Get going with international SEO

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up.

Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the very international woman of SEO, Head of Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Hello, internet people. Hello, everyone around the world, in all of the different countries and all of the different languages. Bon Jour. Hello, everyone.

Mordy Oberstein:

Hint! Hint! Well, I didn't do the whole like, the amazing, fantastic ... I only did one. I'm sorry.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, it's fine. I think you've run out. I think that's it. I think we’re all done.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

It's interesting because when we first joined, people were saying congratulations and I said Thank you a million times and then I moved on to thank you in other languages as well, which is totally up for this podcast.

Mordy Oberstein:

It is.

Crystal Carter:

Because we're talking about international SEO.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, spoiler, spoiler. Before we get to that, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can now subscribe to our new monthly newsletter, Searchlight, where you get full coverage of the SEO world with tips, updates, and links to great SEO content from the Wix SEO hub. The same Wix, by the way, that automatically adds HF link to your pages as part of a wider multilingual offering. Of course, you can add custom texts and to the head element as well. Why am I telling you this? Well, Crystal already told you. Because today we're talking about international SEO.

Crystal Carter:

Worldwide.

Mordy Oberstein:

Worldwide. Forget going mobile, today we're going global. Well, don't forget going mobile. We're diving into the ins and outs of international SEO with special guest host, a leader of all the SEOs herself. Aleyda Solis will stop by to share about how to get started, international SEO and what you need to know, what to focus on, what not to focus on, and common mistakes and miss from the world of international SEO.

Plus, we have a special deep thought for you today as Rock Content's own Giuseppe Caltabiano shares his thoughts on building a global content strategy and of course with the snappies of SEO News for you and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness.

So [foreign language 00:02:21] and welcome as episode number 40 of the SERP's Up podcast is here to help show you that an SEO, it's a small world after all.

Crystal Carter:

I wasn't really expecting that reference, but it was entirely worth it. Yes, we're super, super excited to have Aleyda here, Aleyda, the queen of SEO, of all SEO but particularly fantastic at international SEO. I remember using the tool that Aleyda had on her website for HF link back in the day. It's still awesome, so do check that out and it's incredibly useful. So amazingly pleased to have Aleyda here talking about this incredible, super useful, really valuable topic.

Mordy Oberstein:

So if you have a website and you're trying to grow your business beyond just the region where you exist now you're going to need international SEO, which is kind of complicated. Which is why, if aliens were to come to Earth and say to all the SEOs, take us to your leader, we would take them to Aleyda. With that, here's Aleyda. Hi Aleyda.

Aleyda Solis:

Hello Mordy. How are you? Hello, crystal. You're too kind and oh my God, Mordy, if this SEO thing goes ever to hell because of AI or whatever, you can definitely become a radio announcer because I am so, so very impressed.

Mordy Oberstein:

I've always wanted to be a baseball color commentator. That's like my dream job, outside of SEO.

Aleyda Solis:

You can tell.

Mordy Oberstein:

I’ll bring Glenn Gabe with me. We'll do it together.

Aleyda Solis:

You totally should, isn't it? I mean, why not? Mordy please and you can launch definitely-

Mordy Oberstein:

I already have too many podcasts going on. I don't know if I can handle another.

Aleyda Solis:

Please. And you can launch our Wix website too.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's true. Really quickly. That's good point. Before we get going in this, we need to do some plugging. There's learning.io, there's the SEOFOMO newsletter, which I freaking love because I don't have time to scour the internet for good SEO resources. So you do it for me.

Crystal Carter:

It's amazing.

Aleyda Solis:

Well, you're welcome. You're welcome. No, I'm so very happy that it's read, that it's useful. Learningseo.io, by the way, is getting a refresh look in the following weeks and I'm very excited about that. And yes, hopefully with this I help people to clarify the most... On one hand, the most common doubts about SEO, which I get asked all the time, so I just refer them to the website on one hand. And then on the other hand, with SEOFOMO, it's interesting because the other day, I think it was Cindy Crum, who did this poll over Twitter about why was the reason or main reasons why SEOs had imposter syndrome.

Crystal Carter:

Yes, I saw that.

Aleyda Solis:

And one of the top reasons that got most votes was like the fear of missing out. So I can definitely see the how SEO promo definitely address that particular problem, which I have to say I am totally there. That is the reason of why I launch it in the first place. And I can also definitely see how in recent months because of AI, this new launches and the race of search engine engines to trying to be the first ones and all of these updates that Google is right now launching and conflating many, many times. So important to keep up.

