Global Search Marketing

Hi everybody, and welcome to today's Biznology digital marketing webinar. I'm Frank Reed, one of the bloggers here at Biznology. I'm also the managing editor for the Marketing Pilgrim blog that is currently number 19 on the Ad Age Power 150. I also work with companies and individuals by providing education and training services. regarding internet and social media marketing. Today, you'll be hearing from Mike Moran, the founder of the Biznology blog, who will present global search marketing. Before we do, we need to recognize our sponsors. We have Brick Marketing, a full-service SEO solutions company that increases website visitors. Marketing Pilgrim, the internet and social media marketing news blog. We cut through the bull so you don't have to. Social Ally, your social media support. So as we wait for more attendees to join us here, let me review the format of the webinar. Our technology webinars last just about 30 minutes, so you can easily fit them into your busy schedule. We record each webinar, and we'll email you that link later this week. During Mike's presentation, you can use your GoToWebinar controls to ask a question. That orange arrow opens and closes your webinar controls. If you have a question, simply type it into the box labeled questions at any time during the event and press the send button. I'll select a few questions at the end of the webinar and pose them to Mike. So while we're waiting for the last few attendees to join, I'd like to remind you that the Biznology newsletter and blog are available for free at biznology.com. So if you're not already a subscriber, we hope that you'll sign up now. Thanks again for all of you for spending the next 30 minutes with us. We know how valuable your time is, so let's introduce today's speaker.

Hi, everyone.

Mike Moran is the founder of the Biznology blog, a well-known expert in all things digital marketing, and he's the chief strategist at Converseon, a leading social consultancy. Mike is a co-author of Search Engine Marketing, Inc. and the sole author of Do It Wrong Quickly. Mike is a veteran of IBM, managing groups in IBM.com for 8 years upon retiring from IBM in 2008 as a distinguished engineer. So if you've ever struggled with how to optimize your website or websites for international customers, this is the webinar for you. So Mike, take it away.

