Companies make SEO a priority in their content marketing and to go global, they also need to double down and focus on international Search Engine Optimization to stand out against competitors in local and multilingual searches. In the webinar, top industry experts from companies with a strong global presence explain how to conduct effective international SEO.
Transcription
Kate Vostokova 00:35
Hello, everyone, welcome to Content Marketing marathon part two. My name is Kate, give me please. Just one minute I need to add our speakers to talk just a second. I see Chris is here. And Alessandra and we're just waiting for Neil. Hi, Chris.
Chris Raulf 01:02
Okay, how's it going?
Kate Vostokova 01:04
Great going great. And I don't see. Hi, Alessandra. Hi. Let's wait for him. In the meantime, can you please let us know if you can hear us? Well, if you can see us, so everything is working perfectly in the chat. If anyone can send us a message. I'm okay. Thank you. Thank you, Holly. Thanks. Yeah, I see Neil. So just a second. Thank you, Alan. Okay, hi, Neil. Hey, everyone. So, before we start, I just will do just a short announcement to the series. So you know, this is a series of free events, the first event we did last Thursday. It was about content analytics, with Andy Crestodina. And Caspar Rasmussen, in case you missed it. Don't worry, I will send the recording to that event, along with the recording for this one tomorrow, so don't worry. And today we'll talk about one of the hottest topics I think is international SEO. And we have a fantastic experts here and I will let Chris you to intern to make an introduction to our experts in yourself. And I'm here if you need anything, just call me.
Chris Raulf 02:35
Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen. Start the slides. Very cool. All right. So you should be seeing my slides. Can you confirm that? You can see the slides? Yes. Excellent. Okay, cool. All right. So my name is Chris Rolfe. I'll quickly introduce myself in a second here. We're going to talk about what makes strong international SEO truly is a hot topic. And there is no international SEO without content. So I'm super excited to have Alessandra and Neil here. With me today. Before we introduce ourselves, this is what we're going to try to pack into this short hour here, quickly, you know, meet us then the 30,000 foot overview of international SEO, then we'll have an expert roundtable discussion, talk about some interesting topics here, then we'll do game time. And then hopefully make sure you know, send questions through the q&a feature there. We're here to answer any questions you may have. And then the best question gets a book conclusion and closing out the session with a bang. So that being said, my name is Chris Rolfe and the founder of Boulder SEO Marketing, started this company initially as a local SEO company. And as you can hear from the accent, and I'm actually Swiss. Soon, this local SEO company turned into a national SEO company, and then an international SEO company because of my background. I now live in Colorado, absolutely love it here. I've been in digital marketing for about two decades. You I invite you to connect with me on LinkedIn in and shoot me an email if you have any other questions. That being said, I recently spoke with Alessandra in San Francisco and we actually spoke about this topic, which is really cool. So I'm very excited to be speaking with you again about this very same topic. I'll Wonder if you want to quickly introduce yourself, please?
Alessandra Binazzi 05:03
Sure. Thanks, Chris. Really happy to be here and happy to, to talk about this topic with you again. It's always fun. So it's nice to do it again. I don't have much of an accent, but I am born and raised in Italy. I moved to the States, though, for college I was I went to University in Boston. And you know, like many people in the localization world have hopped around quite a bit spent about 10 years in the Caribbean. I've been a globalization and localization consultant for since 2016, but I've been in this field for about 15 years. And before that, mostly worked with in international sales and marketing. So really, in total, I have about two decades of international user advocacy. I am a board member of Gala the globalization and localization Association, if you're familiar with that, if you are a member, if you're not a member, you should be and yeah, just a few quick contacts there if you want to if you want to get in touch. And this is my first time having the pleasure to speak about this topic with Neil. So really looking forward to that. Neil, do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself? Yeah, thanks,
Neil Sheth 06:30
Alexandra. So hi, everyone. I'm Neil chef. I'm based in London. And I've got a bit of a strange background. But I, you know, had a career in investment banking. And in the evenings and weekends, for the last 15 years, I was launching sites, using SEO and using content marketing and content strategy and pretty much fell in love with it. To the extent that in six years ago, I decided to leave my career in finance to launch a an SEO agency called bubbly digital, so founder of bubbly digital, as well as rightfully, which is a copywriting and content creation service for brands. So that's what I do by day. And by evenings, I'm usually running around to little kids who are driving me mad. But I'm still smiling at the end of it. So that's, that's what we do. We've we've worked with Chris in the past multiple times on on a number of projects, we tend to do anything from copywriting content creation to international SEO to basic SEO as well. So yeah, that's That's me in a nutshell. And looking forward to the chat that we've got coming up.