Mordy Oberstein:

And it's so hard. There's so many updates

Crystal Carter:

And I think particularly one of the things that can be a challenge for somebody who's working across international markets is not only do you have to keep up with it for the general SEO, but you also have to keep up with it for international SEO. And you also have to keep up with it for all the different versions of the same website that you might have and making sure that all of those things work all together. So yeah, it can be a big challenge and we are so appreciative to you for making the effort to help with that. It's incredibly valuable.

Mordy Oberstein:

Since we're talking about international SEO, what's the first thing you think our audience should know about international SEO before anything else?

Aleyda Solis:

Yes. Well, the number one thing probably, because I think that that is the main mistake or assumption that many people do when they want to go international, is that it's not only about hreflang annotations, I mean hreflang annotations is a method, is a mechanism. It's a configuration that is helpful to specify and inform Google that we have other versions of our website pages that can be in different languages or the same or different languages targeting other countries. However, is not the only way to specify that. There are many signals that will take into account and it is a must to align them all because at the end of the day, it's the consistency and alignment of all of the signals that will let go realize that, oh yes, this is not a duplication of product A page, but it's actually product A page targeted to the UK, while you have already your version for the US.

So it is fundamental that we are all aware about this different signals and it's just not about just hreflang annotations and that's it. And I believe that all the potentially most common issue that I see, most common problem, that I have clients, even larger enterprises, that you will think that they have all of these resources in the world. But at the end of the day, there are always restrictions and always limits of what you can do in your time and where it makes sense to allocate resources to. It's this problem when they end up having too many international versions when you launch a lot because you want to target abroad. Somebody has told you that, oh, there's opportunity to grow, launch in Spanish, in Italian, launch to the UK in English, you already know the language.

So you launched the UK to Australia, et cetera. And then you realize you cannot maintain, you cannot support all of these different websites and then all of a sudden it's like, oh yes, I understand that. Then they learn that they need to localize their... Even if it is in the same language, their version for the UK, because they may be sell sneakers in the US and all of a sudden they realize that they are not called sneakers in the UK, but they are called trainers for example, or runners or whatever. So they need to optimize the content accordingly, but they don't have the resources. So it is fundamental to well initially assess the different international markets that actually makes sense for your business. What is the search potential? What is the search demand? If it is worth it for you? The market will be able to generate at some point enough traffic for you to have successful conversions and a successful ROI?

And from an investment standpoint, it's something also doable for you? If you have the capacity to localize the content, if you have the capacity to translate it, if it is a market that speak a completely different language, for example. And then be able to give the, let's say a good support for users coming from those countries too, because it's not only like a one-off type of investment too. So all of the things, I believe that these two areas of let's say misunderstanding and I'll say that these are the most to, let's say, think or understand or when starting. And based on that to be able to start with the proper process of yes audience research, keyword research, completion research, to then establish the best web structure to use to tackle the different markets. And start with those markets where there's a much higher potential with less competition, et cetera, et cetera.

Crystal Carter:

So you talked a lot about assessing whether or not the market's worth it, the ROI from a sort of a monetary point of view, but also the capacity within your team. In the past, I've used PPC as a sort of little bit of a litmus test there because you can sort of do a quick PPC test and see did we get any bites. And if not, then we'll turn the PPC off and come back. I don't know if there's other tools or other things you would recommend for testing a market.

Aleyda Solis:

100%. I mean I believe with the most forward is assessing the search volume of the queries, of the top queries that are search of your relevant topic, to describe your product or your services or your content. And then you can do a topological market type of assessment and say, okay, if I end up even getting at some point in a year, like 10% of this potential search volume and traffic and with my current conversion rate, how many conversions and is this going to be ROI positive at that point? But the point of the PPC campaign, I think is very smart to do, especially when there are markets that might look to be very big. But again, it depends on the context and depends on your offering. Because the markets that, for example, like Brazil or India are huge or Indonesia, these are huge market.

However, they also have a different type of, let's say capacity of an online investment or buying online their type of behavior and capacity to buying things because of how much they earned et cetera, it's different than in the US or in Europe. For example, I have clients that there might be getting more traffic from a few Latin American markets like Mexico, that is a big, big market. But because of the type of offering or product or sophistication and also price point, most of the conversions happen in Spain. In their case like 60% of the search potential or traffic, but the conversions and revenue is much higher. So it's not only a purely search potential, but also the behavior, the sophistication, the price point. So for that PPC is 100% a very small way to do it. Just launching your top products.

Actually, this is also another misunderstanding, right? Thinking that you need to go all in. No, you can launch a pilot project with your homepage and your top three, top five products, those that you have identified that have a higher search potential in that market. And then, yeah, a PPC campaign landing page is well optimized to see what is the buying behavior, the buying journey, and the conversion rate that you get and if it's ROI positive or not, and it's aligned to your expectations or not.

