Local Strategies For International Business
-
A client of mine is in a field that Google (correctly) recognizes as international, and does get traffic and leads for this but they are bound by sales covenants to sell only in regional geographic territories in their country,
Other than PPC is there a strategy I can use to increase regional traffic? As mentioned, Google does not recognize this business as local.
-
Hi Wayne,
you case is interesting and, obviously, it would be a little bit easier offering a potential answer if - at least - you could tell us what is the market niche your client is operating.
I don't if you are asking the question having in mind ranking for keywords like "xyz in "region"", xyz in "region"", and so on.
Personally, I consider that the common product/service description pages should be just one and valid for all regions, than it should be in the conversion funnel, when people already are in a buying/requesting contact step, that you ask them in what region they reside, therefore funneling the customers to their regional funnels.
Then, what I would do in order to have the site earning more relevancy on a regional/local base, I'd design a content strategy that look at local problematics related to the products/services your client sells, so to obtain the attention of local influencers, local news site, local bloggers...
In this strategy I would not even exclude local offline marketing, paying always attention to have these very geo-targeted campaigns mirrored online in the site and social media profiles.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What strategy is better for a multilingual site for the SEO point of view?
Hi everyone, in a case for a site with two languages like spanish and english, how would do you deal with it? I can see 4 cases, which is better?? 1. With differents domains: mydomain.es (for spanish version) and mydomain.com (for english version). 2. With subfolder mydomain.com/es/ and mydomain.com/en/ 3. With Subdomain: es.mydomain.com and en.mydomain.com 4 With URL translation (any url is translated in ther languages but not use of subdomain or subfolder): mydominain.com/hola and mydomiain.com/hello Thanks very much for your answers (i love this forum). 🙂
International SEO | | webtematica0 -
Any Idea for International SEO in this complex situation?
Hi,
International SEO | | teconsite
a client of mine has a site with a domain name brand.es. They are a furniture manufacturer. They has a well known brand in its sector.
brand.com is registered by a US company. (Completly different activity) This client registered its domain name 10 years ago, and its audience was in Spain.
As it is a .es ccTLD it is directly geotargeted to Spain. 5 years ago, they began to export to other countries, and today they have distributors in a lot of countries like Italy, France, England, Portugal, Germany, and many more... As they are manufacturers and they sell their products to multiple locations worldwide, the language aproach seems to be the more efficient way to reach they users. The problem is that they are using a ccTLD domain brand.es, beacuse the .com domain was registered.
Actually the international organic traffic is very poor, mostly related to queries with the brand name. My question:
Is it possible to do international seo with a geotargeted domain .es?
Should they register a .com that doesn't match exactly their brand name? (it is a little difficult, beacause brandfurniture.com would be good for England, but not for Spain or France. )
Or should they focus their strategy with some ccTLDs for 3 or 4 of the main countries? (Not sure this would be an alternative... too much cost) I know, that in this situation there is no perfect solution, but I would appreciate your opinions.
Any Ideas ?????? Thank you!!0 -
Good or Bad? - buying a .com domain name that is already branded under a different county code like .nl but a different business model completely
For example - www.example.com (I purchase) and www.example.nl (is in use and well optimized but a different business model) Seeing that this business (example.com) will be based here in the USA and theirs (example.nl) is in the Netherlands and they are both completely different models, is this ok? They are well optimized for the name and it will be a little bit of a challenge to outdo them here in the US as far as the name goes, but the name is really good and the client wants it!
International SEO | | Cyclone1 -
Subdomains vs ccTLD in International SEO
I'm interested to see if anyone has any additional thoughts or recent experience on subdomains vs ccTLD for International SEO. An article I found on this site is from March 2011, so just wanted to check if this is still relevant? http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/folders-vs-subdomains-vs-cctld-in-international-seo-an-overview
International SEO | | edwardlewis0 -
Keyword selection for international company
Hi everyone, I am working on a new project for a telecommunications company with its target audience in various countries around Europe and USA. They only have 1 website in English and don’t have content specific to different countries. Ineed to choose keywords for this project but I am finding it quite challenging as usually my keywords are localised. In this case I cannot restrict keywords to any particular country. At the same time I know that it would be extremely tough to rank for generic keywords. What do you suggest?
International SEO | | ICON_Malta0 -
International Hub site: .uk vs domain vs subdomain
Financial company with 2 sites: 1- Mybrand.com for the US market.