Chris Raulf 07:46
Correct. And then Neil, right before the lockdown member, we gave a webinar out of London out of your office, and then I came back and then boom, two years later, crazy, crazy. Where we are. All right, so the big question. So international SEO is pretty complex, it's not that easy to implement and to be successful in. So why bother with international SEO? I mean, right there, according to this report, this study here, the average cost per lead, you know, if you look at SEO is the least expensive way to actually attract new potential customers hands down at my company, that's all that we do. We do basically content marketing and SEO. I mean, it's so like, intertwined, right? It is the least expensive way to attract new customers. That's why we should do international SEO, in my opinion. Alessandra, you have a little bit of a different background not not extremely in SEO but heavily in content right consulting with big companies. How would you define in if you know in a few sentences what is content marketing for you?
Alessandra Binazzi 09:12
Oh, boy, that's that's a surprise question. Um, is really to create and deploy content that is engaging to the your target audience and of course, in in the world of international the target audience can vary quite a bit. So being able to create a content marketing strategy that is, is engaging for different types of target audience is really important. So it's not the you know, it's something that definitely needs a strong strategy behind it. And really good tactical execution.
Chris Raulf 10:00
Absolutely. And then Neeleman asking the same question as it when we take on new clients, they all fail at content marketing, hands down. That's just the reality. So, you know, as it relates to SEO, this is it's all about content, right? Where we infuse SEO best practices into a powerful content marketing strategy. Neil, what is content marketing for you?
Neil Sheth 10:26
Yeah. So is is really around? What type of content do you create? Do you strategize and build that helps you number one, demonstrate your expertise, numbers to demonstrate your authority in the industry. And number three, make your own trustworthy brand. In other words, people's eyes we refer to that as E at Google's who will guideline refers to expertise, authority, trustworthiness. So content marketing, basically, your content marketing strategy needs to solve those three. Now, the cool thing is the reason why SEO is always interlinked with content marketing, is because people are often searching for problems and questions. And you know, the two, that you can find questions that helps you to build more credibility that helps you to come across authoritativeness. So if you add in the layer of visibility, ie SEO, then now you've got a content marketing strategy that not only helps you to do those three things, remember expertise, trustworthiness, and, and authority, but it also now allows you to become more visible. So you've got the three new layer on top of SEO and you've suddenly got a powerful content strategy. That's kind of how I think about content marketing.
Chris Raulf 11:47
Excellent. Cool. All right. So let's dive a little bit deeper into international SEO. Obviously, you're not going to learn everything there is to know in this short webinar, but I think our attendees will get a great overview of you know, how international international SEO works fundamentally, all right till posto migliore there, NASSCOM Dory when cadavre Neil, the best world money lie hits the first deck and the best place to hide a dead body. Common joke in the SEO world on page number two, right. Neil, the talk where do you need to rank if you want to get people to your website organically?
Neil Sheth 12:37
Yeah, so the top three positions or the money positions, if you can get number one, you know, you've basically opened up your bank account, but the top three is is as you know, is where your aspirations should be. Ideally, if you're nowhere close, then actually just getting to page one will bring you traffic and then over time as you work hard and and earn Google's trust. You want to get in that top three position.
Chris Raulf 13:06
Yeah, so even the bottom of a page one doesn't call it you really have to be in those top three positions. Otherwise, the click through rate is going to go down dramatically. All right, the best kept secret these days. It's Google's algorithm. Alright, about, Gosh, 678 months ago, there was a massive algorithm update that actually hit my own website builder, SEO marketing. We lost I would say probably like 80% of all of our organic search traffic, why? We were so busy helping other people optimizing their website, right? So we completely neglected our own website. Don't worry, I'm not going to go over all of these things here. But this is basically I had to sit down and in my head figure out how does SEO work fundamentally. So this is a very simplified version of how SEO works, like the strategy that we deploy for our customers. But there's basically a lot of things that you need to do. There's a lot of ranking signals in Google's algorithm, which is becoming more and more complex. By the way, this is called the SEO strategy framework. As Neil already explained it expertise authoritativeness trustworthiness, you have to prove to Google that you are that right? Google's algorithm is getting smarter and smarter. blackhat seo strategies no longer work. RankBrain Google started to incorporate artificial intelligence machine learning into the algorithm. This was a big, big, big, big deal. And now basically every search that you do on Google RankBrain is involved. Neil, you quickly want to talk about your money your life.