Crystal Carter:

And I think there's so much there around the cultural understandings as well. So you talked about market capabilities and things like that. I either worked with a client who did a lot of stuff in the... It was a health test and they were working in the UK. They also wanted to do stuff in South Africa because it was a really good market for them. And they were like, we want to put a video on the page. And the team we were working with in South Africa was like, we have the most expensive mobile data in the world. Do not put a video on the page because no one will watch it, for instance. And so I think understanding some of those cultural machinations can be such a big, big player.

Aleyda Solis:

It's interesting that you mentioned that, because also it's not only about... And I think that in SEO, purely in SEO, we tend to think about how to maximize the signals to the Googlebot at the end and yes, the Googlebot tries to, let's say, simulate the experience of the user. But at the end of the day, depending on the location and depending on the context of what particular product or information or not, users will have their own, let's say, bias or cultural bias. So for example, I have this company right now in France and their offering has to do a lot about healthcare or fitness type of products. And because health, there's a universal search system in France, so they use the French users, visitors, people, they are very used to see whatever health information in with the .Fr ccTLD.

So anything that is not in the .Fr ccTLD and it has to do about health, they double question it, if it is really for them and if it's really worthy and if it is really reliable, because they are so used that it is a national thing. So in their case, they were very well optimized, very well ranking already for their core terms, but their conversions and the click rate of the SERPs, you could tell that they were poorer, the ones that should be expected for those positions.

So the solution here beyond and before they grow much further is to, okay, let's start doing a few tests with a .Fr ccTLD and if the tests are successful, we will need to migrate. And this is something crazy that for 99% of the cases or scenarios, I will say, are you crazy? Why are you going to migrate just because of this? Migration is the worst case scenario that some of the higher efforts type of actions in SEO. But this one of those edge cases that we can see that from a business standpoint, it actually will make a lot of sense for them in the future. So it is now or never pretty much to assess that.

Mordy Oberstein:

How do you get ahead of that as opposed to realizing after the fact? Do you have a process? How do you find whether it be something like culturally like that or it's like we don't call sneakers, sneakers, we call them runners, whatever it is. I'm from New York, so we call soda, soda, we're from Brooklyn, it's soda or whatever. If you're from Michigan, it's called pop. I know that because I'm from the US. But if you're coming from say England and you want to target the Michigan soda population, you better call it pop. How do you get ahead of that?

Aleyda Solis:

The best way to do it is with good old keyword research, competition research, analysis research. Also the more localized, the more granular it can be, the best it will be of course, because there might be variations in the different terms depending on the specific location. And many, many services or products are not launched at a national level either, even if we're targeting countries. So some things might make sense more than others and they change a lot based on the context or industry. It also depends a lot on the, let's say, on your particular business model too. So for example SaaS, you might think about all SaaS have... There are the same type of product, the same business models. So they will tend to have the same type of international targeting and it's not the case. So for example, if you are an accounting SaaS software, it does make sense for you and you can go and take a look at a lot of accounting softwares out there.

They will tend to be country targeted. Not because you search necessarily about accounting software or accounting systems in different ways. In English for example, in across the different English-speaking countries, no, but because their offering actually changes for country because their tax solution or accounting solution is integrated with local banking and local taxing and different type of rules and conditions depending on the country taxing and accounting laws. However, if we go to other type of SaaS like productivity SaaS or product management SaaS, you can see that in this other type of offering, most of them are language targeted because most of project management tools are called in the same way, independently of the country. In English for example, you call project management software in the UK, in the US, in Australia. And they're offering, their personality won't change. It's changes is trivial. It's like the pricing and they can change that dynamically and it's not such a big change that is worth it to create different type of versions.

So you can see that there's a very... From red it doesn't changes it all to green. It doesn't change to nothing or there's a midpoint that it changes just a bit, but it doesn't compensate to create country versions. And the best way to assess that is really to do very granular keyword competition research. See which are the websites ranking for your top queries in that particular location that you want to run for and see which are the terms that are actually used of those best ranking ones, see how they address and what is their offering, what is their web structure are their ccTLDs? Are they subdomains, subdirectories and how they are explaining, describing, wording the product or the service and take that as an input to assess further.

Mordy Oberstein:

And that's a really good point about laws, because I think it's multiple times where the laws of Pacific region around them say... I think one of the case I was looking at was car insurance. The laws in different countries around car insurance will create different needs within the market and totally different queries that are now relevant, that won't be relevant in other markets. Let me ask you another question though. What if you're targeting, let's say a country like Belgium, where it's not just, okay, they have different laws, let's say England. It's in the country itself, they speak different languages.

