It might be natural to think that internet marketing is actually the same thing as global internet marketing since you can access web content from all over the world. But if you’ve decided to market your products or services internationally, you will have to do it in a way that offers the best site and most appropriate message to your various audiences.
Among other things, this involves choosing the right language and interface for your users’ locations while taking into account the multitude of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) factors for a global marketing campaign. As many of you are aware, the internet enables less expensive and efficient online international distribution options for media products and informational types of products. Software companies are the most obvious examples of those that can save by distributing their products online all over the world.
When it comes to SEO, one of the most important technical decisions you need to make before getting started with your global Internet marketing campaign is how to manage the many international domains. What you decide doesn’t just potentially affect your rankings, but also how well you will be able to manage each of your sites and even how much you end up investing in this marketing endeavor.
There are two options when it comes to launching websites in different countries. First, you can host all of the different language variations on one site and separate the languages by subdomains or subdirectories. The second option is to create a seperate site for each language you are targeting.
If you choose the first option, you will probably have greater centralized control when it comes to the site’s management and better SEO because all of the links will be coming in to one singular domain. This method can also be more effective when it comes to suppressing the possibility of duplicate content in the search engines.
If you go with the second option, you will probably spend less. You can start with one site and then add others one by one if you feel it is feasible. Contrary to the first option, by having multiple sites, you will rank better in the country-specific search engines. Because using this method allows you to set up country specific hosting, you can target your SEO efforts to specific countries. It often makes sense to host your site in the country being targeted.
Another important concept to understand at the onset of your global internet marketing campaign is that you can’t do your keyword research in English and just translate to your target markets’ languages in order to be successful. You need to do extensive keyword research in the language of the market you are targeting. The best case scenario would be to have a native speaker supervise or do the keyword research. The very least you should do is to use a foreign language/English dictionary that includes idiomatic expressions and is as local to the target market as possible.