Thanks a lot, Frank. So what I want to do today is to talk about how you think about global search marketing. So what does it mean to think about search marketing in all of these different countries around the world? Now some of you might have a global search marketing program where you really are in 30, 40, even 60 or 80 countries. But some of you may have a global program where you're in 3 countries or 4 countries. And the truth is that no matter whether you're in dozens of countries or just a few, you're still going to have to cope with a lot of these problems. You have to think about search marketing in a different way when you're doing it globally. You'll have multiple country sites. You may have multiple languages. And if you have dozens of countries, you undoubtedly have multiple languages. But even if you only have a few, you can have to have websites in multiple languages. If the only way that you are a global search marketer is that you market in the US and Canada, you're still going to have to have a French site for most businesses in order to market in Canada. You likely have different teams. In each country. So just as you might have a local sales force or a local distribution channel every time you have to get into a new country, you are likely to have a new web team and a new marketing team in each country. And you're usually dealing with multiple currencies. So if you're quoting prices online, and especially if you're doing e-commerce, you have the complication of trying to figure out how to discuss what you're doing using different currencies for the different country markets. And so all of these things add a great deal of complexity to any kind of global marketing operation. But it adds a lot of complexity in search marketing. And we're going to dive into that. But before we do, I don't want it to seem like this is a very negative thing, like it's such a difficult thing. Because the truth is that expanding internationally is far, far cheaper and easier when you're using a digital channel. Than when you were doing it in the old days. In the old days, you might have had to hire people in the country, set up an office. You might have to set up distribution channels for B2C companies. And all those things took a lot more investment than setting things up digitally. And so it doesn't have to be that expensive to start to service customers in other countries. And so what you want to look at if you're making the decision to move into new countries is whether there is high internet penetration and whether people are using the internet on computers or on mobile phones. And once you understand that there's at least some level of usage of the internet, that can make this a country that you might want to expand into. And of course, you're going to look at all the other factors that you would always look at in terms of the need for your product and the importance of your product to that certain market. And so if you can figure out what customers want, and you can put together the content to persuade them, which is usually the simpler parts of the process, then the search part of it is how do they find you? How do they figure out who you are? How do they find your site amid all the sites that are out there? So one of the ways to think about it is some people have a little trouble understanding what it is that people need in other countries. If you really are trying to run everything from the US and you don't have any kind of in-country personnel, even understanding what people want can be difficult. And so you can use the internet to listen. So you can use social media listening to do that, but a lot of people just use keywords. So they do the same kind of work on keywords that they would do in the US to find out which ones are popular, what are the words people are using, and that can help them know if there is a demand for products in a country they haven't gone into. And so once you've decided that you're moving into that country, then you have to now figure out how you're going to do your search marketing. And so there's all sorts of other things that you have to do to move into a new country digitally. So you have to set up a website. There are all sorts of things you need to do. But we're going to spend the rest of this webinar talking about what you do with search. So the first thing to think about is that Keywords are really market segments. So this might be a concept that not everybody's familiar with. And this is not a concept that necessarily has anything to do with global search marketing. This is just a way to think about keywords in search marketing that we'll then now build upon for global search. So if you think about it, even for a single country search campaign, You need to understand what people are looking for in order to be able to deliver the content that they want. And so one way of thinking about that is that when people use different keywords, it's usually because they're indicating they're looking for different kinds of things. So even if the words might mean the same thing, the choice of different words really makes a difference. So I like to use the example of the keyword hotel. versus the keyword lodging. Now, a hotel is a very common word. And so when people type in a hotel, they're trying to find a Marriott, a Hilton, a Hyatt. That's what they're looking for. But when people type in the word lodging, they're looking for something different. They wouldn't go to the trouble of using that more unusual word if all they wanted was a hotel. And so they're looking for something else. They're looking for a bed and breakfast. They're looking for some other way of staying overnight someplace. Without necessarily staying in a traditional hotel. And so by thinking about that, what it tells you is that the choices of words that people use are what gives you the understanding of what their market segment is. So what are they looking for, and then how do you respond to that? Now, the reason this is important for global search marketing is that you have to do the same kind of thing for country segments as well. So country and languages also serve as market segments. So now what do I mean by that? Well, it's tempting when you try and go into a new country to just translate all of your materials. So take all the materials that you perhaps did in English, and then what you're going to do is you're going to say, okay, so now we're going to take that, give it to a translator, And we're going to make sure that the translator then uses all these words and they come up with a correct translation. And now we have the materials we need. And then we'll just see whatever words are in there, and those will be our keywords. And you can do that. It just doesn't work that well. The reason it doesn't work that well is because a correct translation doesn't necessarily give you a translation that helps you to win in search marketing. Because those words that the translator uses aren't necessarily the most popular words. They aren't necessarily the words that are the best fit for your products. They aren't necessarily the words that people are most likely to use when they are searching for your company and your products and your services. And so It sounds difficult, and it is, but translation is only the first step. Once you translate something, you then have to go after the keyword research the same way you would when you did it in English. When you originally wrote your materials in English, you used certain words. They may have been words that you thought were really good, but you learned as you were doing search marketing that it's important to pick the right keywords in order for you to make sure you're getting the most searches to your site possible. Well, the same thing is true when you're doing it globally. So your keyword research has to be done country by country and language by language. So you might think that you have a correct translation, and you'll be right, but it doesn't mean that you're using the words that everybody else uses. It doesn't mean that you're using the best words. And so that even happens when you're not doing translation. So even as you go to a country— so suppose you're going from the US to England. So if your copy has in it words like truck and carriage and custom, I mean, these are all words that are not used the same way in Great Britain. So a truck is a lorry. A carriage is a pram. The word custom is usually used as bespoke. And so understanding what the language is, even when you're not translating, is critically important country by country. You can imagine how much more important it is when you're trying to optimize after you've translated it to a new language. So this is one of the most critical things that people get wrong when they try and do global search marketing. They just make the assumption that as long as the material worked in the US, it will work in the other countries as well. And so obviously they'll translate it to the new language, but that's about all they'll do. And they forget that there is a whole different way of speaking, even when people are using the same language. But certainly when you translate it to another language, it's not enough to have a correct translation. And the reason we fall into this is because we've spent all this time correctly translating things like product instructions or service instructions or troubleshooting guides and all those kinds of things, or assembly guides. And we've all complained about how, you know, it's really painful when you try and assemble something when it's been translated from another language because they really don't take the time to optimize it into English. Well, this is the same thing that's going on with search, but in the case of these instructions, you can kind of get away with it because if you can just kind of figure it out and battle your way through It's probably not costing any business. In search, on the other hand, it can cost you a lot of business to not take that extra step of identifying what the right keywords are and making sure that you're optimizing for those keywords, that those are the ones that you're really going for. So once you know which keywords are maybe the best ones, the question is, how did you figure that out? So you'd say, okay, I get the idea. We don't want to just translate. We want to make sure we're using the most popular keywords, the keywords that are the best fits for our sites, for our products and services. But how do we know? And so the way you know is to use keyword research tools. So if you have experience doing search marketing in the US, you're very likely to be familiar with some of these keyword tools, and you probably use them to understand what the right keywords are in the United States. Well, you can use these same