Aleyda Solis:

Yeah, 100%. It's the same with Canada, right? English and French too. And there are quite a few countries like that. Well, it depends on really the search volume and the search potential that each one of these languages have, right? In the case of Belgium for example, most of the searches are the most popular languages will be French and then also Flemish, which is very, very like Dutch. But again, it's like, okay, again, your capacity where most of the searches for your product are happening in French or in Flemish and based on that to prioritize accordingly. Because indeed, so for example, in Spain actually, you can take that to the very extreme and it might not necessarily be worthy. Spanish is the language that everybody knows internationally about Spain. But the original languages are very well used regionally too. So in Catalonia it's Catalan.

I live in the Basque Country actually in Spain and the Basque language is completely different to anything else out there. And then the Galician language. So I mean you can go very granular if you want, but again, this is not about being let's say politically correct or being super granular because of course that will be the ideal work, whatever. But we don't have unlimited resources. What we really want is that this new versions generate money, generate sales, generate traffic, and these are ROI positives.

So at the end of the day, just think about what are the languages that your audience in that country are actually searching for your products on services. And here, coincidentally again, speaking about car rentals, is one of those sectors or businesses where it actually makes sense to enable an English version in Spain for your website because of the target market, the audience. These are a lot of international travelers, holiday makers, whatever, coming here, renting cars. So there is a non-trivial search volume about hiring cars in Barcelona, renting cars in Madrid. Actually that is another edge case where it actually makes sense to enable an English version in Spain, in France, in non-speaking English countries, 100%.

Crystal Carter:

I think it can get very complicated, but I think it's worthwhile because I think it demonstrates trust. So we have a great article from Adriana Stein talking about translation versus localization. And I think that when people can see that... And again, it's worthwhile. So for instance, if you were a hyper-local business that was in the Basque Country and was serving people for traditional Basque Country activities or something like that, it would make sense for you to connect with them in that language. And if you're searching on the SERP and you see that that's written in that language and they know the terms that are related to the thing, then you go, okay, these people know what they're talking about, they actually know what's going on. This isn't somebody who just pressed a button to translate this. They actually know they actually care. And I think that that can be really useful.

Aleyda Solis:

100%. I mean if you do really have the capacity and the resources and if it is an important market for you, you should totally go ahead. And if it is a minimum effort too, you should definitely go ahead and do the extra mile and personalize because that can make a complete difference for it. So for example, in my case, I was back in the day, I am originally from Nicaragua. When I was living still in Nicaragua and Nicaragua is such a small country, it's also a poor country. So we were so very used to get all of this marketing actions in TV even or in Billboard or whatever, that we're so obviously not targeted at Nicaragua because we actually speak, like the way that we word things in Spanish is like in Argentina, like with the dos. So we put an accent at the end of each, pretty much conjugation and the verbs.

And we don't say two, we say dos. And we had a lot of these billboards and TV ads and whatever with the two and we were like, oh, this was just generic ads for all Latin American people, whatever is not for us. But then it made all, little by little you could tell that they were making more efforts toward things to change things. And it was a minimum thing really pretty much to change up a couple of wordings. The rest was exactly the same, but at least they took care and this is actually really for us. The engagement and I think the connection with the brand or the offering increase.

Crystal Carter:

Absolutely. I've heard SEOs talk about some of the communities where you get sort of hybrid languages. So there was somebody who was from Mexico and she was from the north of Mexico. Ms. Marie White actually was talking about this and she's from the north of Mexico and she was like, we need Spanglish. And they were like, what? She was like, people on the border of the United States and Mexico, everybody speaks Spanglish. And so they started adding in some of that into some of their copy and they started to get a lot of good response from that because also people have phones where they're searching both in English and in Spanish. And this is going to happen in lots of places where there's people who speak multiple languages. I don't know if you have any tips or any examples from sort of hybrid searches and adapting for that.

Aleyda Solis:

So for example, again, it depends a lot on the industry, but the industry, that can be crazy. Speaking about car rental, car rental in Spanish, you can say in so many different ways. So this is one industry that if you are for in, it really needs to be very well localized, especially because also a lot of the queries are also with location, connected with location, with your current city or the city where you want to go. And you can call “carro”, “coche”, just three terms for the same thing, for car. And the same also where the property... I have had quite a lot of clients across different countries in the property market. And for apartment in Spanish you can call it [foreign language 00:24:35]. So three different ways again for the same thing.

And well, it's the same in the UK and the US flats and apartment. But in Spanish I think that because there are so many different countries that have it as a native language, there's so many different correct ways to say it. So especially for this very localized services and products, car rental, property, it's very, very worthy to go very granular, double check and validate how they are the right way or the relevant way to call it in that particular market. Because it's definitely going to change not only the name of the locations or the countries, but the term too, very likely.