Neil Sheth 15:09
Yeah. So Google's business is, is, or should I say Google's usage is based on how much people trust Google's results. And if you think from a risk perspective, if you're looking for a cupcake, and locally for your kid's birthday, and you find the wrong result, from Google, it's not going to have a major impact on your life, right. But if you are looking for something connected with your money, or your life, and you end up choosing the wrong credit card, or you come across a scam website, that gives you a loan, which is actually a big thing in India at the moment, and you make the wrong choice, you know, at the back of your head, you're gonna go, how did I make that choice? How did I come across that? And so Google's usage is based on people's experience on the search on search results. And so it's, the risk to Google just goes higher and higher, as, as people searches relate to your money on your life, which is why if you're in that space in the health space, your money, money, space, insurance, anything like that, you need to work a lot harder than the local cupcake to earn Google's
Chris Raulf 16:30
trust. Yeah, well set well sets, Bert. Google is getting better at understanding context, way better at understanding context, core with vitals, you know, how does your website function? Is it fast to do things load rapidly, etc. It's all about the functionality of the website, the speed of the website, mom, Google Now pulls information from various different sources, media, languages, etc. So again, there was another leap in terms of, you know, Google, natural language processing, massive update. And then just a few weeks ago, Google unleashed the core update on May 25. And I actually showed an example of what happened. That was a big one, they waited about seven months to unleash their next core update. So these updates happens, the big ones happen every three to four months. And you will see things change if you've been affected by these updates. Whenever they unleash one of these core updates, they announce it they try to explain sort of like what they did with this blog post. To me, this was the main sentence. Alright, these changes may cause some pages that were previously under reworded to do better. What does that mean, Google became way better at understanding our content that we put out on the web on our websites, right. So what exactly does that mean? Well, here we go. This is a an example of one of our customers, where we created the best possible content that's available on the internet. As you can see, they're on May 25, they saw a dramatic increase in visibility, traffic, etc. So these core updates are powerful. And you will get rewarded if you put in the effort to develop the best possible content on the web. So I hope that's, you know, an encouragement for you guys to put a little bit of effort into content marketing and SEO. All right. Oh, boy. Yeah. Alessandra. One of the things we talked about this, when we spoke in San Francisco, one of the key issues with international SEO silos. Right. Do you want to talk a little bit about that, as you have you been consulting with some of these bigger companies?
Alessandra Binazzi 19:14
Yeah, absolutely. And it's, you know, it's amazing, even in really, you know, big global companies that have been global and very successful globally for, you know, a long time for many years. It's incredible how internally many functions, many departments still really work in a silo with very little exchange between them. And as we have learned from from Chris and Neil, you know, SEO requires quite a few components to be set straight, to be done well, and so if you have different organism different functions within an organization but are not talking to each other, this can become a big challenge and executing on your international SEO. So what I've learned in in a few companies that have that have helped me and I'm not an SEO expert, but I have executed on on the strategy together with, with a, you know, SEO experts within organizations. If we can go to the next slide, please, Chris, there we go. Yeah, you know, it may be a bit basic, but this is important stuff to understand is that, you know, SEO primarily is marketing domain, right. It's even in product focused companies, SEO usually sits with marketing, and specifically with digital marketing or digital media. So you know, if you're looking to as a as a localization professional, if you're looking to affect international SEO and contribute to its success, these are the people that you need to go to. Normally, people may not think of marketing as a very data driven function, but it really is, especially digital marketing, and digital media is completely data driven. It's a very data rich function. This is where all your Google Analytics are maintained and analyzed. So if you're not fluent in the, you know, in this language of Google Analytics, go to your digital marketers, go to your digital media people, and ask them, you know, ask them to help you understand what these numbers means, and, and how the triggers work. So that you can start understanding a little bit more where, where you can impact things, get a seat at the table, I mean, if your lock function is in marketing, you should be at the table already. And so you should have visibility into these kinds of conversations. If you're not within marketing, just be at all, squeeze, squeeze your chair at that table and make sure you're part of the conversation. It's amazing how many internal SEO functions or even SEO agencies that focus on SEO, in a domestic market do not know about international SEO. So, you know, when you when you encounter these initiatives within your organization, try to assess the level of international SEO competence of your internal team or your agency. And if they don't have even the most basic knowledge about international SEO, do some education, because, you know, it's like, everything else would localization, if you think about the international component as an afterthought, and you do your whole SEO first and then you, you try to plug in the international piece only at the end, you're gonna pay for it, it's not going to be as good, it's not going to be as comprehensive, you're gonna have to backtrack, it's gonna take more time, it's going to be more expensive. In very large global organization, there's often regional or local digital marketing functions, or maybe even SEO agencies that the regional offices work with. So make sure you plug into that process to make sure that you're, you know, your strategy is, is really trickling down to the local level, because if that if that satellite component stays, you know, is a separate component, then of course, you're not going to be impactful with with the global international SEO practices that you've put in place. But as we said, SEO is not only a one function operation, it involves, you know, many different functions, product functions is also important. So product content matters. A lot. So make sure that you know, when you're looking at your content, and you're making sure that it's, you know, quality, make sure you're looking at your product content as well. So make sure you leverage your term bases you have your optimized keywords available for for that content as well. Site Structure considerations for international SEO are really, really important. And I think we're going to maybe dig into that a little later. And then content deployment tools, that mark the localization team is usually very uniquely positioned to really understand how content moves around an organization. So when you're trying to deploy the international SEO strategies, plug into those existing processes when it comes to content deployment and tools. To make sure that you're connecting the dots in the right places for, you know, for efficiency.