tools to be able to identify country by country and language by language what the popular keywords are in other markets. And so you can use, for example, the Google Keyword Tool, which is free. The Trellion Keyword Discovery Tool is also, I find, a really good one. I find that sometimes it has better and deeper sets of keywords than are in the free Google tool. You do have to pay for it. So the other difference with Trellion is that it brings keywords in from dozens of different search engines, not just from Google. Now, in some countries, that doesn't matter very much. I mean, if you're looking in Norway or a Scandinavian country where Google has a market share of, you know, 96%, you don't really care about getting keywords from other search engines. But Google doesn't have 96% market share in a lot of countries. So it's really important that as you go country by country, you figure out which search engines you're going to target. This is especially important for paid search because you can think about the fact that, say in China, the search engine Baidu is the leading search engine. It has 75% share. So if you just say, well, we're just going to buy paid search for Google because Google is worldwide the leader in search, you're actually losing 75% of your audience in China. And so country by country, you can look and see which ones have the market share, and then you can decide which ones you're going to optimize for. And so in the countries where Google has a pretty minority market share, it might be more important to use that Trellion tool because it's possible that the people using Google are not using the same keywords in the same proportions as people who are using other search engines. And so you might want to have a broader set of sources for where you're getting that keyword research from. So paid search globally is relatively simple. It's not a breeze because you do have to do all that keyword research. You do have to optimize your ads using the right words and trying to make sure that you get high click-through. And you have to do that country by country, language by language. So you do have to do all that work, but it's relatively simple to understand. So you can pick which countries your ads appear in. And as we said earlier, in different countries you're going to want to do paid search with different search engines. It might not always be Google. If you want to, you can even target regions or cities within those countries. So it could be that especially when you first start doing distribution of a consumer product in a new country, you may not have distribution for the entire country. And so what you might want to do instead is to say, okay, we're going to limit our paid search to just those areas where we have distribution, and we'll gradually build up to buy over the whole country. We're going to spend the rest of the few minutes left on organic search, because organic search is a little bit more complicated. So SEO, search engine optimization, organic natural search, they all mean the same thing. And the first thing you have to do is to make sure that your pages are actually in the right country indexes for organic search. So you might not have thought about this, but every time you go to Google or to some other search engine that operates in multiple countries, it's figuring out which country the searcher is in. And then it's limiting those search results for the most part to a country or at least a region based on where they think the person is. You have to make sure that your pages end up in the right search index, which is not all that easy sometimes. Because especially if you're a multinational company, you may not have top-level domains that tell the search engines which country the pages are in. So if you're in Sweden, for example, most Swedish companies will have a domain that doesn't end in .com. It ends in .se. Because that's the 2-character code for Sweden. But if you're a multinational company, you might not have a .se domain. You might have all of your country pages in your .com domain. And so that can make things difficult for the search engines. So if you can't use the top-level domain, one thing you can do is to host your pages on a server in that country, or you can get lots of links from the country, from other sites in the country. And all of those for a few years were the only things you could do. And for some search engines, they're still the only things you can do. But for Google and for Bing, you can now use their webmaster tools to actually identify on your .com site which pages belong in which country indexes. So for every search engine that you can do that for, you want to, because then you have complete control of which indexes for which countries you get your pages into. But for some other search engines that are in some of these other countries, you may need to do some of the first 3 things we talked about on this slide. In order to get your pages indexed properly. You also have to think about how you're going to get the pages crawled. And so getting pages into the index is really important. And so how can you get those pages to really show up? How can you make sure that the spider is going to find your pages? So one way you can do it is to is to use something called a sitemap. So a sitemap file can show the search engines which pages belong in the search index. You can also use something called a country map. So you can link all the pages in that country from a single country homepage. And so that can help the search engines to figure out where it is that they need to go. The other thing that you need to focus on is once you know that the pages are getting in there, we talked about how you can't just translate your keywords. But you also can't just translate all your pages and leave them alone. Once you know those keywords are the right ones, then what you need to do is to understand how you're going to get the translators to then start using those keywords when they do the page translations. So it's a multi-step process. You're going to start out by just taking a few pages and translating them. Then you're going to do your search optimization to understand what words are really the right ones to optimize for. Then you're going to tell your translators that these are the words that you want them using when they do the translation. The other thing that you need to do is you need to make sure that the search engines understand your national language. So how do they know that a page is in Japanese, for example, or it is in Spanish? And so in order to do that, Google and a lot of the larger search engines can just figure that out automatically. They can look at the page. They can analyze the content. And they can figure it out. But for smaller search engines, and a lot of search engines that are maybe popular in only a couple of countries, you have to have the tags in your file correct. So on your pages, in your HTML, you need to make sure you have the right language and character set meta tag set so that the search engine correctly figures out what language it's in. The other thing you want to think about when you're doing a global search campaign is you want to understand which things you're going to do centrally, so in the home office, in the home country, and which things you're going to do in the local country market. And so you need to make a list of all the things that you do in search marketing. What are the things that you're focused on? All the tasks that you're expecting people to do. Then what you want to do is you want to analyze your organization structure. So think about how you're organized as a company. So if you're a multinational company, that's pretty simple because basically you have very little that goes on in corporate headquarters and almost everything goes on in the country business units. But if you're a conglomerate, you may have multiple companies that each manage themselves. If you're a product-oriented company, company, then maybe each of your products has its own business unit. Functional companies might be organized so that marketing is in one place, sales and service are in somewhere else. And so you have to look at how your company is organized to figure out where you put things. And for a lot of companies, they have more than one of these organizations. So they might be a product-oriented company, but then they also have a multinational aspect. So maybe the product divisions are organized by product and they're mostly managed in the home country, but the marketing is managed country by country. And so you need to figure out how you're organized in order to make decisions. Then what you do is you go through each task and you say, okay, for all the tasks that we have to do, where does it belong? So do we have the ability to take this task and do it centrally? Do we have another task that we want to take and we want to do it somewhere else? And so Depending on how you're organized, you might make different decisions. So many times targeting search engine is something done by that extended country team, because if you have marketing people who are in the country, then they will know what the popular search engines are. And so you might want people closer to there. And the same thing could happen for planning keywords. But a lot of companies want to do metrics reporting centrally, because they want to guarantee that they're measuring all the same things country by country. Or defining standards centrally. And so depending on what it is that you're doing, you may have to figure out different things. So as you decide these tasks, you're going to pick out tasks that should be country-specific, that should be language-specific, and others that might need centralization. And you might make different decisions based on your organizational structure and based on what it is that you're trying to get done and to optimize and where those skills are. But these are things that as you're doing these multi-country campaigns, you need to focus on how you're going to do that. And so I spend a lot of time helping clients organize these kinds of multinational campaigns so that they really understand how to get the work done and how to make sure that each country is doing all the things they need to do. So thanks for listening to this. I know we've got a few questions and Frank's been collecting them up and he's going to ask them now. We also hope that you'll join us for next month's webinar in May when I'm going to talk about agile marketing. So how you can quickly try marketing experiments, understand what's working and not working, and then make changes so that you optimize not just search marketing but just about any kind of digital marketing. So Frank, tell me what people were thinking about that I haven't answered.