Crystal Carter:

Can I ask you one question about attending technical? So sometimes when I worked on the international SEO campaigns or international SEO projects. I've seen it where sometimes Google can't figure out which one is the main one, even when you canonicalize it. And I don't know if you've seen that and if you have any sort of recommendations for how to address that particular challenge.

Aleyda Solis:

Yes, thank you very much for asking that. Actually, I think that this scenarios happen when you have a very, very established powerful, popular original version that you had... Usually the US one, that then it perform a little bit also like the global one for a while. And then you have, let's say a UK version or an Indian version, they are also in the same language. However, well they target their own audience. And in those particular scenarios we may see that the copy might be very, very similar because it actually makes sense because in that particular context, the product, the service is actually searched with the same terms. And in general the behavior of the user connecting to them, it's very similar. And so it's harder for Google to understand which is the right version. Even if you implement hreflang, remember that hreflang is one of many signals.

So for those particular scenarios, what I highly, highly recommend to do to help Google further, is to add the name of the country in the metadata, add the name of the country or the location or the offices in case you have offices or subsidiaries or partners within the copy. The information that you are targeting those particular markets, personalize the message. So whatever examples or testimonials or information, give additional signals that, oh, this is for India, this is for the UK. And also a typical mistake that I see websites doing all the time is that in the country picker that the menu, the global menu that you may have, many of these are JavaScript generated, they are not crawlable. The links are always going to the homepage of the alternate version. Know your product A page should cross-link to your product A page in India, to your product A page in the US, in the UK.

So the product A page in the US that has millions of backlinks can pass that link popularity accordingly to the product page of other countries. Rather than product page in other countries never be able to rank or not showing enough popularity to rule and not ranking because of that, right? So I believe that good crosslinking is critical. Localizing everything, every single signal that you can give to Google. This is especially important when you are targeting different countries with the same language. As examples of indeed like how your product make the life easier for relevant audience within that country. All these additional signals also help a lot. And of course hreflang notations, correct canonicalization too, in each one of these pages, that is also important.

And if you have the capacity to promote within the relevant country to attract backlinks of local specific websites that will point to that particular country web version, the best will be, because many, many times the US slash global version was the one that existed before. All of the backlinks from India are still pointing also only to the US and the UK point to the US one rather than the relevant version. So little by little like that, you are able to give the right signals for Google to run the relevant version of the website.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's a great way to put it. You're helping Google. It's really complicated. I think they have a really hard time as somebody who lives in a non-English speaking country, but only searches for the most part in English. I get all sorts of cross results all the time. Google really does sometimes have a really hard time figuring it out. I've worked on sites where they're showing the wrong page and it was completely on Google's end to understand what was what.

Aleyda Solis:

Google thinks that I am a British living in Spain. I am all the time shown ads. And in Google discover too, recommend reads for British in Spain because I guess that's because they identified that a lot of British expat here or live in Spain by the way, that since I am searching in English so much, I should be a British living in Spain.

Mordy Oberstein:

The opposite I have. I only search in English basically, and Google discover will show me stuff in Hebrew now. I never search, I don't know what I'm looking at. Don't show that to me. But I'm getting used to knowledge panels-

Aleyda Solis:

Opportunity for you to learn Hebrew.

Mordy Oberstein:

Nati, Head of SEO, he gives me a hard time about knowing Hebrew well enough. So I think it's him behind the scenes pushing Google to let me learn more Hebrew.

Aleyda Solis:

100%.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's a conspiracy. Aleyda, thank you so much for coming on. Don't forget to follow Aleyda on Twitter, on LinkedIn.

Aleyda Solis:

If you're not following Aleyda Solis.

Mordy Oberstein:

If you're not already, it's @aleyda on Twitter. We'll link to your profile in the show notes. And of course it's learningseo.io and subscribe, subscribe, subscribe to the SEOFOMO and now the marketing FOMO newsletters.

Aleyda Solis:

Just reached a thousand subscribers a week ago and I'm actually preparing it for this Wix edition too. I'm so very excited too. Because in SEO we are also sometimes too isolated focusing on it. And there's so much happening in other markets, in other channels of marketing by the way. And we can learn a lot from them and leverage, learn to leverage them and to, yeah... That's definitely interesting.

Crystal Carter:

As well as Crawling Mondays as well as remoters.net.

Aleyda Solis:

Oh right.

Crystal Carter:

As well as Remoters.net SEO. So yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

Aleyda, thank you for everything you do for the community.

Aleyda Solis:

No, thank you for the opportunity to share with you and everything what you do too. Really appreciate it.

