Five Ways to Maximise the Potential of Search Engine Marketing, Globally!
Search engine marketing refers to everything you do to promote your website and business on search engines. This includes search engine optimisation as well as pay per click advertising. Search engines are used by majority of people to gather information about a product/service/brand. While one can use search engine optimisation and PPC advertising for local marketing, these services can also help businesses maximise their reach across the globe.
If you plan to use search engine marketing for international benefits, you first need to understand some of the factors that may affect the performance of your international search engine marketing strategy. Not every nation across the world speaks and understands English language. There still are many countries where regional and national languages dominate over English language and their websites and search engines also give preferences to those languages. This is the reason why you need to consider different factors so that your website gets exposure and visibility on local search engines anywhere in the world.
Discussed below are some of the factors that must be taken into consideration in international search engine marketing-
- Targeting local keywords: When you are looking for exposure in global markets, a thorough research on creating international keyword list is necessary. If you just stick to English-speaking nations, you may be losing on a lot of traffic and potential customers from the non-English-speaking nations. This is the reason why you should interact with native search marketers and then work on your keyword list. The list should comprise of local and national language words and even the ones that are mashed up with English language.
- Advertising on local search engines and social media: Google doesn’t rule everywhere. While countries like Australia have a majority of population using Google as the most preferred search engine, countries like China have their own local search engines that dominate the market; and if you still focus your search engine optimisation and PPC strategies on Google, you are in for a loss. Moreover, social media websites in non-English speaking nations can also serve as a platform where you can get in touch your target audience.
- Focus on the character count: Most of the time, when a PPC ad in English is translated into another language, the character count is bound to increase. This can pose a problem in most cases because search engines allow only a limited characters in a PPC ad; so when your translated ad’s characters go beyond the permitted limit, your ad would not get a preference by that search engine. You should ensure that after the translation, the character count remains within limits, while the primary message of the ad remains intact.
- Don’t overlook English language: When you perform international search engine marketing, you shouldn’t avoid English altogether because there still are many countries that are English-speaking. Moreover, the search engine marketers should also take care of differentiating between the English used in different countries, such as Australia and US.
- Testing is critical: Whether it is international search engine marketing or local, testing is quintessential. Moreover, in SEM, having one ad and sticking to it does not bring complete success. It is important to create different ads and test their performance and then finalise the one that derives maximum results. This strategy helps in optimising the keywords that haven’t performed well.
