Webcertain organised a great International Search Summit 22nd of October in London. There were some key speakers from the search industry sharing their tips on how best to approach SEO in multiple markets
I have recapped some of the highlights from the day on this site and a few more on SEO Jo Blogs and written a full day write up on State of Digital.
International Content Outreach
Lisa Myers, CEO of Verve Search
Lisa as always, gave a very insightful and detailed presentation about International SEO. She also referenced a case study for a piece of work her company Verve Search completed for Hotel Club, it was a video about “Brighton on a Skateboard” and was called Sk88ssing. The point of any campaign that is made is that it has to be beneficial for social media which in turn will generate links back to the site.
Videos do not need to cost a fortune. The video in this campaign was under £1k. It is important to find people with passion who care about what they do. Our job as SEO and marketers is not just about generating links, it is thinking as a business person. This isn’t just something for the team at Verve to create as a one off, it is for the long term. With the video, there is an embed code and therefore if people like it, they can easily put it on their sites.
The result?
This video was mentioned in the papers. Several sites in Brighton, embedded the video, without Verve asking them to.
Main take away: If you create content that deserves link, then will get it. There is no point in getting links from low quality blogs and forums.
Lisa also mentioned that it is important to start using Google+ if you have not already. If you do not use Google+ now, you will be very far behind. It is very important to use rel=author and build the authority of your content writers.
SEO Localisation – A Case Study
Marta Olszewska from Ingersoll Rand
Marta spoke about her company Ingersoll Rand and the fact that they translated their website into many languages. However, they did not follow the location process, which means the translation was not done correctly and some words did not make sense.
When Marta joined, it became obvious that they needed to spend time in translating the content. They chose Webcertain to help them. They had to select very good translators for the job. They also created a style guide and glossary as it was important to check the accuracy of every term. The Webcertain team did a lot of keyword research and page by page mapping.
It was a big job and therefore they translated the first 80 pages with the keywords from the glossary already written. This process in itself took 3 months. There was also an additional QA once it was complete.
The biggest challenge was the balance between branded words versus the technical keywords. However, the hard work paid off. In May 2011, before the launch, there was minimal traffic to the different individual sites of Ingersoll Rand. By May 2013, after localisation, they started ranking for multi lingual keywords and saw 130% increase in visitors to EMEA site. The leads from French, Spanish, Italian and German speaking countries increased by 290%.
International Keyword Modelling
Immanuel Simonsen from WebCertain
Immanuel started the presentation by asking the audience “What is keyword modelling?
- It is making sense of the raw keyword data at hand.
- It is also getting into the minds of potential customers
- Understanding how customers search, in turn helping us identify opportunities
We need to start off on the right foot by selecting a good base list of keywords. When working across markets and languages, what could prevent us from getting the base list right? It is merely translating our base keyword list.
So we need to find the pattern then can combine to create search phrases. Can you keep this across different markets? Do the research and see if you can do this structure with your local teams.
So why have this framework?
- Pros – efficiency, structure
- Cons – lack of flexibility, missed opportunities
- Best practice is to look at search query reports. See if it covering everything,
International Web Analytics
Daniel Smulevich gave a great presentation, but he talked so fast, I was not able to take notes. Please find below his slides from ISS 2013.