Mordy Oberstein:

So one of the things that Aleyda touched on, which as a content person and as an expat myself kind of irks me about international strategies, that sometimes you don't fully appreciate how hard it is to actually localize the content to best align, not with the GEO’s language, but with the cultural idiosyncrasies and so forth. So we thought we get a serious expert on content to share their thoughts on building an international content strategy so that Crystal and I could offer you a very, very special version of a deep thought with Crystal and Mordy. Except this time it's not a deep thought with Crystal and Mordy. Let's get into what Giuseppe had to say first. Take it away, Giuseppe.

Giuseppe Caltabiano:

Well thank you for having me first of all. That's a very good question. Now let me say, despite the pandemic, my passion for traveling has not changed. In a way, it has been a constant of my life, whether I was on road for business or pleasure. The reason why I'm saying this is that travel really fueled my passion for global marketing, specifically for global content marketing. My travels have given me a better understanding of the world. But the reality is, when I launched my first new global content marketing program for Schneider Electric, that was 10 years ago. I thought I knew the world, but when you have to develop content for different geographies, well it feels like you have never stepped outside your front door, while I've always covered international or global roles. I remember, my first global content marketing journey started 10 years ago, when my team and I began defining Schneider Electric IT division global content strategy.

Our goals were two fold: Lead Gen, first of all, marketing opportunities and secondly, increased brand awareness. Now after defining our strategy, we spent eight months preparing for the global launch through multiple pilots. We learned an incredible amount from our success and mistakes. And then one year later I replicated the same model with global clients when I moved to NewsCred, which is now part of Optimizely, at the beginning of 2017 and then later in Contently in 2019. Now the issue I found in most of the cases is that content marketers just try to replicate at global level what they have done in some cases with some success at central or local level. Well that's a big mistake. The thing is that global content marketing is not just content marketing deployed across multiple countries. Enterprise will need to plan, find the right balance between global and local. They have to pilot and then scale at global level.

If they fail at one of these steps, of course usually they may fail with the full program. I think there are three main steps global marketers need to follow in order to design a proper content marketing strategy. First of all, finding the optimal balance between central and local. Now in most of the regions, I mean take Asia or Europe for example, there are thousands of countries and languages. It's simply unrealistic to make the same content work for each individual market. For this reason, creating content centrally and allowing countries to fill the gaps may represent a good solution. I've been working with both organizations, centralized and decentralized. Some organization have a very unclear understanding of local markets, which is the reason why involvement of countries or regions in content planning is really key. The role of central teams may shift of course as the program progress.

In the early stages of the program, the flow of information is very outwards with the central team leading content production and strategy. And then as global content program flourish and progress, the emphasis on the central team shift to providing guidance and building local content skills and competencies. The second step is establishing local editorial board. While of course the central editorial team will generate content, a global level local editorial board have to be placed. And I mean this is really a key. In each country or on geography to manage proper planning and distribution, the local editorial board will agree with the central team on target personas. They lead the decision for distribution, content distribution, they contract local vendors and so on and so forth. The third and final point is piloting your content market strategy. The thing is piloting means starting small.

Large enterprises are running pilot programs across geographies. It's a common practice, great ideas often receive resistance. You need to start small, test if your strategy is working, get results, and then finally create a proper business case, in order to allow a global content marketing program. In a global content marketing model, you ideally need to set up the pilot program as a test in one of two countries and usually no more than two different languages if possible. And then you run the pilot program with a full integration with the existing marketing technologies. And finally, of course if it's successful, you may roll out your program to the other geographies. I realize that this is probably super simplification, but it may give you a good overview of what to do in order to create a global content marketing program.

Mordy Oberstein:

So I don't know where to start with it, because Giuseppe makes a bunch of really, really, really, really good points. But I guess let's talk about a point that I feel I personally probably gloss over all the time in talking about global content strategies, is that the fact that you have to balance the global with the local.

Crystal Carter:

Absolutely, entirely. It's something that is really, really important. And I think that it applies to lots of elements of international SEO and even regional SEO. Even if you think about the United States for instance, there's different laws in different states, there's different realities. February in Florida is very different from February in New Hampshire for instance. So there are definitely things to consider about which products to put out, which content to put out, what makes sense, where all of these things are really important.

Mordy Oberstein:

The same thing with local SEO also. You might have a local presence, you might also have a more international presence or a national presence. So balancing this out is really, really important. Because you don't want to go all in on the global and then ignore the fact you also have a local presence or cannibalize a local presence with your global presence. You really have to think about what pages should exist. It's really about planning. What pages should exist, where do they exist on the domain, what are they trying to do? Where are they trying to target? And how do we keep what they're trying to do somewhat separate from each other.

