the proper tools and knowledge.
If you want to boost your website traffic overseas, you need a localized strategy for each market. Here are five SEO tips to keep in mind during the process.
1. Know your customers
Knowing your customer may seem an obvious prerequisite, but thinking like your customers can be challenging if you don't speak their language or understand their culture, attitudes, and thought process. People in the US may like your products for one reason, while people in China may find it pleasing for other reasons.
Say you sell power tools. Research may show that people in one locale appreciate your products for their strength, but elsewhere they may appreciate their prices; accordingly, Web surfers in the first region may search for "durable power tools," whereas those in the other locale may search for "affordable power tools." That's why understanding your markets' thought process and demographics come into play when you're choosing keywords.
You want to understand your markets' languages as well. Keywords need to be in the target audiences' native language and localized to accurately reflect the way locals think about your product and industry.
2. Research keywords and phrases
Selecting relevant keywords and phrases is not as simple as choosing words in your source language and then translating them. Each word or key phrase will need to be re-created for the target region, carefully considering culture-specific user behavior. It also needs to go through a thorough local review process. Only an in-country, native-language-speaking global marketing expert can tell you which terms are appropriate and target-specific.
Moreover, the specialized terms that your organization uses internally are probably not likely what your customers will search for. For example, "low fare" is a travel-related industry term, but your customers would more likely search for a "cheap flight."
You should also consider preferred search engines and how they differ from country to country. Google may seem the obvious choice, but in Russia, for example, the dominant search engine is Yandex. Learning about local search engines and their algorithms is key to ranking in their search results.
3. Adapt your content