Worldwide Search Engine Visibility
Brands with a presence in several markets are confronted with a serious problem: one website, several languages. Translating a website can be expensive, but ensuring strong visibility in each language might cost you even more! We say languages, not markets, because with the same language you can often reach several different markets; for example, with French, you can reach the Belgian, French, and Senegalese markets, and with Spanish you can reach the Spanish and Latin American markets.
How do you go about referencing a website for a brand that is present in 30 countries?
The first thing to consider: what kind of website you have and what role it has in its different markets and for your business.
Obviously, it all depends on the purpose of your website. Is it an online store? Does it provide estimates? Should it enhance your brand awareness? Does it rake in new clients? Investing should be directly related to bringing in traffic, in other words, create revenue through clicks. It’s also important to define your priorities according to your different markets. Obviously your 30 markets don’t all generate the same turnover and don’t have the same development potential. Thus, investment should be adjusted accordingly.
The second point to consider: your available resources.
Take into account the value of your local teams: do the local teams have the structures or resources to help you choose keywords? They know their market and their local knowledge can prove quite useful in ensuring the actions you take make sense for individual markets. They can also actively contribute, especially by improving the local website’s ranking (popularity). Is content management centralized or is each country responsible for maintaining and updating local content specific to its market and services/products? This factor will influence action mutualization or local team involvement.
How website administration is organized will also influence the role of the different people who will be involved in the project: who has access to the website content and who has access to the CMS?
It’s particularly important to remember the 3 geographical criteria that search engines take into consideration when identifying whether a website is part of a particular market. These are:
• website’s hosting country
• domain name extension (.com, .co.uk, .us, etc.)
• website language as detected by the search engine
In order to be visible in your target countries, it is essential to take these criteria into consideration. For example, a “.co.uk” website translated into Spanish and listed under (.co.uk/es) and hosted in the UK will be less likely to generate traffic from Spanish-speaking search engines.
Last but not least you must also equip yourself with tools that let you monitor the results of your actions in each country, to measure their coverage, and to identify local competition positioning. If possible, you should let your local teams have access to this information because these are often the driving forces in your local markets.
Image credits: Google Images
Adapted by Jessica Hartstein
Tags: languages, natural international visibility, search, website, worldwide SEO