Chris Raulf 25:08
Awesome. And I think we'll see, I think somebody may also want to take the lead on this slide. So global food, your digital marketing?
Alessandra Binazzi 25:19
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, not nothing like, revolutionary here, you know, and I think, and Chris and Neil, you know, you can speak to this maybe a little bit, too. I think a lot of this, the SEO exercise is really around diligence, making sure that you do these steps. It's not brain surgery. But if you don't, if you're not diligent about the detail work of putting into your content and your keywords, etc, you're just not going to get the results. It's really, it's really simple in terms of the triggers that you use and the results that you get.
Chris Raulf 26:00
Question for Neil. Neil, I think you're working on a Arabic international SEO project right now. Can you talk a little bit of the keyword translation versus trace creation? Yeah.
Neil Sheth 26:12
So I'm sure many have heard of the term. But keyword Transcription is the process of taking the English source language keyword that a site is targeting, or a brand is hogging, and then identifying the most relevant key word for that particular region. And one, one thing that you often find is, clients will go, Hey, let's target that keyword, because it has the highest volume. But actually, that keyword is not as relevant to that culture to that region as another less volume key or less volume keyword. So picking the right keyword is so crucial. When you're thinking about international SEO, it's almost like your, as you plan the business launch expansion. Keyword Research is somewhere in there, right at the beginning of your international SEO process, keyword transcription. And with this particular site that we're we're talking to what's what's actually quite interesting is when you are trying to translate and localize content for the Arabic market, it actually adds on 15 to 20%. In terms of text. So now, when you're designing your site, you're doing wireframes and outlines your English version of your page no longer fits your Arabic version, like international SEO, a large, I would say one of the largest part of international SEO where sorry, my light keeps going in this office. But don't know why. But it's it's one of those things, that's just that constant happens. But so one of the one of the largest portions of running an international SEO project is is, is having the right language and not just translating it or using some sort of online tool, and really thinking about the culture, the localizing it for that particular region. In Arabic, there's different dialects. So you you kind of have to drill even further and go, Okay, which dialect are we going to use? What, who are we talking to, and then there's the whole complication of hold on this English text copy can no longer be used, or the design for the English text can no longer be used or the even the borders, we now have to rethink this for the Arabic market. So that's why I find international SEO projects really interesting because it's a real combination. And looking across that Alessandra was saying is looking across multiple facets of a brand and an audience, not just the keywords, not just technical, not just hreflang, but actually looking at the content, the culture, and, and all of those things.
Alessandra Binazzi 29:13
But Neil asked you a question, because I think this is I maybe I'm misunderstanding. But are you saying that layout also matters? And like length of Yeah, the layout of the page and the length of the page? Because, I mean, those are things that, you know, in localization, we always are concerned about because layout is important. But I didn't realize it actually had an impact on SEO.
Neil Sheth 29:40
So absolutely, like layout, I think fits design UI UX. Let me give you a really bad example actually. So I was doing a pitch in the UAE recently, and to a UAE client and in the pitch deck. We used just a normal A woman going to going to the gym. And my colleague pointed out and said, Hold on that low carb top, we cannot use that. And so it's as simple as that. It's not just looking at the design and the images, which is that sort of example of, but it's looking at the entire makeup of that page, even even in your head like thinking, like, what do people want to read? What what what's, what do we need to tell them, in order for them to feel like this has been written on displayed for my culture that I feel at home, when I'm looking at this page. And that's the type of thinking and mindset that you want to have. And it goes into the UI, the UX, the images, the layout, like I said, the even like, imagine a web page, we've now 15 to 20% text doesn't look right. Like clearly, it's not built for that market, because no one's thought that hold on Arabic text is longer than English text. So this is where UI UX and SEO need to go hand in hand.
Alessandra Binazzi 31:09
So that will you mean, Chris, when you said that Google is much better at context?
