By Motoko Hunt

Internationalizing websites for search success

When the internationalization of a website is mentioned, the first thing that comes to the site owner’s mind would probably be localizing the web content. It is a huge improvement since many site owners used to think that internationalization meant having a website in English and a few other languages. However, companies need to start thinking about the next evolution and start internationalizing their websites for search success.

 

According to a January 2009 comScore report, the global internet audience has surpassed one billion users, with more than 41% of these users coming from the Asia-Pacific region. Even more staggering are the nine billion searches done every month on Google, with 70% of them being done from outside the United States.

Many businesses, large and small, have noticed this data and realized Google is their new home page and need to take the steps necessary to be one click away from unprecedented direct-to-consumer market access that we would not have even dreamed of a year ago. Companies are already trying to maximize this opportunity by spinning out local language websites with content not only translated but also localized for each of the targeted markets, including separate websites targeting different English-speaking markets. However, creating linguistically correct content is only a part of the internationalization process, which many site owners find out after the fact when they are invisible to the masses on results pages of the mighty Google.

We need to segment this new set of challenges into three distinct pools: linguistic challenges, technical challenges and organizational challenges.

As you can imagine, integrating search engine-friendly best practices after the website has been localized and launched would be a project management’s nightmare, akin to ripping up the asphalt on Main Street because someone forgot to put in sewer drains. On the other hand, you could save time, money, pain and suffering simply by planning ahead and integrating the following into the workflow.

 

Linguistic challenges

Targeting multiple markets means your business and its websites must be prepared to handle different languages, cultures, business rules, behavioral patterns and, of course, keywords. A critical linguistic problem we face is that the search language of our customers does not often sync with the language of the website describing the same products or services. The essence of search marketing is simply creating intersections between our content and those people looking for that sort of information.

By speaking your customers’ language, you uncover opportunities to find new customers or better serve existing ones. How do you know what language your customers are speaking? Keyword research is the practice of mining various sources of data, mixed with intuition, a little brainstorming and a dash of guesswork. This is especially true when the target market uses multiple characters, as do the people of Japan. To find the optimal phrase may take extensive keyword research of the writing patterns that will bring greatest exposure for your website from search engines.

For example, the phrase baby carriers is translated into the Japanese phrase ベビーキャリア. Our keyword research shows this iteration has approximately 1,600 searches in a given month. Digging further, you’d find that there are actually a few other words that represent the same product. Unfortunately, in Japanese the word can be written in four different ways. Each of the four variations comes with different search demands:

抱っこ紐：12,100
抱っこひも：6,600
だっこひも：2,900
だっこ紐：1,300

In this case, the Japanese word with 12,100 searches should be used as the translation choice for baby carriers. By virtue of it being the most frequently searched, this can potentially bring the most exposure to the site.

Using the word with greatest searcher demand is the first goal in any search engine optimization (SEO) project. I have seen far too many localized websites that were nowhere to be found in the search results simply because the translator used a linguistically correct though not most popular phrase for the transition. This is common for many companies. They use phrases that are internally popular but are far from what a potential consumer would use to look for their products or services. The objective of your keyword strategy is to identify, prioritize and map a complete set of keywords that best matches the business objectives of your company. More importantly, they should match the terms searchers are using to find you.

This process consists of a number of steps, each of which is designed to make the case for or against a particular keyword by gathering and examining a variety of data. Look at the demand volumes provided by the search engines, your currently paid search program, conversion metrics, the content you have, your on-site search engine database and your competitions’ websites. Most importantly, conduct searches in the local search engines to see how many pages containing those phrases are currently indexed.

You should develop these lists both in English and the local language or languages. In many markets with certain global products, the locals may even use the English variation, a phonetic version or one of many local dialect versions of a word. In many cases you can get a head start if the translators developed a robust glossary of the key terms from your content.

Keyword research tools are now offered by search engines to assist marketers to research topics, identify search-volume data, and find additional permutations of their “root keywords.” The most popular free tool, aptly named Google Keyword Suggestion Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordTool External), is provided by Google. This is fairly straightforward to use. You simply select your country and language and add a keyword phrase in the keyword field, then click “get keyword ideas.” Google will return all of the variations of your phrase and an estimate of how many searches for each iteration of the phrase was done in the previous month, globally as well as in the country/language combination you selected.

Beyond just the obvious task of selecting the highest demand keyword phrases, you can research market trends and opportunities in new markets. Many companies are starting to use this data to help prioritize translation and internationalization work focusing on products and site segments that have the highest searcher demand in each of the target markets. If you have not already started integrating this step into your projects, you may want to start thinking about doing so. At least ask if the marketing teams have done it, since it is the first step of any search marketing program.

 

Technical challenges

Beyond the linguistic and internationalization challenges one faces when adapting a site for a new or multiple languages, a host of technical ones must be addressed as well.

