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Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Discover your International Online
Potential'


Posted by Aleyda Solis

One of the major advantages of having a web-based business presence is the
opportunity to reach a global audience, eliminating many of the restrictions and
costs that a physical international presence might have. Nonetheless, from my
day to day experience Ive found that there is still a lack of vision of
opportunity to target international markets.

Ask yourself: when was the last time you checked how many visitors were coming
to your site from other countries? Even if you have a small or mid-sized
business, do you frequently check what's the percentage of your current
conversions coming from other countries and languages than yours?

Besides being an International SEO, I consider myself a cultural broker: I'm a
Nicaraguan living in Madrid. I speak English and French in addition to my native
language, which is Spanish. I love to travel and I've had the opportunity to do
it because of work (and also for pleasure) to places like Argentina, Costa Rica,
El Salvador, Turkey, Tunisia, Montenegro, and Russia (on top of other, more
common destinations such as the UK, US, France, Italy, Ireland, The Netherlands,
Switzerland, etc.). I've had Nicaraguan, Argentinian, Dutch, Spanish, and German
bosses in the past, and now I have an American one.

I've also worked in the past as an SEO for:


A Dutch owned online marketing agency in Spain with clients from all over
Europe

A Spanish owned Vertical Web portal targeting eight Latin American and
European countries

An online marketing provider for Spanish small businesses owned by a French
group

A Russian company targeting the European market


Currently, I work for an American online marketing agency targeting
international clients. As you can see, the international component has been a
common characteristic in my personal and professional life, and I cannot imagine
how there's still a lack of vision and openness towards international
activities, which at the end means lost opportunities for businesses and a less
rich and competitive market that will end up also hurting the audience.

Unfortunately, this frequently happens because of misconceptions about
expanding internationally. I want to share and clarify here three of the most
common misconceptions I find in my every day work.




I'm not telling you to leave your current market (and lose your current
profits), but to take others into consideration. At the beginning, it will be
only to assess the opportunities there, so really, you don't have anything to
lose. I also know that we all tend to feel like we're already in the "center of
everything," and a couple of World Maps from different countries are the best
proof of it:



According to a recenteMarketer study, B2C E-commerce sales will grow 18.3% to
$1.298 trillion worldwide and Asia-Pacific will surpass North America to become
the world's No. 1 market:



Additionally, in the same study we can see how Asia-Pacific and Western Europe
as regions have both more digital buyers (Internet users who buy goods online)
than North America:



As you can see, nowadays no one is really in the "center." There's enough
globally "distributed" potential out there, and the highest growing ones are in
countries like China. Wake up! This means more exciting possibilities for your
business internationally.




You don't need to be a large international corporation, an E-commerce business,
or a completely online based business to benefit from a website version in other
languages, or targeting to other countries.

Although from a business perspective it can be more straight-forward for these
type of sites to identify an international potential, there are also different
types of local businesses that have an international audience, or that can
additionally benefit from having an international online presence since their
target market can be also abroad or from abroad. For example:


Language schools:such as Spanish language schools in Spain or Latin America
targeting US, German, or UK students

Summer camps: like international summer camps in Switzerland targeting
children from abroad

Centric hostels and apartments rentals: located in touristic or centric areas
that can be attractive for tourists

Traditional restaurants and bars: that usually have tourists as clients

Volunteering organizations: looking to attract volunteers from abroad

Gift and flower shops: which might also suitable to send from audience abroad

Traditional art and crafts shops: that look to sell typical local goods to
foreigners

Traditional food and drinks shops:like cured ham factories or wineries in
Spain looking to sell their products abroad


You need additional incentive? Check-out a mobile search engine result page for
a local query in Google.es for "restaurantes en brooklyn" (restaurants in
Brooklyn), that in English would be usually taken by Google maps results:



There's a huge opportunity, indeed. You can definitely achieve additional
benefit targeting an International audience even if you are not a big company or
based internationally!




It's true that expanding your site presence internationally might have higher
costs than your local language version. From deploying the web platform in a new
ccTLD (or subdirectory if it's not a country but a language targeted version) to
localizing (not only translating) the content, having native language support to
expand your content and social media marketing strategies (that also need to
take into consideration the local audience behavior, using the criteriaI've
previously shared in this post), as well as to support your outreach and
community management efforts in this other language.

Nonetheless, this doesn't mean that expanding your site internationally should
be non-beneficial for you. When you implement complete research to identify the
potential organic traffic and conversion from each language and country and on
the other that you validate from the start, this potential revenue will surpass
the costs related to your international web presence:



With this information, you will be able to calculate the expected international
presence (as well as international SEO process) return on investment:



I've seen too many situations where this type of initial assessment hasn't been
done, and because of this, there are businesses that have ended up with many
languages or country site versions that have been developed without any clear
strategy. They don't answer to a business related goal and are simply the
"literal translation" of the main site version. Of course they're not
profitable! But it's because the international web project hasn't been correctly
developed.

Another common signal when an international site presence hasn't been
effectively planned or executed is when the site owner tells you that they have
their UK site version with the exact same content than the US one but they
cannot afford to update it to make it unique, specifically targeting the UK
audience.

If they cannot afford it, this means that they're at the moment not getting any
or enough benefit from it; whether because they likely don't have any strategy
behind and this presence is potentially not optimized, or because there's not
enough potential in this market and they haven't been able to identify this
since they didn't do any research previously. It's also our work to advise our
clients effectively from the start, validate the potential benefit from any
international development or SEO project, and warn them if, for some reason,
there's no potential.

Additionally, we can run pilot projects to test the market, just with the most
important product or services categories with targeted landing pages, so as you
can see there's no excuse for a non-successful international web presence that
has been effectively planned, well developed, and optimized.




With a couple of very simple analysis steps that shouldn't take much of your
time you can have an overview of the potential your business might have
internationally:






Check your International traffic status




Go to the Audience > Demographics > Location & Language reports inGoogle
Analytics to check the percentage of your website visitors coming from other
countries and using browsers in other languages.

Verify the volume and trends from the last couple of years for all of your
traffic as well for only organic and compare them:


Is there a high or growing percentage of visitors coming from other countries?

What's the volume and trend of conversions and the conversion rate of visitors
coming from other countries?

What's the traffic source of visitors coming from other countries? Direct,
organic, referrals?

Which are the keywords and pages attracting this international traffic?


You have a bit more of time? If so, go to Google Webmaster Toolsto validate the
visibility you're getting already in Google search result pages from other
countries, along with the queries and pages impressions and clicks.



This is just your starting point that will help you to prioritize the
international markets where you have already have activity and might be
initially easier to start with.

Nonetheless, if numbers are not high it doesn't mean you don't have potential,
but that maybe your efforts have been highly targeted to your current audience
and haven't had a high international impact until now, so you will likely need
to work harder at the beginning.






Identify your International Organic potential




Prioritize the countries that you have already identified with higher traffic
activity in your Website before and do a quick keyword research for each one of
them by selecting the desired location and language from theGoogle's Keyword
Tool Advanced Options and Filters.

You can use the keywords that you have identified in the previous analysis that
are already giving visibility and traffic from these countries and languages. If
you didn't identify any keyword information in the previous analysis and the
country you need to research is non-English speaking (or in other language than
yours), then the best option at this level is to take the keywords in your
current language, use Google Translate to quickly translate them to the desired
one and use them for this initial and quick validation and overview (It's
important to note that this is ok just for this initial, quick analysis, since
these keywords will likely have errors and missing opportunities. You can do a
complete international SEO research and processwithout speaking the language but
with the right process and local language support, as I've described in this
post).

Use the exact match type (to get more "realistic" data that you can expect for
each specific keywords) and check:


What's the local monthly search volume for the relevant keywords in each of
the countries and languages?

Are there more suggested keyword ideas with a high level of search volume?


Refine and expand the research according to the suggestions you get for them.

You have a bit more of time?If so, go toSEMRush or Search Metrics
Essentials(that support many countries) to identify more keywords opportunities:



Is there a high search volume potential for the verified countries and
languages? If so, congratulations! This are great news.

It's time then for you to develop a full International SEO research to
understand, validate and plan your strategy, and verify your potential costs,
revenue, and ROI, taking into consideration all of the necessary aspects, from a
business abd language to technical capacity, restrictions, and requirements.

To do this, take a look and follow the step-by-step guide I published some
weeks ago about it:

How to start your international web presence





Images under Creative Commons taken from Flickr.
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