Chris Raulf 31:15
Yes, great point. So basically, I think Google has figured it out. Right? So Google is able to take a look at everything, you know, the content, the context of the content, the quality of the content, the basically the visual representation of the page, Google has just made such a massive leap to like very clearly understand, you know, what a particular page is about. And if you're really good ad, you know, like Neil just described and really presented something to the right target audience the way they would expect to see it, you will succeed with SEO. So if we talk about international SEO now, it's not just SEO, it's all the things that we're discussing. Everything matters. This is why, you know, Neil, and I really good SEO right. But you, you, you personally, you bring all the strength to the table. It truly is a team effort to succeed with international SEO in quotes. That's, that's basically, my takeaway from this recent Google algorithm updates. Yeah,
Alessandra Binazzi 32:26
it's amazing. You learn something, you know, from these panels, it's learn something new. And you know, all the time, it's very cool. Because, like, you know, layout and context is something that is a localizer, you think about all the time, but not in terms of SEO. So, okay, yeah. Now, it's good to know, it's something that we would do anyway. But knowing this fact, gives us ammunition to, you know, convince people of the importance of layout and images and UX UI for international users as well, because that's a constant struggle for us, right, like putting in the effort. Even in the local copies. It's not only about translating, you know, but it's the whole, it's a, it's a really holistic approach
Neil Sheth 33:17
depends on the size of the project, obviously. But what you really want is if there's a company looking to hire an SEO is, and they're going into a project like this, you don't just need an SEO, you need the content solved, as well as UI and UX. And you ideally want all of that to work together in harmony, because, yes, SEOs will be giving direction, but then a localization expert will give the cultural differences and add that to the equation and then it's how all of that comes together.
Chris Raulf 33:54
Because he gets I think we need to move forward to live forever. All right, I'll quickly talk about this slides you know, completely translate or entrance create or not, I mean, key words here don't just translate transcript find the the equivalent in the other language, then I mean, other Saundra maintaining a solid glossary with translated and transcribe the terms very important. Do you have one example maybe that you can share from like your customer briefly talk about that.
Alessandra Binazzi 34:33
This is Yeah, for sure. So at ASICs for example, we, we had recently done a big SEO exercise around our pronation guide. So a six is known for different for designing shoes for different pollinators, you know runners that pollinate in different ways. As and we're quite known for this. So we wanted to make this guide an important piece in our content marketing strategy. And, of course, pronation is something that runners actually search for a law, but how is that you know, described and other in other languages. So we went through a big exercise of, of keyword transcreation, as you said, and based it on a local search volumes. And then we created basically a matrix in our in our terminology to make sure that when, when the key word pronation was used in English, that the appropriate optimized trance create a key word was present for for the different languages. And without that terminology that the linguists or the copywriters could rely on. In some languages, the obvious choice was definitely a different one. So it may it would have made a difference in the in the results.
Chris Raulf 36:03
Absolutely. And I guess the key takeaway from this slide is like, if you actually put effort into international SEO and content marketing, the localized or international optimized website, it needs to speak to the target audience in, you know, in that market locale, you know, it's like I'm from Switzerland. So I'm Swiss German, I can tell if German content is targeting at you know, a German, German or Swiss German. That's how detailed this strategy needs to be. Yeah, and obviously, a lot goes into it. But this is what you need to think about if you put effort into international SEO and global digital marketing. Neil, did you want to add anything to this slide here?
Neil Sheth 36:54
No, no, I think you guys covered it. Thanks. Okay. Cool.
Chris Raulf 36:57
And then so Alessandra, Neil, as we all know, like localizing creating content in our languages, it is expensive, it's involved, it takes time, takes resources, knowledge, et cetera. Why not start an international SEO strategy with English only, right, especially if you're a newer company, potentially an E commerce company that is now ready to sell its products globally? You know, you've done well in the US, for example. But now, hey, why not take a shot at you know, let's target all of the English speaking market around the world. That's what we did with this customer here. That's a real customer example. It's a small bar, where a company they sell anything from, you know, bottles, tools to make cocktails, etc, including pour spouts. That was one of their products that they wanted to push to sell more of, they come to us, they came to us, we developed something that we call micro SEO strategies. We basically identified and under performing blog post that was already ranking, you know, position 2025 30. For the keyword pour spouts, we eventually developed. Right there you can see the organic number one position The Ultimate Guide to pour spouts. We completely redesigned Revell, redevelop this on the performing blog post into the best piece of content on the internet about pour spouts. Basically the ultimate guide to pour spouts not only are we out ranking websites such as Amazon, Target, Walmart, etc. In the US, but this piece of content now ranks globally at the top around the world in English speaking markets. So if you don't want to deal with, you know, right away localizing internationalizing and international SEO going into other languages, you know, start with us an English international SEO strategy. It's amazing how well this works costs you a lot less money. Neil. Alessandra, any thoughts on this strategy?
