In This Chapter

• Targeting international audiences
• Identifying opportunities
• Quantifying how many people search

Throughout this book, we talk mainly about what to do to optimize for search engines in the United States, but what about the international market? What about Europe, Latin America, and Asia? This minibook covers what you need to know about working on an international level.

In this chapter, you discover all the basics you need to know to start thinking globally. Cultures and languages vary across the globe, and if you don't properly adjust your market strategy for your international audiences, you risk failure.

You also need to be aware of the different opportunities in international search and how many people out there are using search engines. Not to worry: We have an overview all ready for you in this chapter.

Targeting International Users

Say that you decide to take your business to the international markets. You know that a market exists for classic car customization, and it will generate a whole lot more revenue for you and your company.

Before you get started, remember that when doing business in other countries, you have to be aware of laws other than those of the United States. Unfortunately, to make things difficult on all of us, there is no such thing as a standard international copyright law. National laws, to no one's surprise, apply only to businesses operating within that country. Two countries can barely agree on pizza toppings, metaphorically speaking, let alone a standard international law. Although international law goes beyond the scope of this book, we caution you to look into the laws governing copyright and business before entering an international market.

Along with the technicalities of international copyright laws, you have to think about certain challenges when you're gearing up to start working in the international markets. First of all, be aware of the different browsers that other countries use. Not all of them use Chrome or Mozilla Firefox, so when designing or tailoring your international website, you need to be aware of the constraints of whatever particular browser is popular in your target country or region. This is why good coding is so important. Remember to always test your web pages in a validator, such as the one at the World Wide Web Consortium’s website, www.w3.org. (You can find more on validating your code in Book IV, Chapter 4.)

Second, the way people access the Internet varies across the globe. Mobile devices (smartphones) far exceed the number of desktop or laptop computers in developing countries. For example, in the world’s most populous nation, China, 85.8 percent of the 649 million Internet users access the web with mobile devices, according to a report by the China Internet Network Information Center as of December 2014. To put those statistics in perspective, the number of Chinese Internet users already outnumbers the total U.S. population by two to one. Yet 649 million represents only 47.9 percent of China’s population — so the Chinese market still has a lot of room to grow. Marketers who want to target China must focus on mobile apps and mobile-friendly websites. A mobile-focused strategy is essential for many other countries, as well.

In countries such as Indonesia, India, and others, Internet access is not a given. There are ongoing efforts by Google, Facebook, and other tech giants to expand the reach of the web in places where connections either don’t exist or are very slow (2G speed, for example, compared to the 4G or 5G networks in the U.S.). If you hope to reach these markets with your online business, your site or application software needs to have streamlined code and small file sizes that can travel well through slow connections. In 2015, Google began using transcoding to simplify web pages when sending results to slow connections. Google has rolled this out in Indonesia, India, and Brazil so far. Transcoding drastically reduces the elements on a web page, removing large images and so forth, so it can load faster. Therefore, if you plan to do online business in these countries, we recommend that you trim your web pages down so that Google’s transcoding hatchet doesn’t have to butcher them too much.

Another thing you need to be aware of is any difference in currency. It affects shipping rates and the prices of the goods you’re trying to sell. For example, at the time of this writing, 1 Euro is the equivalent of 1.07 United States dollars (USD), whereas 1 Japanese yen is the equivalent of .0083 USD. But the exchange rates fluctuate continually, so you need to revise accordingly. A good currency converter is available at XE (www.xe.com/ucc).

The language barrier is a fairly tricky one to navigate as well. Some countries have multiple languages spoken by the populace. For example, in the Netherlands, two main languages are spoken by the population, Dutch and Frisian, but most people speak English or German as well. Marketing in the correct language can be trickier than you'd think. Having local input is the best way to make sure you're getting it right.