No problem, Mike. Thanks. I'm sure our attendees have a much better idea now how to use search marketing for a global audience. suggest you didn't get to every question. I have several good ones from the audience that are teed up for you. Mike has already— oh, I'd first like to remind everybody that it's not too late to ask a question. You can type it into your questions box in your GoToWebinar controls. Before we get to the first question, however, we need to thank our sponsors once again. It's Brick Marketing, full-service SEO solutions company that increases website visitors. Marketing Pilgrim, the internet and social media marketing news blog that we cut through the bull so you don't have to. And social alliance, your social media support. Now on to your questions. The first question that we have is related to talent. And I guess what is meant by that is, you know, you're talking about multinational or multi-language, multilingual efforts. Do you have any suggestions, Mike, for companies that are trying to find talent in other countries that, you know, could have the SEO knowledge but also have the local What are you looking for? What does a good candidate look like?

So a lot of times when you are first getting started doing global search campaigns, it doesn't make sense to actually hire someone into your company in the country. If you already have a marketing team that is in-country, They probably have some of the skills already. So they certainly have the language skills. You can probably fairly easily teach them how to do keyword research so that they would understand that. You could have them work with the translators. So there are certain things that they could do. They might not be as good at, for example, understanding how to get pages indexed into the search engine. And so for certain kinds of tasks, you might want to actually hire a local search consultant. And I do a lot of this for my clients where they come to me and they say, okay, we're trying to run a search campaign in these 9 countries. Can you recommend for us who the people are we should work with in each country in order to get this to happen? And so over time, you'll be able to build up the skills in-house if you're a large enough company and you really need an in-house person. But in the beginning, probably the people you already have can do some of the work, and the work they can't do, you might be better off hiring a consultant who is in that country to be able to help you.

Great. We've got another question here, and it's regarding that top-level domain, the idea of having that for each individual country. What disadvantages or what limitations do you have if that's not available, or for whatever reason that just can't happen, whether it's the way you're structured or it's just not an option? What are the true disadvantages of that, and how can you overcome them?

For the search engines that allow you to update Webmaster Tools, and Google is one of them, to tell the search engine which country each page on your site should be indexed for, there are no disadvantages. So by and large, if you're working with the larger search engines, you really don't have an issue. It's not a problem. But when you're working with smaller search engines, when you're working with search engines that might be country-specific, When you're working with vertical search engines, or specialty search engines, or ones that don't have that Webmaster Tools option of being able to identify page by page on your website which pages belong with which country index, then you have to figure out something else. So if you cannot do the top-level domain, then you might ask yourself, is it an option for me to at least host those pages on a server in that country? Or can I really work hard to get links from other sites that have the country domain and I know are indexed properly? Because some of the search engines, they figure out that your page belongs in that country if you have enough links from other country sites that are in the same country. And so the disadvantages of not being able to use that Webmaster Tools function are that some of your pages, in some cases all of your pages, will not show up in the right country for the particular search engine. Remember, this is only for some of the— it's not for Google. It's not for Bing. You can do this kind of stuff for them. But for the other search engines, it can be a real issue that you might not be getting all of your pages into that country's search engine. And so that's the search index. And so the 4 things that I laid out are the things to do. Obviously, if you can do the Webmaster Tools, that's the way to go. If you can't, you have to try and figure out how to do one of the other 3, or just live with the fact that you're not getting as much search traffic from that particular search engine as you'd like to.

OK, great. Well, I think that's all the time we have for today, because we want to be respectful of our our visitors' time. Thanks to Mike for these great ideas, and thanks especially to our audience for your participation and your questions. If you have had questions that we didn't have time to answer, you can email your question to Eileen. That's eileen@mikemorangroup.com, and she'll be sure to get them to Mike for the answer. Later this week, we will send you a link to the recording of the webinar. So you can listen again and share with others. We also invite you to mark your calendars for our next Biznology webinar, as Mike had mentioned earlier, which is Agile Marketing, scheduled for 11:00 AM Eastern time in the US on May 22nd. So thank you very much, everybody. We hope you have a great day. Take care. Thank you.