Neil Sheth 39:30
It's a good strategy. Chris. One thing I was just going to say is when you're targeting a English speaking countries, you want to think about your domain and the the architecture of your website. So this is this is almost like the beginnings of an international SEO strategy. So like Chris said, this is a blog post that probably doesn't follow any, any format in terms of the domain name which is fine for a blog, but the point Whether you're trying to sell a particular product, for, say, the UK market for English people in the UK market or English people in Europe somewhere, then you want to think about how do you how do you give Google enough information to tell Google that this product and this page is for the English speaking market in Germany, and that's where you think about.com forward slash if you're in the us.com, forward slash d, for instance, or you might have a strategy in the future where you want to speak to people that are in Germany, and they speak German, and they search in German. Right. And so at that point, now you're looking at a architecture of d dash d. And and then the rest of the pages follow that. So from without complicating this, what you want to do from a business point of view is go where do we want to be? And who do we want to be in front of, and at that point, you want to go work backwards? And say, okay, technically, what does my site need? Content? What does my my site need? Culturally? What does my site need in that region? Design wise? What is my site, and then they all come together? So I just wanted to give that kind of overarching schpeel.
Chris Raulf 41:13
Awesome, thank you.
Alessandra Binazzi 41:14
Can I ask a question though, on this, Chris? Yep. So do you have to do optimization for different Englishes? So like, are your keywords optimized in this case? Or? Or? Yeah, or can you just use?
Chris Raulf 41:32
Obviously, it could be a complex answer, basically, with these guys, we know that they want to eventually sell in the UK. That's the next step. So we optimize the website just for like, Global English, we still told Google, look, our main market is the US you do this through content, marketing, technical things on the back end of the website, but we wanted to go ahead and ready get the you know, this page, the attention in other English speaking markets that it deserves, is basically, you know, a very broad guide about pour spout doesn't only target people in the US, primarily in the US. But we're already setting the stage for you know, when this company is ready to actually sell their products. In other English speaking markets, we can make a few changes on the back end, in the content to really, you know, ramp it up. I don't know if that answers your question.
Alessandra Binazzi 42:35
ourselves. Yeah, I think it makes sense at least. It's ready to go global.
Chris Raulf 42:41
It is. Yeah. All right. Kate, I think at this time, we're gonna do game time, right?
Kate Vostokova 42:50
All right, I just need to invite my my colleague who helped me to share the screen with a game. So I think Santa will join in a second. Can you please stop sharing? Because we will. Yeah. Oksana will help me to share. So about the game. Basically, it's very simple game, we have just five questions for you. It will be really easy to answer them in case you listen carefully to our experts. So right now I'm sending to the chat axon. Can you please stop? Sorry, start sharing? Yeah, thanks. I'm sending the link that you need to use. You can also go to the website mentee.com. And use the code that you see here. I will do a quick announce for the for our price. So the person who will answer questions correctly and who will be the fastest one will get this book. Chris, maybe since you have chosen this book, maybe a couple of words, why you think it's super interesting to read why it's so useful. To actually Neil Neil, I think chosen a novel. Okay, maybe I'm mixing up. Sorry,
Neil Sheth 44:01
Chris, this is your one.
Chris Raulf 44:05
Oh, my gosh. Is that what it is? Yes. Yes. I mean, I think it provides a really great overview of global market. I mean, there's so many bits and pieces that you need to think about this, this, this book provides a great overview, including, you know, international SEO, localization, creation, all the stuff that you need, think about. So yeah, I think that's
Kate Vostokova 44:36
actually, it's not the first time when I see this book, suggested from different experts to read, like I have seen it many times and we, we have it as a giveaway in our events. So it's not surprisingly that you have chosen this one. So let's go to the next slide. And let's start our game Aksana Can you please move over it and let's see who is here. Okay, so we have people joining us. I love is funny images. Yeah. Okay, so guys, let's let's join, use the link that I sent to the chat or just go to manta.com and use the code that you see on the screen. It's real simple with the flow with your mobile phones. Okay, just for 10 More seconds waiting for people to join and we'll start anyone else wants to win the prize? Okay. Okay, so let's start. First question, there will be just five of them. Yes, and you need to answer very fast. So which marketing channel offer the least expensive way to generate leads? And here are free options, pay per click social media marketing, or search engine optimization. And you have 10, nine, eight seconds to answer. Okay, fantastic. Let's go to the next one. Second question, what type of service can you use to translate key website pages and blogs? So you have here, four options, and all of the above? I just heard someone clicking or you're also participating Krishna. Right. Right answer. Let's move to the next third question. How many algorithms updates Google estimated to make every year 10 To 2200 to 300 500 to 600 or 900? To 1000? Okay, great. And I think the last question Oh, no, sorry. It's four. Yeah. Which of the following is not a Google algorithm update? I think we talked about this on the slider clear. Remember? All these names? So is it verb mom source moon? Sorry, is it should be moon? I think this the correct one. Okay. Yeah. And the last one. Which of these activities does not does not fall under SEO? Is it keyword transcreation? Google My Business email strategy or content strategy? Okay, 10 is up. Great. And let's see who is the winner. Let's see who got the most number of points. Wow. So close. And
Chris Raulf 48:36
no, I'm not. I actually didn't get the other questions. In next Mar.
