At its core, search is about language. So how do you configure your SEO campaigns for an international (and multi-lingual) audience? Ugo Smith at Mediarun offers a guide to getting the most out of your search campaigns across multiple countries and territories.
Companies engaging in multilingual search are more often than not putting the cart before the horse. Too often a website is launched with multilingual capabilities and only then does the organisation bring the SEO team in to do their thing. SEO should be a consideration at the design stage and this applies doubly for multilingual sites.
Mediarun has been working on several multi-channel search strategies for clients targeting several territories and languages. In one recent key account the site was specced and built before any SEO techniques were even considered. As such, we faced the prospect of either redoing design work or operating under permanent restrictions.
The challenges we typically face fall into 3 categories: content, architecture and tracking.
A common oversight with content is that when dealing with English content the copy used on each territory tends to be duplicated. It’s perhaps understandably viewed as a time and cost saving, but in actual fact this should have been kept unique in order to cater for the local market, or canonicalised to avoid duplicate content issues with search engines.
Another popular pitfall is that the mother tongue of the business leads the architecture of the other language sites. Often this can lead to a complete disregard for the local target market, as navigation or popularity of the products can vary vastly on a per territory basis. Where SEO can help here is often the keyword research, which will immediately show how popularity for any given product or service can vary from country to country, regardless of what the sales data says.
Tracking is a rarer issue, yet plausible in many instances. A multi-territory enterprise may well choose to work with localised PPC agencies. When doing so, a problem that arises is the tracking and reporting. Typically for Google Analytics users, only one analytics account can be linked at one time to an AdWords account.
This is a problem the client may have foreseen and that, as online marketing professionals, we should be able to answer and provide solutions for the clients that work for them, just as much as they work for us. Collaboration and task ownership is what agencies need to embrace to avoid this latter issue from irritating clients and ultimately jeopardizing the whole operation.
So, for multinational organisations, addressing the SEOs in at the designs phase will save a lot of headaches down the line.
By Ugo Smith
Client Servicing Manager
Mediarun
www.mediarunsearch.co.uk/
