Visibility

Ensuring that your website gets noticed in a foreign market can be tough work. Local competition, linguistic barriers and cultural differences can all contribute to the success or failure of your website’s international reach.

Here are four top tips to ensure online success in the competitive global marketplace:

1.    Localisation
First and foremost, search engines from Google, through to Baidu in China, to Yandex in Russia, prefer localisation. In order to do well in competitive markets you need to analyse both, your local and global competition in each target market. For example, some search engines prefer that sites are hosted locally, with country-specific domain names.

2.    Don’t just translate your keywords – think like your target audience
Don’t base keyword research solely on translations from English to a particular language - neither for PPC nor SEO. Oban recently found that there was a ‘perfect’ German translation of a technology term but it had only 140 searches a month on it. OBAN Multilingual’s German team identified an alternative term, which had over 40,000 searches a month.

3.    Think Big! Think Global! Go for global conversions!
    Does your Website have the potential to deliver conversions globally? 2011 is     certainly the year to ensure it does. For those companies who are going     global,     Cultural Multivariate Testing should be part of the Marketing strategy.

    The Global recession has taught many online companies that focusing on just     one single market can be quite risky. It is obvious that the larger your target     audience is the higher is the potential of conversions. It is important to be     aware that as different as the people are, are their perceptions of websites.

    Our research has shown that one website layout very rarely appeals to all     cultures. As mentioned above, we know that solely translated SEO or PPC is     highly ineffective and it’s the same with content. As a company OBAN     Multilingual have been testing and learning about how different cultures react     to content for many years. What we’ve learnt is that cultures respond very     differently to factors such as language used (localisation vs. translation) or the     colours used for buttons. For example we’ve found that German users very     much prefer highly localised buttons, Headers and Calls to action whereas     the French actually convert best with translated elements.

Colour in sites is highly impactful with both the Chinese and Germans showing strong preferences which affect how they convert.

Oban Multilingual is the only search agency to have its own proprietary conversion testing platform and cultural database: GlobalMaxer, which is the
world’s leading international Conversion Optimisation
and Landing Page testing software. It supports all popular types of testing including Cultural Multivariate Testing (MVT), Split AB Testing, Hypervariate and Sequential Testing.

4.    Socialise efficiently – it’s not all Facebook and Twitter
Social Media can be a great marketing tool; however, it is used very differently across the globe. The below SNS Chart shows that global Social Networking platforms are as varied as the people using them. For example, in China QQ.com is by far the most popular social networking site, whereas our good old friends Facebook and Twitter are banned. To maximise the effects of social media marketing, make sure that your social media strategy is specifically tailored to the region and market you are targeting.



When it comes to taking your website to a foreign market, the one key fact to always remember is that localisation is the most important part of international search engine optimisation and marketing. Every country uses the internet and searches differently, and the differences can be huge. By researching the culture, the language, and the political and religious views of a region, as well as the internet trends, businesses will be able to develop an effective and successful online marketing strategy for the market they are aiming for.

And global success doesn’t have to be a fairy tale.