Crystal Carter:

There's a section where he discussed planning and some of the work that's gone into planning. He was saying they spent eight months planning a particular campaign and that can take a lot of time. So these things should be well thought out and should take all of the things into account. Because of course it's important to have a global presence. If you think of a company like IKEA for instance, IKEA has global things and actually IKEA's approach to marketing tends to be fairly universal worldwide. But that's a distinct strategy that they've taken, which is really very interesting.

Mordy Oberstein:

It works for them.

Crystal Carter:

It works for them.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm not sure it works for others.

Crystal Carter:

Exactly. But they will understand that. Even I know that... We recently had an IKEA open near us and they ran a specific hyper-local campaign launching the store. And I know that they have general activities there, but the global brand will impact the local brand and vice versa. So it's really important to make sure that they line up. But that also that if part of your brand is making sure that you care about your customers, making sure that it's very clear that you are respectful of your customers, then respecting the local cultural elements is really, really important. And localizing appropriately will help you to demonstrate that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Which goes to what Aleyda was saying about the advertisement she would see growing up and really speaks to what Giuseppe was talking about, and just another amazing point, in that there's really no way around having a local expert. Giuseppe was talking about they have a board and that local board offers feedback on the overall global camp. How much do you want to automate, especially in the world of AI and ChatGPT. But in general, how much do you want to try to automate or try to template from the global strategy into the local areas, you can't. You have to have somebody who understands what that region's all about, what works, what doesn't work, the interest, the way of talking, all the idiosyncrasies of that region. There's no way around knowing that other than you having some actual integration into that community, which means you need a local expert

Crystal Carter:

Indeed. And there's idioms that will make people feel more warmly towards your brand. There are particular celebrations or particular things that are important milestones. So for instance, in the Mediterranean you see a lot of these things with the blue eye for instance. That's something that means good luck or prosperity and things like that. If you have the same symbol and somewhere else it would be less recognized. And there are things that visually, for instance, would be really, really recognizable. And that's something to think about as well.

And these are things like you said, that you can't get from a bot necessarily. You have to have humans there. Adriana Stein is someone who has worked with us on some localizing projects and she wrote an article on translation versus localization. And she gets into a lot of these details. She talks about the direct translation from English to German of beating around the bush for instance, which... He did the direct translation, it doesn't convey the same sentiment as if you do a localized translation of their idiom for that same sort of thing. And what you want is the sentiment. You want the sentiment of that statement rather than the direct translation because it's an idiom.

Mordy Oberstein:

And you have cultural biases and there's no way around them. I'll give you a great example. I think I might have talked about it in the podcast at one point, but growing up every day, I used to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I love peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I moved to Israel, I had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at work one day and someone's like, what's that? I'm like, peanut butter and jelly. And they're like, what is that? They do not eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Blew my mind, to this day, absolutely blows my mind. It is the go-to sandwich in America. To this day, I still eat them, because they're so delicious.

Crystal Carter:

Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are suitable for every meal.

Mordy Oberstein:

Every meal and in between meals, all meals.

Crystal Carter:

Anytime you eat-

Mordy Oberstein:

You can live on them.

Crystal Carter:

You can live on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. They're quality, quality.

Mordy Oberstein:

We do not eat them where I currently live. And if you were talking about them, it would be like you if you're trying to target that or if you're using it as a reference and whatever it is, it would be lost because it is not the same thing.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, entirely. And I think these are things that you have to get. And I think that it takes... One of the reasons why it takes so long to plan for a sort of global SEO or marketing campaign, is that you have to take those things into account. You have to make sure that you have good experts for wherever you're based. Wix is, we work in 17 different languages and we work in lots of different spaces. Someone that we work with in Japan is someone called Titone. He's fantastic, he's amazing, he's incredible. And we worked with the team at Faber as well to do some SEO webinars. We didn't think like, oh, we should swat in and do the SEO webinar ourselves. From a remote team, we got local experts to help us with that and to help us engage in, because for instance, with search in Japan, for instance, the way that the web is structured is slightly different because they have different kinds of writing.

So this is really important to think about. And so there's going to be people who have more experience in that and more experience of the way that the people use the web and the different search engines that they use and the different things that will come up first for that particular audience. And you have to think about the people on your team who are genuine experts and you have to make sure that you build up those relationships. And that takes time.

And also I think it's important, particularly from a content point of view, to think about how you get traction an at what point, how much of a foothold you need to have in a market in order to get some traction in a market. Especially if your team isn't specifically based there, but you're trying to connect with an audience in a different place. You have to sort of figure out how much content do we need? What investment do we need? And Aleyda talked about this as well, what investment do you need in order to be able to serve those customers well? And I think that these can take time, but hopefully it's worth it, if that's a market that's good for you.

