Visibility

Of the world's Internet market, 87 percent of the people on it are from outside the US, quite a drop from 1996 when two-thirds of the world’s Internet users were US-based. Indeed, Europe is home to more of the world’s online population than all the Americas combined. Add the burgeoning internet use in large populations in Asia and it becomes clear the best opportunities for website marketing will be outside the US.

Do you need a separate website to do business in another country? Yes. Have you ever found your way to a website in a foreign language and attempted to buy something on it, or even simply navigate it? Think about how confusing that was, and you may understand how confusing your US-based English language web site could look to visitors from other countries. Search engines too need specific signals to know whether to display your site to visitors in Australia or Austria, Bhutan or Bangladesh, Germany or Ghana.

Write Content in Your Customers’ Language

You will have better luck attracting customers in their own language, but there is more to it than simply translating your content.  Spanish in Spain is different from Spanish in Mexico, Argentina or the US. Stay away from automated translation tools and find a native speaker to help you.

Google’s keyword tool is a good place to start for basic keyword research, but be aware you may be missing some important local jargon. For example, in Sweden, searchers use a local word for “laptop” (which includes a character or two not used in English) nearly half the time. While “laptop” is used, if you optimize only for that search term you will miss close to half the queries. Similarly, in Germany, many searchers call a cell phone a “mobile”, some a “mobilefon”, but a great many also use the term “handy”. Likewise, in Brazil “Telemóvel” has a small fraction of the searches than the term “Celular”.

Help Search Engines Help Searches Find You

For each global market, you can avoid confusing the search engines by using an country-specific extension in the URL, such as “.pt” for Portugal or ‘“.br” for Brazil. You can further identify your target geo in your Google WebMaster Tools account in the space provided.

Locally sourced links provide invaluable guidance for search engines as well. Identifying linking opportunities is another way your native speaker can help, making link requests, which are best done personally and individually. Get your links from sites with a top level domain from the country you are targeting. If you have a lot of websites for different countries, avoid interlinking among them your primary link building effort. It won’t do you much good in your target country.

Where your website is hosted is much lower on the list of factors search engines weigh to identify the country you are targeting, as long as you have a country-specific top-level domain. If however, your domain is a “.com” only, with no other country-specific identifying factors, then where it is hosted becomes one of the few remaining identifying factors.

Learn the Leading Search Engines in the Markets You Target

While Google’s market share is near 100% in many countries in Europe, much more than in the United States, there are significant markets where local favorites are more popular. In Russia Yandex. In China, it’s Baidu. In fact, Google withdrew from mainland China last year to serve Hong Kong and Taiwan only.

In Japan formerly popular Yahoo! Japan announced plans to use Google results, instead of Bing, Google’s share of market in Japan will grow and probably dominate, making Google the new search engine to target in Japan.

In South Korea, local favorites Naver, Daum and Nate hold 90 percent of the market share, with Google and Yahoo! trailing with less than five percent together.

Basics for PPC in Other Countries

Starting a PPC campaign in Google-dominated markets is fairly straightforward from within your Adwords account, where you create separate campaigns for different countries. The tools and interfaces you already know -- AdWords, Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools -- should prove convenient support to successfully implement a PPC campaign. In the few countries where market share for Google and Yahoo! is small, you can use your Adwords and AdCenter accounts to target searchers there.  However, in those countries, Russia, China and South Korea, the lion’s share of search traffic goes to local favorites, Yandex, Baidu and Naver, respectively.

But knowing the ad platform is the least of what you need to attract future customers in foreign markets. You need to know how to speak to them in their own language, and equally important, understand what appeals to them. Landing pages, too need to speak to potential customers in their own languages.

Even your shopping cart and the methods of payment you offer need to be familiar to each culture. The credit card system we are accustomed to is not the norm everywhere. Nor even is Paypal. The Dutch prefer their own payment system “iDeal”, set up by a consortium of banks. Mexican online shoppers like their pre-paid “Todito” card. The French, Germans and British are all comfortable using bank cards, and Paypal for online purchase, but the Italians are very cautious about using credit cards online, and will often use just Paypal instead.

Social Media Around the World

Don’t expect to find everywhere all the features you like to use on Facebook in the US. Like most search and social media, Facebook rolls out new features, such as “Places”,  at home before other countries. Though the most-used social network worldwide, it’s not the top social media platform everywhere.

In Brazil, Orkut is more popular by a factor of 4X. What’s more, if you want to appeal to Brazilians, you should know Twitter is popular as well. Even more, Brazilians really love video; more than 85% of Brazilians online have viewed a video.

Meanwhile in neighboring Peru, Hi5, an interactive gaming site is the most popular social network site and among the most popular sites in Peru. Hi5 is a broadly international site and is available in 23 languages. Popular in many South American countries, and Portugal, North Africa and Asia, Hi5 lags behind Facebook and My Space overall, but reports 40 million visitors every month, and is available in 50 languages.

In China 146 million of the 420 million internet users there visit social networking sites, but not Facebook. Chinese engage mainly on Qzone, and, RenRen and Kaixin001. Qzone owner Tencent has 637 million active users on its QQ instant messaging system, and 492 million active users on Qzone itself, making it China’s most popular social network. China also has it’s own version of Twitter, Sina Weibo, which has more than 100 million registered micro-bloggers. Sina Weibo has been growing fast, and attracting Chinese away from SMS to Micro-blogging.

Russia is one of the most active social networking countries in Europe. A whopping 89 percent of Russians online have an account on one or more social networking sites, such as VKontakte which has 88 million accounts or Odnoklassniki,ru which has 45 million members.

In Germany StudiVz is more popular than Facebook, with students driving much of its success. Germany is the third largest network market in the world, after the US and China.

In the Netherlands, Hyves has more than three times more members than Facebook. Twitter, on the other hand, has become very popular as micro-blogging on it played a role in the most recent elections there.

Japan’s Mixi is the top site for socializing in Japan, and the second most popular is GREE. A mobile-only game site called Mobage Town is popular as well, particularly in light of the heavy use of mobile telephones in Japan, where many people have more than one.

In South Korea Cyworld has more than 20 million members among South Korean Internet vistors, and Facebook is far behind. South Korea’s second largest search engine Daum launched its own social network similar to Twitter in 2010.

Going global with your web marketing is likely to provide you with greater opportunity for success than marketing in the US alone. When you do, to make the most of your effort be sure to:
1.    Create individual sites for different countries
2.    Engage a native speaker to review your content to make sure it fits the target culture
3.    Be sure to find out what the local search terms for popular items are so that you can reach the widest market.
4.    Use country-specific top-level domains and locally sourced links to help search engines identify the country your are targeting.
5.    Target the leading search engine and social media in each market; it may not be Google or Facebook.