Be especially aware of cultural dimensions within that language. Spanish is spoken in many different countries, but it has variations, and what can be a completely innocent word in one country can be a very nasty slang term in another. For example, in the U.S., when you want to determine what’s causing a problem, you say you're trying to get to the “root” of the problem. In Australia, “root” is slang for something very different, and using it in a business meeting will probably get you accused of sexual harassment. Understanding the impact of culture on the language is equally important. In Japanese culture, 4 is an unlucky number (the way 13 is in America), so if your company has “four” in its title or you use it in advertisements, you might want to make a couple of tweaks if you’re going to expand into the Japanese business market.

Some other issues to think about with language include

• Local terms: Especially important if you hope to do local business within that country. Your classic-car customization site for southern Germany could use a listing of dealerships in Bavaria, for instance.
• Spelling and grammar differences: The Spanish spoken in Spain and the Spanish spoken in Central or South America all have some key differences when it comes to spelling and grammar. For one thing, in Spain, Spanish makes use of verb conjugations for the plural second person, vosotros, whereas Spanish spoken in Mexico rarely uses it. French natives say that the dialect spoken in Quebec sounds “wrong” to them.
• Popular culture references: Avoid dating yourself. Keep up on the pop culture trends in a country if you have a business that would be related (such as one that sells clothing). For example, a Bulgarian site would appear dated if it talked about a popular sitcom that hasn’t been on the air in the United States in many years.
• Translation issues: You risk a big hit to your credibility if you’re not careful translating your website content from its original language to a new one. For example, in Wales, a website that had been improperly translated for a school listed its staff as a “stave made out of wood” in Welsh. We suggest adding someone who’s fluent in both English and the language to which you’re translating the site (and preferably someone actually from that country) to your content building and marketing process.
• Vocal culture issues: You may run into issues with languages that have different sounds than English. For example, Japanese has no “t” sound. The closest approximation is “tsu,” so a word such as “fruit” would sound like “fruits” when pronounced in Japanese.
• Visual design: Figure out a country’s particular design aesthetic. Study the visual culture of the target country. In both Japan and Korea, to look professional, your website needs a lot of bright colors and a busy page full of words, images, and links. Google's ultra-clean home page doesn't play well to that audience, but Yahoo's busy portal does. In England, however, a super busy and bright page is considered completely unprofessional. Similarly, color is an important consideration. In China, white is the color of death, much as black is here in the United States — probably not the best choice for your wedding site. Use red on your Chinese site instead because it represents joy in Chinese culture.

When you are doing keyword research, make sure to do it in the target language. Don’t just copy/paste into an online translator to find keywords to try. You run the risk of missing out on nuances, subtleties, and all the cultural references you could be using in keywords, and you may run afoul of many tricky conjugation rules.

In order to truly succeed in a different language, we recommend you get experts in each country on your team. Do you have a German classic-car customization website? Hire someone from Germany who’s an expert in classic cars. She can tell you about the different slang terms Germans use for cars, what kinds of cars are popular, and any of the cultural references you’d miss if you relied on just yourself and a German dictionary.

When translating the website copy you already have, consider language issues and don’t try to translate your pages exactly from one language to another. To get the best final result for your foreign-language website, follow these steps:

1. Break the original English down into main bullet points.
2. Have a professional translate this text into the second language.

3. Use that document to create your actual website text for your target language.

   Hire a marketer who’s native to the language and region so that you know he’s getting the tone and slang right. Web marketer Ian McAerin refers to this process as the Symantec Expression Equivalency Document (SEED) process.

If all else fails, use the local rule of thumb. Use local terms, local keywords, and local structure in order to truly succeed in your foreign market. People have started bandying about words such as glocal, which is defined as localizing the global market.

The impact of languages and culture should not be underestimated. By understanding culture and languages, you can adapt better, succeed in your efforts to localize, and get more sales and respect. Showing an interest in communicating in the native language boosts interest in your company.

Identifying Opportunities for Your International Site

When you expand into the international market, you have three options when it comes to your site architecture: one site, multiple sites, or a combination of the two. With one site, you can take advantage of subdomains (smaller domains linked to bigger domains) and subdirectories that point to pages in different languages or are geared toward specific countries. Multiple sites require you to build an individual site for every country with a local ccTLD, preferably hosted in the country.