Mordy Oberstein:

Now speaking of time, do you know what time it is?

Crystal Carter:

What time is it? What time is it?

Mordy Oberstein:

Snappy News. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. It's here. I mean, snappy news, snappy news, snappy news, but oh my God, it's here. Google has opened its Search Generative Experience, SGE. Two select folks on the wait list, yours truly, not among them. I can't even get on the wait list? Something about it not being open to my account, I don't know. Personal grumblings aside, we got our first look at what Google's Search Generative Experience is going to look like. Follow me here for a second. Danny Goodwin at Search Engine Land covered Barry Schwartz and his covering of his initial experience with the SGE. Barry got access to the SGE or the Search Generative Experience, but had to go offline for a few days. So Danny covered Barry covering the SGE. We'll link to the article in the show notes, because there're already heap of examples and you should definitely look at them.

Just looking at it myself, I just want to say, don't panic. It looks like there are plenty of organic link placements all throughout the experience. Mike King from iPullRank, who did a whole webinar with us on AI and SEO, he said quote, "it's basically an interactive feature snippet, but it doesn't feel as threatening to organic search traffic as the original demos made it feel." Good news. All right, who wants some more big news? Yeah, Google held its marketing live event and friend of the show who join us talking about SCOM PPC over at Cypress North, Greg Finn did an amazing job covering all of the updates that Google announced to its ad platform and beyond. Check that out in the show notes as well over at Search Engine Land.

Some takeaways, they're personal. When I took a look at the keynote, one of the things I took away was a Google talks about how people search and how it's changing, how they're looking at longer queries and how they're more conversational, what they're looking for, and they're looking for more specific things than ever before.

People are being far more specific when they search. Some might say not new. Old, not new. I agree it's not new, but I feel like now this is an official part of the conversation that we as SEOs, the content marketers, the content creators need to get on board with.

Also ads will be in the Search Generative Experience, the SGE or as I'm just going to call it the AI box. When Google announced the SGE or the AI box at Google I/O 2023, it made it seem the ads would be above the box itself, not part of the actual Search Generative Experience. But at Marketing Live, they show that yes, it's going to be right there in that whole SGE ecosystem. Also, say goodbye to Google Merchant Center and say hello to Google Merchant Center NEXT. It's next level because it will take a lot of the techier parts of connecting to Google Merchant Center out of the equation by pulling information straight from your site into the Merchant Center feed. Next, well, nothing is next because that's this week's snappy news.

And well, that was the news. How newsy was it? So Newsy. Always so newsy. Which brings us to our follow of the week as the episode ebbs away and this week our follow of the week as we're going international SEO is none other than Veruska Anconitano.

Crystal Carter:

Veruska is fantastic. She's a member of Women in Tech SEO. She's an amazing international SEO-

Mordy Oberstein:

Contributor to the hub.

Crystal Carter:

What's this?

Mordy Oberstein:

Contributor to the hub.

Crystal Carter:

A contributor to the hub, which I was just going to get to. Yeah, she's a-

Mordy Oberstein:

Sorry for jumping the gun.

Crystal Carter:

She's multilingual. And yeah, she wrote an article called Why Cultural Relevance is Key to International SEO Success, and it's absolutely fantastic. So yeah, she speaks many languages and she talks a lot about the different elements that come into play when you're thinking about engaging with international markets that are not just some of the technical SEO elements that can be easy to implement, relatively speaking. But some of the cultural elements in, we're thinking about cultural identity and how that impacts search and what people search for and how people search. It's a great article. She's a great follow. She's also an expert on Rome, so I knew someone who was going to Rome and I tagged her and she was like, oh, let me tell you all of the places that you should eat.

Mordy Oberstein:

And her Twitter account is really informative. She had a post on skyscraper content the other day that kind of made me laugh. There's a lot of really good content in her feed. It's not just one of these accounts where you're going to file but not really getting SEO value out of it. It's a definite value in the SEO knowledge itself. So it's @LaCuochina on Twitter. We'll link to Veruska's profile in the show notes. But definitely give her a follow. Which means our episode is now over.

Crystal Carter:

Finito.

Mordy Oberstein:

Finito. Ooh, very good.

Crystal Carter:

Finn.

Mordy Oberstein:

Finn.

Crystal Carter:

Absolutely, hasta la vista.

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't know how to say the end in any other language.

Crystal Carter:

S ayonara!

Mordy Oberstein:

Sure. Adios. That's really goodbye, not the end. Anyway, thanks for joining us on this SERP's Up podcast. Already going to miss us, not to worry, we're back next week with the brand new episodes. We dive into how to build a content strategy SEO and beyond. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO.