Written by Fernando Maciá
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When we want to attract qualified traffic from other countries to our website, any Internet marketing strategy must be more carefully studied than when analyzing a campaign in the local market. Knowing factors such as customer profile, market size, price elasticity and business profitability are important points to consider in a traditional off-line marketing campaign. But there are many more factors to be studied in the network that are closely related to each of the tools used in any Internet marketing plan. Taking them into account is one of the first tasks to be carried out…
Search Engine Optimization: Keyword Definition
When positioning our website on search engines, the choice of keywords is the starting point for success in this Internet marketing tool. When we try to position ourselves in another country, for example, that speaks Spanish, we already take it for granted that no changes have to be made in the choice of keywords.In other words, the keyword chosen in Spain will also work for Argentina, Venezuela and Colombia and vice versa, since they officially speak the same language. Did you know that in some Latin American countries they use the word “carro” and in Spain they use the word “coche”, or that in some Latin American countries they use the word “lentes” and in Spain they use the word “gafas” to refer to the same thing? It is possible that some Internet users when searching for information know this and use both words to get the same thing but if we make it easy for them we will get better positions in the results of their respective searches.
Content Management: Translation of content
Many websites have the habit, when designing their version in another language, of limiting themselves to translating the contents. This can have certain disadvantages; if, for example, a real estate website has a news section in Spanish and one of its news items is “the evolution of Spanish people’s indebtedness to buy houses on the Costa del Sol”, it will surely be tempted to translate this news item and place it on the English version of its website. But wouldn’t it be more interesting for the target audience of this page, which could be the English citizen living in his country, to read a news item about “the evolution of the indebtedness of the English to buy houses on the Costa del Sol”? What I mean by this example is that certain content should not be translated literally, but rather set to the target audience. The best way to do it in the previous example is to look for the original sources in English in other websites that talk about those topics and then insert them in our site. This is what we call content localization.
Increasing Popularity: Link Search and Submission
Among the activities necessary to increase the popularity of a website is to get quality links to it. Among the pages that can bring us good links and quality traffic are some thematic and regional directories, we can fall into the error of discarding this last group because we think that Google, Yahoo and MSN bring us all the visits. While it is true that a small group of search engines generates a large amount of traffic, it is also true that there are countries where some regional directories are almost as much used by their local Internet users as the famous global search engines such as Baidu, Yandex, Seznam, Daum, Naver…
Cost-per-click tools: Opportunities to insert sponsored links
When managing a Google Ads campaign, one of the most important variables to approve the budget is the unit cost per word. It is well known that trying to appear at the top of the first page of results costs a lot for certain words. Likewise, the cost also varies according to the country where the sponsored ad is to appear. Since the price of a word moves according to the demand of the competition we have to take into account the number of competitors active in this tool that exist in the other countries. For example, positioning in English words is much more expensive than in Italian words, given the great difference in competitors in one language and in the other.
It is also worth considering that sometimes we discard countries because in theory we think that in that country “there is a lot of local competition”, but in reality this is not the case due to other factors that we may not be aware of. For example, businesses in Venezuela cannot comfortably use sponsored links on Google because there is currently an exchange control in this country that limits the procurement of dollars that can be used for e-commerce. It is also necessary to take into account the exchange rate disparity that exists between two given countries, which is often not taken into account by large cost-per-click companies. For Google. the minimum cost of a click is 0.05 euros or dollars in Spain, Nicaragua or Peru. What these search engines have not taken into account is that 100 euros for a Spaniard may represent 10% of his salary while for another country those same 50 euros may represent 100% of his salary and consequently in one country he may spend more on this tool than in another.
Other food for thought:
a) In Europe, 50% of Internet users have broadband, but do you think this percentage is as high in other regions? Still customers with a speed of 56Kb are an important proportion, so pages with low weight are still the most read.
b) One of the best places to find an exporter or importer are certain portals created mostly by the government of each country where they have directories of companies looking for importers and companies looking for exporters.
Human Level Communications is an expert consultant in international SEO services as well as in the development of international search engine optimization campaigns. Since 2005, we have accumulated extensive experience in multi-language and multi-country website positioning.