Each of these three options has its pros and cons. It’s up to you to do the research and figure out what’s best for your company in your target markets. However, you can understand the differences by reading the details we cover in the following sections.

Realizing How People Search

In this section, we introduce you to how the rest of the world searches the web by discussing several internationally popular search engines. First up is Google, as shown in Figure 1-1. This figure shows the French, Japanese, and Brazilian versions of the site.

Google is available pretty much everywhere. Here’s a small sampling of the languages in which Google is available: Afrikaans, Amharic, Basque, Bihari, Chinese, Dutch, Finnish, Hindi, Kazakh, Malay, Norwegian, Quechua, Slovak, Tagalog, Twi, Urdu, Yiddish, and Zulu. This list is only a sample, but our point is that Google is available pretty much across the globe.

As for the other U.S. players, statistics from NetMarketShare as of May 2015 show that Yahoo makes up approximately 4 percent of the global search market worldwide, whereas Bing, has roughly twice that. Ask (www.ask.com in the U.S.) is a relatively minor player (with less than 1 percent). One extremely important thing to note here is that YouTube actually gets more searches per month than Yahoo.

Even search engines local to the target country are mostly backfilled (supplemented when the local engine's index doesn’t have sufficient inventory) by Google’s search index and paid ads.

Not every country uses Yahoo, Bing, or Google. Hold on tight: We're going to take a whirlwind tour around the global to look at some of the most important search engine brands outside the United States.

Baidu (www.baidu.com, shown in Figure 1-2) is the leading Chinese search engine for websites, audio files, and images. Baidu has an index of more than 740 million web pages, 80 million images, and 10 million multimedia files, and it attracts 5.5 million visitors annually.

Yandex (www.yandex.com, shown in Figure 1-3), launched in 1997, is a Russian search engine and the largest Russian web portal. Its name comes from the phrase Yet Another Indexer.

Seznam (www.seznam.cz, shown in Figure 1-4) is a Czech search engine that has a customizable home page and other features such as email, maps, and a company database.

Naver (www.naver.com, shown in Figure 1-5) is the most popular search portal in South Korea. Naver was launched in June 1999, the first portal in Korea that used its own proprietary search engine. Naver received 2 billion queries in August 2007, accounting for more than 70 percent of all search queries in Korea and making it the fifth most-used search engine in the world, following Google, Baidu, Bing, and Yahoo.

Najdi.si (www.najdi.si, shown in Figure 1-6) is a Slovenian search engine and web portal created by Interseek. It's the most-visited website in Slovenia.

These are just a sampling of the search engines across the world. So where do you want to advertise? Simple answer: maybe on all of them. You always want to be where your customers are looking for you. However, if that’s too broad and a little daunting, narrow your target market by demographic or search engine. Start out small and then expand as time goes on (depending on your success in the international markets, of course).

It’s time for a small, shameless plug: With the SEOToolSet (available in two versions, a free Lite version and a Pro version for just $89 a month from www.seotoolset.com), you can do three things for international search that make your international campaigns easier to manage:

• Perform on-page SEO content analysis. The Single Page Analyzer (available in its full-featured form in the free SEOToolSet Lite) supports about 20 languages. Use it to review how keywords are optimized on your page, with a natural language analysis that scores your content, makes suggested improvements, and visually maps your page themes.
• Monitor keywords in a number of engines, including country-specific engines. We think the Ranking Monitor (available only in SEOToolSet Pro) is a great tool, and not just because we built it. You can monitor your pages’ rankings for your target keywords on search engines in close to 20 countries.
• Share data with an international team. With an unlimited number of users able to access and manage your projects, you can empower your multinational team with the data available through the SEOToolSet. Every report and interface can be displayed in 20 languages with the switch of a drop-down menu.

For more about the capabilities of the SEOToolSet, check out Book III, Chapter 2.