SEO and local market orientation for international expansion

In my last column, I addressed the company the benefits of an international SEO strategyand the first advantage was complementing your broader global strategic plan.

This is critical alignment, especially when it comes to how you plan to deploy sites to target these markets.

Managing multiple global websites not only requires resources to create and maintain, but must also add value to users in the target market.

How many sites on the market are too many?

Over the years, I’ve seen many companies translate their site into another language, such as Spanish or Arabic, and then try to “maximize their investment” by cloning a local version in each market that speaks that language.

For one company, this approach resulted in 1,600 separate websites and more than 18 million websites, most of which were not indexed, as Google treated these pages as duplicates.

On Twitter Recently, John Mueller of Google answered a question from a post asking if the English language version was a good strategy for EMEA markets.

His response was, “It looks like you have 78 URLs for the same content.”

He went on to say, “Looks like it’s the same page, there’s no real reason to index multiple versions.”

Develop your focus on the local market

Local market orientation is a delicate balance between managing the expectations and needs of customers in a foreign market with the goals, resources and capabilities of your organization.

When planning, you need to consider each potential market in terms of localization to local business requirements, user behavior, user expectations, language, currency, and any other elements that will encourage customer participation in the market.

Simply cloning an existing website into another language and then submitting it to Google is not enough.

Suggested previous article tools to help you identify new markets which have consumer demand and facilitate cross-border business.

Yours content strategy will be driven by your local marketing orientation, forcing you to plan the entire conversion chain and help determine whether this site is a monolingual global site, a localized marketplace, or a language-specific site, and whether the technology adapts to the user on demand. . dynamically.

This matrix will often guide your technological requirements.

Too many companies are too late in the enlargement process to realize that you are not doing business with countries or regions, but with people.

When it comes to transactions with people, you can’t avoid the Rubik’s Cube of different versions.

People in the target market speak a certain language, use a certain currency and live in a certain location.

Dedicated sites for market, language or currency

Companies planning global expansion need to make more long-term and short-term decisions.

If you look at their crystal ball, what does their complete expansion look like?

Expanding into a single additional market is very different from several markets in different parts of the world.

In the early stages of enlargement, these decisions can be easy.

An Austrian company can target Germany relatively easily, as they both speak German, use the euro and have contracts for cross-border shipments.

Do they even need another website in this case?

Simply enabling the shipping calculator and VAT management may be all you need.

It gets more complicated when an American website wants to target Mexico.

It will need a way to organize its Spanish websites, disguised prices in beets, ensure that purchased products can be sent to a customer’s location in Mexico, and inform consumers if there are additional costs for tariffs.

When you have Mexican infrastructure, we may be tempted to expand further south to Argentina, Peru or Chile.

Should we use the same website in Spanish and use a currency converter and a shipping manager, or are there specific market requirements and language differences that will require us to use separate market sites?

I have seen several companies launch ‘EU’ websites targeting the European Union using the euro.

They are cloning a global website on the “.eu” domain, converting prices into euros and speculating that they can magically target this region using a common currency and legal structure.

It sounds logical, but despite using the same currency, most markets speak different languages, which is why they don’t attract enough visitors to survive.

Visual or technical orientation

Once you decide on your web structure, you will need to consider using visual orientation, such as forcing the user to use a country / language selector to choose which site they want, or technical orientation using a visitor’s physical location or language preference. them to a specific website.

There are many articles on the challenges of using a user’s local Internet address to direct users to specific sites based on where they accessed the site, and on possible cultural errors in using one country’s national flag to represent the language in different markets.

For both methods, it is crucial to test the implementation to ensure that search engines can access all the available content for any method.

Typically, the selection pages set a cookie that records the user’s choice to eliminate the selection step in the future.

Although great for users, search engines are often blocked from accessing any of the routes, as they will not accept cookies that prevent them from accessing any of the local websites.

Similarly, an IP and language detection system is designed to direct users to specific versions of a website.

This is very common for e-commerce sites with market-specific prices and / or business rules in specific markets.

Unfortunately, this will often restrict search engines from entering these sites.

Therefore, it is crucial to ensure that there are exceptions to the rules that allow search engines, including Google, to access any website they request, as you do not know where your sites are coming from.

Conclusion

While there is no easy answer to the question of how many global websites you should have or the number of pages within each, it is best practice to decide according to your business and marketing needs and not just because you can.

Managing a successful multinational online presence requires detailed planning to ensure that the content you introduce adds value to users in your target market, which encourages collaboration.

At the same time, it should meet the increasingly stringent requirements of Google to be relevant, authoritative, and unique enough to justify its indexing.

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