miercuri, 20 martie 2013

Discover your International Online Potential

Discover your International Online Potential


Discover your International Online Potential

Posted: 19 Mar 2013 07:15 PM PDT

Posted by Aleyda Solis

One of the major advantages of having a web-based business presence is the opportunity to reach a global audience, eliminating many of the restrictions and costs that a “physical” international presence might have. Nonetheless, from my day to day experience I’ve found that there is still a lack of vision of opportunity to target international markets.

Ask yourself: when was the last time you checked how many visitors were coming to your site from other countries? Even if you have a small or mid-sized business, do you frequently check what's the percentage of your current conversions coming from other countries and languages than yours?

Besides being an International SEO, I consider myself a cultural broker: I'm a Nicaraguan living in Madrid. I speak English and French in addition to my native language, which is Spanish. I love to travel and I've had the opportunity to do it because of work (and also for pleasure) to places like Argentina, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Turkey, Tunisia, Montenegro, and Russia (on top of other, more common destinations such as the UK, US, France, Italy, Ireland, The Netherlands, Switzerland, etc.). I've had Nicaraguan, Argentinian, Dutch, Spanish, and German bosses in the past, and now I have an American one.

I've also worked in the past as an SEO for:

  • A Dutch owned online marketing agency in Spain with clients from all over Europe
  • A Spanish owned Vertical Web portal targeting eight Latin American and European countries
  • An online marketing provider for Spanish small businesses owned by a French group
  • A Russian company targeting the European market

Currently, I work for an American online marketing agency targeting international clients. As you can see, the “international” component has been a common characteristic in my personal and professional life, and I cannot imagine how there's still a lack of vision and openness towards international activities, which at the end means lost opportunities for businesses and a less rich and competitive market that will end up also hurting the audience.

Unfortunately, this frequently happens because of misconceptions about expanding internationally. I want to share and clarify here three of the most common misconceptions I find in my every day work. 


Misconception 1: I'm already in the most profitable market so I don't care about the rest

I'm not telling you to leave your current market (and lose your current profits), but to take others into consideration. At the beginning, it will be only to assess the opportunities there, so really, you don't have anything to lose. I also know that we all tend to feel like we're already in the "center of everything," and a couple of World Maps from different countries are the best proof of it:

The World map according to our perception

According to a recent eMarketer study, B2C E-commerce sales will grow 18.3% to $1.298 trillion worldwide and Asia-Pacific will surpass North America to become the world's No. 1 market:

B2C Ecommerce Sales Share Worldwide by Region

Additionally, in the same study we can see how Asia-Pacific and Western Europe as regions have both more digital buyers (Internet users who buy goods online) than North America:

Worldwide Digital Buyers

As you can see, nowadays no one is really in the "center." There's enough globally "distributed" potential out there, and the highest growing ones are in countries like China. Wake up! This means more exciting possibilities for your business internationally.


Misconception: Local Businesses don't need to have an International Online Presence

You don't need to be a large international corporation, an E-commerce business, or a completely online based business to benefit from a website version in other languages, or targeting to other countries.

Although from a business perspective it can be more straight-forward for these type of sites to identify an international potential, there are also different types of local businesses that have an international audience, or that can additionally benefit from having an international online presence since their target market can be also abroad or from abroad. For example:

  • Language schools: such as Spanish language schools in Spain or Latin America targeting US, German, or UK students
  • Summer camps: like international summer camps in Switzerland targeting children from abroad
  • Centric hostels and apartments rentals: located in touristic or centric areas that can be attractive for tourists
  • Traditional restaurants and bars: that usually have tourists as clients 
  • Volunteering organizations: looking to attract volunteers from abroad
  • Gift and flower shops: which might also suitable to send from audience abroad
  • Traditional art and crafts shops: that look to sell typical local goods to foreigners 
  • Traditional food and drinks shops: like cured ham factories or wineries in Spain looking to sell their products abroad  

You need additional incentive? Check-out a mobile search engine result page for a local query in Google.es for "restaurantes en brooklyn" (restaurants in Brooklyn), that in English would be usually taken by Google maps results:

Local SERP for Spanish Query

There's a huge opportunity, indeed. You can definitely achieve additional benefit targeting an International audience even if you are not a big company or based internationally!


Misconception 3: Expanding Internationally is Expensive

It's true that expanding your site presence internationally might have higher costs than your local language version. From deploying the web platform in a new ccTLD (or subdirectory if it's not a country but a language targeted version) to localizing (not only translating) the content, having native language support to expand your content and social media marketing strategies (that also need to take into consideration the local audience behavior, using the criteria I've previously shared in this post), as well as to support your outreach and community management efforts in this other language. 

Nonetheless, this doesn't mean that expanding your site internationally should be non-beneficial for you. When you implement complete research to identify the potential organic traffic and conversion from each language and country and on the other that you validate from the start, this potential revenue will surpass the costs related to your international web presence:

International SEO: Revenue vs Costs

With this information, you will be able to calculate the expected international presence (as well as international SEO process) return on investment:

International SEO ROI

I've seen too many situations where this type of initial assessment hasn't been done, and because of this, there are businesses that have ended up with many languages or country site versions that have been developed without any clear strategy. They don't  answer to a business related goal and are simply the "literal translation" of the main site version. Of course they're not profitable! But it's because the international web project hasn't been correctly developed.