Kate Vostokova 48:45
Okay, it's more. Okay. Great. So Mark congratulates. You got this price. And yeah, I will contact you. And we'll send you this book. Great. Fantastic. So excellent. Thank you so much. We can Yeah, thanks. Thanks. And let's now move to two questions from the audience. Guys, you can use a special section that we have here for questions. Or if you want, you can raise a hand and I will turn on your microphone. So you can join us and ask your questions live. Because sometimes, you need to provide a lot of context. And it's really hard to put it in return. So let's wait for the questions. In the meantime, I think Chris, do you?
Chris Raulf 49:29
Let's let's start with submit. Submitted question. I'm going to Neil, what are some other major global search engines? should we bother optimizing for other search engines? Neil, I'm gonna let you answer this one. And I have some thoughts on that as well.
Neil Sheth 49:47
Yeah, so I would I would be inclined to go to YouTube. The word maybe that's maybe that's not the answer you were looking for. suspecting I would go, like, I want to be greedy. I think people should just be greedy. If you can take position 123 on Google page one, why not take more positions? Because often on Google, you're seeing different formats of content, right? So you're not just seeing the written form. If you're seeing videos, create videos, if you're seeing LinkedIn rank, which you are nowadays, or you in the travel space, you often see Pinterest rank, or in the finance space, you see Twitter rank? In it, I'm changing my answer slightly. I'm going create content for where create content, there's two answers here. One is YouTube, just because it's a it's it's a gigantic search engine in itself. And then the other kind of answer to this is, depending on your industry, create content, not just in the written form. So do that do that well, but also create content in the format that is ranking on Google for your industry.
Chris Raulf 51:04
Like linked in, right, it's a social media platform, but it's also a search engine. So just I guess, to your point, you know, make sure to think about where your target audience hangs out. So just, you know, think outside is Google, Yandex, Baidu, etc, all the global search engines, there's probably a local search engine right to where these people hang out. I love that answer. We see.
Kate Vostokova 51:31
Sorry, we have I think we'll have a question. And I also forgot to mention their important thing that we have actually a second giveaway for the question I'll just show you. So here is the book that we will that the person who will ask a question, and although choose this randomly, we'll get so this is the second book that we'll have chosen. So please do send your questions. And yeah, you have a chance to win it. And in the meantime, yeah, there is a question.
Chris Raulf 52:02
Nisa, would you recommend creating local subdomains, for example, if r.domain.com Okay, that's the site structure, have we built internet, you know, set up the success for a national SEO? On its own Dragneel? Like, what do you thoughts before I share my thoughts here?
Neil Sheth 52:27
I prefer subfolders. Over subdomains, depending on the resources that company has, they may want to or so it's resource dependent, and also whether they've got a local office. So larger companies would probably go separate domain, ie if you've got a UK, if you've got a US office.com. If you've got a German office dot d, right. From a management perspective, that's harder, more complex. However, if you've got the resources and the silo teams managing those various properties, then that may be a better solution. But if I wasn't doing that, I would generally go on the same domain, let's say see us base website going abroad.com forward slash country slash language? Combination sub folder?
Chris Raulf 53:21
Yeah, no, I mean, I agree. I think the sub folders you know, language and country, sub folders, the hyphen, V, German for Germany, etc. To slap on the.com, or the main top country code top level, is the easiest way to manage an International website, the most expensive yet the best way to be successful with internationally SEO is, for example, set up a website you know.com for the US and then dot the E for Germany, the CH for Switzerland, women, it's a lot of work. Yeah. So hope that answers your question. Nisa.
