Global Marketing Ops
Web Translation – 3 Worlds Colliding
I spent last week speaking with a number of leading global marketers in London. We had a full day session with a number of great company presentations and some very open dialog about the operational challenges of global digital marketing and SEO web translation.
At the end of the day, I asked the group what was the single biggest takeaway for them from the session. The nearly unanimous response was the diagram below:
The Venn diagram represents three worlds that used to be completely separate and are now being forced to merge together for global marketers to achieve their objectives – and it is painful. The three circles represent the following supplier groups:
- Translation – Translation of content that is traditionally provided by Translation Service Providers
- Production – IT resources to produce digital assets and web pages most often provided today by internal IT or IT outsourcers
- Content Marketing – SEO content that is compelling to potential buyers and most often provided today by small, specialized SEO agencies
ANA Survey: 52% Ask Agencies to Cut Internal Costs
A very interesting survey from ANA that you should check out. The main takeaway:
“The good news is that comparatively few plan to cut agency compensation — only 17% of all respondents, which is the lowest since 2008. Instead, they are asking agencies to look for ways to cut costs internally. More than half (52%) of marketers surveyed will challenge their agencies with such a request during the course of this year.
In essence, agencies are being called on to share the burden of cost-efficiency. More marketers say they are under pressure to tightly manage their controllable spending. Last year 77% of respondents said they had been asked to control spending; that jumped to 84% this year.”
We are seeing this in our client base. At many companies Procurement is involved for the first time in agency spend and promoting a “decoupling” of agency spend to improve operational efficiency. Agencies would be used for what they do best (strategy, creative, campaign concepts, etc.) but the digital production, translation and web publishing would be performed by an operations focused outsourcing provider.
International SEO – Crawl, Walk, Run
Many companies we speak with are expressing frustration with their search engine rankings in countries outside of their home base. Most companies do a decent job with SEO in their home markets, but globally it tends to be a different story. A core part of the challenge for many of them is how they currently approach website translation. To assist them, we developed a 3 stage maturity model that you see below:
The majority of companies we speak with are still in the CRAWL phase and just now starting to take a look at international SEO search rankings and developing a solid keyword list in each market. For too long, translation and SEO have been artificially separated due to a separation in the vendor community between translators and SEO experts. These two worlds are now coming together and companies should look for a partner that has fully integrated SEO into the web translation process to effectively WALK. Some advanced companies in international SEO leading industries such as travel & hospitality are already in a RUN and achieving significant results.
Do you know where you stand in each of your global markets? If not, we offer a free Global SEO Analysis to help you begin the journey.
Website Localization + SEO – It’s Time to Drive Traffic to that International Site of Yours!
Global SEO and SEM – Is Anyone Doing it?
Last month, I attended SMX West, an annual three-day search and social media marketing event in San Jose California.
During one of the Q&A sessions, an audience member asked the distinguished panel of search experts if they could recommend an international SEO tool to help his organization’s global web presence. He said they were doing a great job with SEO in the U.S market, but really struggled in other markets. The panel of experts all looked at each other, shrugged their shoulders and told him there were some tools out there, but nothing they would trust.
The truth is, while international SEO tools may provide some insight, all too often many organizations lack an operational component for their multi-market SEO strategy – leaving highly-relevant, keyword opportunities untapped and failing to meet on-page and off-page SEO best practices for global search engines. Their translated websites rank poorly across different search engines even though they perform very well in the home market. So how do top brands ensure consistent SEO performance globally?
Well, I caught up with this person after the session was over, and I told him about Lionbridge’s approach to website translation and global search services. I suggested he contact one of our global SEO experts for a free, 30 minute consultation to see how we can help. It can be an important first step in learning how to improve your international SEO results.
URL Management for a Global Business
As an Internet professional, I care a lot about URLs. Whereas some casual surfers may never notice what appears in the address bar of the browser, I am constantly looking at the URL to give me context about what I am looking at… Where does this page fall within the site hierarchy? is it protected by HTTPS? Was I redirected to a phishing site?
I am not the only one who cares about URLs. Search engines care about them too. We hear about search engine friendly URLs but the most important thing is that the URL is the unique identifier that a search engine uses to catalog its index. If you care about getting found in a search, you better make it easy for both users and search engines to be able to understand what information is available at each of your URLs.
When you run a global website that serves multiple markets and languages, the problem of URL management gets harder because you are adding more dimensions to your site for the search engines to understand. You want your localized content to appear in search results so that audiences go to the sites that have been localized to serve them.
URLs play a big part of that because they can help a search engine segment and group content. You want your global URLs to communicate the following information.
- The website that published the content
- The purpose of the content and where it fits into the site
- The market that the content is primarily intended for (as in country)
- The language that the content is written in