Another common signal when an international site presence hasn't been effectively planned or executed is when the site owner tells you that they have their UK site version with the exact same content than the US one but they cannot afford to update it to make it unique, specifically targeting the UK audience.

If they cannot afford it, this means that they're at the moment not getting any or enough benefit from it; whether because they likely don't have any strategy behind and this presence is potentially not optimized, or because there's not enough potential in this market and they haven't been able to identify this since they didn't do any research previously. It's also our work to advise our clients effectively from the start, validate the potential benefit from any international development or SEO project, and warn them if, for some reason, there's no potential.

Additionally, we can run pilot projects to test the market, just with the most important product or services categories with targeted landing pages, so as you can see there's no excuse for a non-successful international web presence that has been effectively planned, well developed, and optimized.


International SEO Potential

With a couple of very simple analysis steps that shouldn't take much of your time you can have an overview of the potential your business might have internationally:

Google Analytics International Traffic

Check your International traffic status

Go to the Audience > Demographics > Location & Language reports in Google Analytics to check the percentage of your website visitors coming from other countries and using browsers in other languages.

Verify the volume and trends from the last couple of years for all of your traffic as well for only organic and compare them:

  • Is there a high or growing percentage of visitors coming from other countries? 
  • What's the volume and trend of conversions and the conversion rate of visitors coming from other countries?
  • What's the traffic source of visitors coming from other countries? Direct, organic, referrals?
  • Which are the keywords and pages attracting this international traffic?

You have a bit more of time? If so, go to Google Webmaster Tools to validate the visibility you're getting already in Google search result pages from other countries, along with the queries and pages impressions and clicks.

International Search Queries

This is just your starting point that will help you to prioritize the international markets where you have already have activity and might be initially easier to start with.

Nonetheless, if numbers are not high it doesn't mean you don't have potential, but that maybe your efforts have been highly targeted to your current audience and haven't had a high international impact until now, so you will likely need to work harder at the beginning.

International Keyword Research with Google AdWords Keyword Tool

Identify your International Organic potential

Prioritize the countries that you have already identified with higher traffic activity in your Website before and do a quick keyword research for each one of them by selecting the desired location and language from the Google's Keyword Tool Advanced Options and Filters.

You can use the keywords that you have identified in the previous analysis that are already giving visibility and traffic from these countries and languages. If you didn't identify any keyword information in the previous analysis and the country you need to research is non-English speaking (or in other language than yours), then the best option at this level is to take the keywords in your current language, use Google Translate to quickly translate them to the desired one and use them for this initial and quick validation and overview (It's important to note that this is ok just for this initial, quick analysis, since these keywords will likely have errors and missing opportunities. You can do a complete international SEO research and process without speaking the language but with the right process and local language support, as I've described in this post).

Use the exact match type (to get more "realistic" data that you can expect for each specific keywords) and check:

  • What's the local monthly search volume for the relevant keywords in each of the countries and languages?
  • Are there more suggested keyword ideas with a high level of search volume?

Refine and expand the research according to the suggestions you get for them.

You have a bit more of time? If so, go to SEMRush or Search Metrics Essentials (that support many countries) to identify more keywords opportunities:

Additional Keywords Ideas from SEMRush

Is there a high search volume potential for the verified countries and languages? If so, congratulations! This are great news.

It's time then for you to develop a full International SEO research to understand, validate and plan your strategy, and verify your potential costs, revenue, and ROI, taking into consideration all of the necessary aspects, from a business abd language to technical capacity, restrictions, and requirements.

To do this, take a look and follow the step-by-step guide I published some weeks ago about it: 

How to start your international web presence


International SEO Doubts? Let me know in the comments!

Images under Creative Commons taken from Flickr.


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Announcing the March Mozscape Index!

Posted: 19 Mar 2013 07:17 AM PDT

Posted by carinoverturf

It's that time again - the latest Mozscape index is now live! Data is now refreshed across all the SEOmoz applications - Open Site Explorer, the MozbarPRO campaigns, and the Mozscape API.

This index finished up in just 13 days, thanks again to all the improvements our Big Data Processing team has been implementing to make our Mozscape processing pipeline more efficient. The team continues to dial out our virtual private cloud in Virginia as well as tweak, tune, and improve the time it takes to process 82 billion URLs.

We've been saying we're close to releasing our first index created on our own hardware - and now we really are! Stay tuned for a deep dive blog post into why and how we built our own private cloud.

This index was kicked off the first week of March, so data in this index will span from late January through February, with a large percentage of crawl data from the last half of February.

