Five SEO Tips for Global Marketing
If your small business is online and marketing to customers all over the world, chances are you need to reach more customers all the time with a broadly appealing marketing campaign to go with your broadly appealing products and services. Selling products and making your business website available to customers around the world is obviously rewarding, but it can also represent many challenges that businesses in smaller markets don’t have to worry about. SEO is extremely important for a business of any size to find new customers and allow them to find you. When your marketing reach crosses international borders, fine-tuning your SEO practices becomes even more important.
Here are five SEO tips for global marketing that will boost traffic to your business website:
- Research keywords and phrases. Adapting the content of your site to fit commonly searched keywords and phrases is SEO 101, but when you’re trying to market to people in different countries who may adhere to different cultures and speak different languages, you’ll have to refine your keyword analytics even further. Consider culture-specific user behavior and put your SEO content through a local review process if possible. Another factor to consider is different search engines. Google has a global reach, but in Russia, for example, the dominant search engine is Yandex, which uses a different algorithm.
- Adapt your content. One of the best SEO practices is to produce useful, actionable, and high-quality content. In order to make your content appealing and useful to people in other parts of the world, you have to adapt some of your content to fit in better with local cultures and customs. Make sure your content is localized to different target audiences and the language they use.
- Test, test, test. The more your SEO content grows to reach more people, the more testing you should run on the effectiveness of your content. A few metrics to look for in order to ensure that people are reading your content in your target locales around the world, are organic search rates, keywords that referred visitors to pages on your site, and where people are coming from. Keep an eye on which SEO content is doing better in which areas. You can use this data to improve your content in some areas quickly and efficiently.
- Research your local audiences. Similar to learning about which keywords and phrases are most effective in certain areas, learning about your different audiences around the world will help you craft content that is appealing to them. This is more than getting the right keywords together. By learning about your customers in India, for example, you can create content that is more relevant to their lives and presented in a way that is more familiar, drawing more traffic.
- Trust in the experts. From local native language-speaking advertising and SEO experts to local marketing agencies, global marketing experts are out there waiting to help you frame your content to bring in traffic from sources around the world.
Taking your marketing efforts and your business global is a big step in the development of your business. With added opportunity to bring your products and services to people around the world comes the added responsibility of maintaining a positive brand image in the minds of people with disparate cultural beliefs and user preferences.