As companies start to create new country or language versions of their web-sites, the question of how to host them arises. Should they register the local domain or just add the content to a subdirectory? Search marketing professionals have always recommended the adoption of the local top-level domain (ccTLD). However, for many companies, maintaining multiple sites is cost prohibitive. They often go without precious traffic from local search engines to save money on hosting and server management.

Many site owners complained about this, especially large multinationals, of which 85% favor subdirectories over ccTLDs. Google listened and now offers site owners the ability to designate specific sections of their sites as country specific using their geographical targeting tool.

For example, if you maintain all of your UK content in a /uk directory of your website, you can log into your Google Webmaster Tools account and set this feature so that everything under the /uk directory is exclusive to the United Kingdom. Once this is set, Google will then treat your /uk directory the same as it would if the content were hosted in the United Kingdom or sitting on a .co.uk domain. For more information on the geographic target tool, review Google’s support page.

Content management systems (CMS) make life easier by offering the ability to make a change to a master template, which can then be deployed to all country variations, thereby making global search optimization exponentially more effective by eliminating problems on a global scale rather than requiring individual country-level remediation.

Many of the major commercial and open-source CMS tools offer the ability to integrate key SEO functionality into them at all levels of the site. Often these are built into the site or in the form of plug-ins or modules developed to solve the most common problems inherent with the CMS not being search friendly out of the box. A CMS should allow for at least the following:

local language content integration
ability to use unique country and language meta tags
ability to use custom title tags
ability to use custom and dynamic meta tags ability to use custom H1 tags
ability to create search friendly URLs
ability to customize hyperlink text

It is important to take these features into consideration when selecting a CMS tool provider.

In order to properly assemble the content for the local language, most CMS tools leverage parameters in the URLs. These parameters are used to call the specific language content segments from the database or point to a specific subdirectory where the local content is stored.

Companies that opt to use language parameters in their URL structures often overcomplicate the URL or add too many parameters. You can see in Table 1 that there are various ways the countries and languages have been set for these major companies.

In the Acer example, half of the characters of the URL are doing nothing more than setting country and language codes, which can be handled much more efficiently. But the real problem is that search engines may interpret those multi-element parameters as a session ID, assume that it is not truly unique and fail to include it in the database, thus resulting in large sections of the local language site not being indexed.

Another problem caused by global expansion is the creation of site segments to target a region broadly while the local market content is being developed. This is common with Latin America, where companies launch a Spanish language section of the site they hope will cater to all of the Spanish-speaking countries. While this works for the site, it will actually hamper ranking well for any individual market since there are no signals to indicate applicability to any specific country. The geographic target tool described previously will not work, since there are no countries named LatAm, APAC or EMEA. You may, however, pick a single destination and map the regional content to a single country. This may be your best option if you are better equipped to do business in Argentina than Chile. You will gain traction in this dominant country while you develop content for the rest of the region.

I know what you are thinking: we will replicate the Spanish site multiple times and put them into unique country directories. This is an all too common occurrence for companies wanting to target the 400 million native Spanish internet users. Looking beyond the obvious legal, cultural and linguistic problems with this approach, the search engines will penalize you with a “duplicate content penalty.” The geographic target tool does help minimize this problem, but it only works for Google. The only real solution is to spend the time and effort to make content that is unique and relevant to each target location, and you will reduce your duplicate content exposure.

We have tackled the linguistic challenges of finding the right words and getting them into the optimal locations on the site, and the technical issues of setting up the CMS and making it easy for search engines to index and score our content. Now comes what many believe is the biggest challenge of all: getting your organization to come together and play nice for the greater good of Google traffic riches.

 

Organizational challenges

Sad to say, the organizational challenges are the biggest of all. The localization and internationalization community is all too familiar with the challenges of getting the disparate marketing and technical sides from the same organization to come together to create a finished product that hums and sings to local audiences. There is no one-size-fits-all organizational model for managing a search program. You might have to experiment to see what works for your organization.

For each of the typical search marketing functions, you need to look at each task and the ownership in each country, then decide whether to centralize them or give them to the extended team. When deciding which tasks to centralize, the most important guideline is whether the task is new for your organization or whether you already have a team that performs it — or should perform it. Much in search marketing requires changing the way someone’s existing job is done, such as a copywriter adding keywords to page titles or an information architect making template changes. Those tasks usually belong with your extended search team.

The single most successful search marketing best practice deployed by global companies has been adding search marketing expertise to internationalization and web development teams. By being part of the team, the search marketer will prevent the search crises you live with today by collaborating with the extended search team to maintain proper page tagging, avoid technology “downgrades,” head off ill-fated navigational designs, as well as dozens of design and infrastructure problems that could be debilitating to your inclusion and ranking well in search engines around the world.

Through standards sharing and best practices training, you can raise the level of knowledge of your local teams. By integrating search best practices directly into the ongoing translation, copywriting and content management workflow, you will create economies of scale leading to unparalleled success from one of the most effective marketing tactics ever used in business.