Here are the metrics for this latest index:

  • 83,122,215,182 (83 billion) URLs
  • 12,140,091,376 (12.1 billion) Subdomains
  • 141,967,157 (142 million) Root Domains
  • 801,586,268,337 (802 billion) Links
  • Followed vs. Nofollowed
    • 2.21% of all links found were nofollowed
    • 55.23% of nofollowed links are internal
    • 44.77% are external
  • Rel Canonical - 15.70% of all pages now employ a rel=canonical tag
  • The average page has 74 links on it
    • 63.56 internal links on average
    • 10.65 external links on average

And the following correlations with Google's US search results:

  • Page Authority - 0.35
  • Domain Authority - 0.19
  • MozRank - 0.24
  • Linking Root Domains - 0.30
  • Total Links - 0.25
  • External Links - 0.29

Crawl histogram for the March Mozscape index

We always love to hear your thoughts! And remember, if you're ever curious about when Mozscape next updates, you can check the calendar here. We also maintain a list of previous index updates with metrics here.


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Photo of the Day: A St. Patrick's Day Lunch

The White House Your Daily Snapshot for
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
 

Photo of the Day: A St. Patrick's Day Lunch

Yesterday, President Obama held a bilateral meeting with Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny at the White House before the two leaders traveled to the Capitol for a St. Patrick's Day Luncheon. In their Oval Office meeting -- the fifth since President Obama took office -- the President and Taoiseach reaffirmed the incredible bond between the United States and Ireland.

See more from the President's meeting with Enda Kenny.

President Barack Obama, Taoiseach Enda Kenny of Ireland, and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, talk together during a St. Patrick’s Day lunch at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., March 19, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

President Barack Obama, Taoiseach Enda Kenny of Ireland, and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, talk together during a St. Patrick’s Day lunch at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., March 19, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

In Case You Missed It

Here are some of the top stories from the White House blog:

President Obama's Bracket for the 2013 NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament
President Obama makes his picks for the 2013 NCAA men's basketball tournament. He has Louisville, Ohio State, Florida, and Indiana headed to the Final Four.

Affordable Care Act at 3: Holding Insurance Companies Accountable
The Department of Health and Human Services is celebrating the 3rd anniversary of the Affordable Care Act.

Encouraging Young Women to Become the Leaders and Advocates of Tomorrow
In honor of Women’s History Month, the White House welcomes a group of high school students to participate in a conversation with a mentoring panel featuring women from a diverse range of fields and backgrounds.

Today's Schedule

All times are Eastern Daylight Time (EDT).

6:25 AM: The President arrives Tel Aviv, Israel

6:30 AM: The President takes part in an official arrival ceremony

7:30 AM: The President views an Iron Dome Battery

8:00 AM: The Vice President hosts a St. Patrick’s Day breakfast in honor of Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny

10:00 AM: The President arrives at the residence of President Peres and signs the guest book

10:10 AM: The President participates in a tree planting ceremony

10:15 AM: The President and his delegation participate in a photo with President Peres and his delegation

10:25 AM: The President and President Peres of Israel hold a restricted bilateral meeting

11:05 AM: The President and President Peres of Israel deliver statements to the press

11:30 AM: The President arrives at the residence of Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel and signs the guest book

11:45 AM: The President and Prime Minister Netanyahu hold a restricted bilateral meeting

2:05 PM: The President and Prime Minister Netanyahu hold a press conference WhiteHouse.gov/live

2:50 PM: The President and Prime Minister Netanyahu meet for a working dinner

WhiteHouse.gov/live Indicates that the event will be live-streamed on WhiteHouse.gov/Live

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Seth's Blog : Us vs. us

 

Us vs. us

Who would cheat at the church social?

"Hey, I know we were supposed to bring handmade food, but I bought some cheap macaroni salad and dumped it into a bowl and faked it..." "Yeah, well I got in line twice and got more food than anyone else, in fact, one old guy (my cousin!) didn't even get any..." "That's nothing! I didn't bother to bring anything..."

No one brags about subverting a community they care about, because your peers will ostracize you (and why would you hurt a group that you are part of?). No, we feed the community first, then we take our share.

On the other hand, we often return a rental car unwashed, or turn a blind eye to someone sneaking into the movies, or fail to report a mistake in our favor by the credit card company. That's because those institutions are apart from us, not a part of us. They transact with us, charge us interest, take what they can get. This is not a community to be fed, it's merely a way to buy what we need, and the system is impersonal, industrial, apparently made to be gamed.

With online tribes and communities, though, instead of adopting the principle of not peeing in your own pool, it's easy to slip into the same mindset of us vs. them. When you sock puppet wikipedia, or vandalize the comments on a blog, who is being hurt?

One way to look at the web is that it's billions of people, anonymous, a shooting gallery of others. The other way is to visualize the smaller circles, the tribes of interdependent human beings helping and being helped.

When we steal or disrupt or game the system of a community we care about, we hurt everyone we say we're connected to, and thus hurt ourselves.

Online communities are quick to form, but they're just as quick to fade, to become less open and to become less trusting because sometimes we have a cultural orientation toward taking, not giving. We forget to feed the network first, to take care of those we care about.

Here's a possible standard: is it open, fair and good for others? If it's not, the community asks that you take your selfish antics somewhere else.

Call me naive, but I think it's possible (and likely) that the digital tribes we're forming are going to actually change things for the better. But not until we embrace the fact that we are us.


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