Alessandra Binazzi 54:03
May I also add and actually get validation for new guys? Because one of the part of the question was also like recreating the pages at the local website. Isn't that kind of counterproductive? Like if you have already authority and trust on your global site? Does it trickle down to your local? So if you rewrite the locals, like starting from scratch, basically does does the the sub folder or local page inherit some of the benefits of the global page?
Chris Raulf 54:40
I mean, it's it will sit on a already strong, you know, domain authority with sites it's going to be your to get, you know, new localized content to rank. Neil, what's your expertise with some of the projects?
Neil Sheth 54:53
So it just depends if you're, if your question is in relation to a asked going down the sub folder strategy which is.com forward slash d, then the authorities the lives within the site. You're now looking to launch various properties in different domain names, then yes, absolutely. You, you've got authority, you've got an authoritative website and.com. But that doesn't necessarily mean you've now got an authoritative website, Dakota, UK or dot d. So you can transfer authority across by interlinking the websites, however, you are pretty much starting from scratch in that region. And this is why I started my answer with if you have the resources, that is the big if, if you've got the business, if you've got the resources, if you're a large organization, you've got the office, from a business point of view just make sense to do the separate property, it doesn't make sense to confuse your audience that are in the US looking at D, you know. But what I also found is in certain regions, Chris May validate this as well, in certain regions, it's easier to rank for terms in various languages that are non English languages, than it is to rank for those same terms or the transcribed version in the US and the UK. So we see a lot of opportunity for for rankings. And there's my light gone again, as well. So I'll end it there.
Chris Raulf 56:27
I think we're slowly running out of time. So let's get a few more questions in. But thank you for answering that. Holy, any tips on marketing for distribution partners in the international space, particularly Mexico, or China, or our biggest distribution areas, we've had some trouble with providing the right kind of marketing materials for our partners. We could be alone things or any tips and marketing for distribution for Sondra?
Alessandra Binazzi 57:00
Yeah, I mean, work with them, you know, learn from them as then we were at ASICs, again, we work with, with our regional partners very, very closely, they drove the local marketing activities, but of course, the branding, you know, and some of the major global campaigns came from global but the way they were executed locally, it was done by them. So if you have local distributors, I would rely heavily on them to kind of tell you what they need and how to execute, as well as for SEO. So if there's local agencies that you can get support from, I would definitely encourage that as well.
Neil Sheth 57:46
You want you want the main core brand location to almost guide the smaller sub regions. So there should be brand guidelines, there should be marketing material marketing guidelines, there should almost be a framework to say this is how we operate, right? And then, and then you go out to them. And they're not figuring things out, you know, what's worked in your region, you know, you've got a rough framework. And then what you want them for is to tag on the regional and cultural and local expertise. But you need to go there with a framework so they can put their thoughts into buckets. And if you just go out there and go, Hey, could you market, the two are not going to be aligned. So I would say this needs to be owned, the responsibility needs to be owned by the, you know, your company, and then you need to work with partners to bridge the gap.
Chris Raulf 58:36
Awesome, then let's see pre submitted question. What are some tools that we should be using? I'm going to answer this first. We primarily now use a tool called ES E ranking. Awesome tool. Incredible. But of course, you also need to use analytic and Google Analytics, Google Search Console. That's basically we'll be using my shot here. Neil lasondra. With us and
Neil Sheth 59:07
Alessandra after you.
Alessandra Binazzi 59:09
Now go for it. It's more your realm. I don't want to talk about TMS is
Neil Sheth 59:16
Yeah, so totally Google console, Google Analytics free tools. Google Data Studio to see your data report on it. There's H refs for good keyword research you can use if you're running a paid ads campaign. That's actually the one of the best ways to get actual data to see what keywords are actually bringing in money as opposed to just people looking around the shopping around. So I'll probably stop there. There's probably some some good tools for you.
Chris Raulf 59:46
I mean, we're actually at a time holy cow this this hour flew by. Kate over back to you.
Kate Vostokova 59:54
Yes, thanks. Yes, we actually yes, all run over time. And since we have only Nissan Fully asking questions I want to like choose a winner. I will just send books to both of you. Thank you for questions. And thank you so much for your insights, Neil and Sandra crease. I think it was great. And it's actually it's not enough time. So next time I need to do it like one hour in half because we can talk about so many things. Thank you.
Chris Raulf 1:00:25
If anybody's interested in actually doing a webinar for Gaul, I'll be talking about international SEO. Yeah, so gala global. Okay. Cool. Thank you so much for having us. That was a blast.
Kate Vostokova 1:00:41
Thank you. Thanks, everyone, and have a nice day.
Alessandra Binazzi 1:00:48
Bye.
Chris Raulf 1:00:49
Thank you. Bye