International SEO | | FXDD
2- global.mybrand.com is the hub for international with selection for 10 languages: drop-down allows selecting between mybrand.jp, mybrand.fr, etc Now we have the opportunity to redesign the site from zero and I am exploring to get rid of the subdomain for the global site What would be your preference to use as the international hub? a) mybrand.co.uk: I have to use lawyers to get the URL from squatter b) mybrandGlobal.com : URL easy to get, and can be geo targeted using google webmaster tools. Cons: It might not rank as well as .co.uk in the UK, which is our biggest market c) global.mybrand.com-- pros: keep using it because it is aged and has some authority. Google might now see subdomains as part of TLD, thus making it a valid way to separate international from US .. Cons: SEO best practices advice to avoid subdomains because it might not pass full link value across domains. There is not really different content the subdomain, it is just the hub for international Thanks in advance for the help0 -
Internationally targetted subdomains and Duplicate content
A client has a site they'd like to translated into French, not for the french market but for french speaking countries. My research tells me the best way to implement this for this particular client is to create subfolders for each country. For ease of implementation I’ve decided against ccTLD’s and Sub Domains. So for example… I'll create www.website.com/mr/ for Mauritania and in GWT set this to target Mauritania. Excellent so far. But then I need to build another sub folder for Morocco. I'll then create www.website.com/ma/ for Morocco and in GWT set this to target Morocco. Now the content on these two sub folders will be exactly the same and I’m thinking about doing this for all French speaking African countries. It would be nice to use www.website.com/fr/ but in GWT you can only set one Target country. Duplicate content issues arise and my fear of perturbing the almighty Google becomes a possibility. My research indicates that I should simply canonical back to the page I want indexed. But I want them both to be indexed surely!? I therefore decided to share my situation with my fellow SEO’s to see if I’m being stupid or missing something simple both a distinct possibility!
International SEO | | eazytiger0 -
International SEO - auto geo-targetting
I read with interest the recent post on international SEO and the top level domain architecture approaches to local content: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/folders-vs-subdomains-vs-cctld-in-international-seo-an-overview#jtc135670 The issue I have is a little more complex: The business sells a wide variety of products (37) but one is by far and away the biggest and most popular. This means that due to the link profile of the various country sites and HQ site, search engines categorise the site according to this product (this is easily seen with the Google Adplanner) and the other product lines suffer as a result. The current architecture is to have a .com site and then individual ccTLD country sites, again with all products on each site. This creates an issue as in most countries the brand is not strong (compared to the keyword names and search volumes of the products) and so it is not that effective in generating organic traffic. The .com hogs much of the inbound links and the country sites themselves are not that well optimised for a number of reasons. A proposed solution has been to leverage the strength of the .com and the search volume for the product names, and to produce thematic sites based on each product: productA.brand.com
International SEO | | StevieCC
productB.brand.com
productC.brand.com In this way, the sites, content and link profiles are aligned around the more desirable products and we can expect improved organic search performance as a result (or at least ensure relevant traffic finds the relevant content fast). In terms of providing localised content, the plan was to use content mirroring and to then assign each content mirror to a specific geo-location using the webmaster tools console (and other SE equivilents). This is shown I think in one of Rand's videos. ProductA.brand.com/de/de Germany site for product A with unique German content
ProductA.brand.com/fr/fr French site for product A with unique French content This makes economic sense to me as to utilise the ccTLDs would result in hundreds of separate sites with all the licence and server considerations that entails. For example, for product A alone we would have to produce: productA.brand.de
productA.brand.fr
productA.brand.cn
productA.brand.jp
ect ect ect This just would not be sustainable in license/server costs alone across 37 products and 24 countries. However, I saw in a recent presentation at SES London that (auto) geo-targeting is risky, often doesn't work well for SEO and can even be seen as cloaking. I think the above strategy could still work, but perhaps we should avoid the use of auto-geotargetting altogether and hope the search engines alone do their job in getting users to the right content as we optimise the unique content for each country (and if they don't, ensure our desgn, UX and country selectors do the job instead). SEO guru consensus is to use the ccTLD if you own it, but as described above, in the real world that just isn't possible or practical given the company's strategic position. Which leads to the final question- we do own the brand ccTLDs- if they are directed back to the content mirror for the country on the .com, is there any SEO benefit in doing so aside from directing back any link juice associated with the domain)?0