seo

SEO & Local Market Focus for International Expansions

To cater to a specific region’s consumers, businesses must tailor everything from the language and currency used to the language and currency used on the choice pages.

Learn what works best for search engine optimization.

One of the advantages I mentioned in my previous column is that an international SEO strategy may help your company in other ways, too.

This alignment is essential if you want to successfully launch websites targeting these demographics.

Multiple worldwide websites need the investment of time and energy to develop and manage and provide unique and valuable content for consumers in the relevant regional markets.

When Do You Have Too Many Market Sites?

To “maximize their investment,” I have seen numerous businesses convert their website into a language like Spanish or Arabic and then clone a local version for every market that speaks that language.

This strategy led to 1,600 unique websites and over 18 million web pages for one corporation, the vast majority of which Google wasn’t indexing since they were deemed duplicates.

John Mueller, a Google employee, recently responded to a tweet wondering whether targeting the EMEA region with English-language versions was an intelligent idea.

There were 78 duplicate URLs, to which he replied, “It appears like you have the same material.”
Continuing, he said, “It appears like it’s the same page, there’s no real need for us to index various versions.”

Create a Focus on the Local Market

Managing the demands and wants of consumers in a foreign market while being true to the organization’s goals and resources is the essence of local market orientation.

Localization to local company needs, user habits, user expectations, language, currency, and other variables that would drive consumer interaction in the market must be considered while designing for each potential market.

It’s not enough to translate an existing site into another language and submit it to Google.

Tools that assist you in finding emerging markets with consumer demand and facilitate cross-border commerce were recommended in a previous post.

Whether this site is a single-language worldwide site, a localized market site, or a language-specific site, and whether technology adapts to the user on-demand or dynamically will all be determined by your local market orientation, which will, in turn, be determined by your local market orientation drive your content strategy.

Your technological needs will often be determined by this matrix.

Businesses often learn the hard way that you can’t expand your company by targeting certain nations or areas but rather by targeting specific individuals.

People are like a Rubik’s Cube full of variants, and you can’t solve them all.

A target market comprises people with specific linguistic, monetary, and geographical characteristics.

Market, language, or currency-specific websites

Companies with worldwide expansion aspirations have several choices, both long and short-term.
What does their future growth look like, according to their crystal ball?

One new market expansion is quite different from entering many markets in various regions.
This choice may be simple at the beginning phases of a company’s growth.

A German market is accessible to Austrian businesses since the two countries share the same language, currency, and shipping agreements.

Is it necessary to have yet another website since this one is already up and running?

It’s possible that only making available a shipping calculation and a method for handling VAT taxes is all that’s required.

Things grow trickier when a website in the United States aims its attention at Mexico.

It will need a system to categorize its Spanish-language web pages, convert pricing to Mexican pesos, guarantee delivery to a Mexican address, and inform customers of any extra tariff fees that may apply to their purchases.

We may be enticed to push farther south into Argentina, Peru, or Chile after establishing ourselves in Mexico.

What are your thoughts on using a single Spanish-language website with a currency converter and shipping manager across many markets or creating niche websites for each?

There have been several instances of businesses launching “EU” websites to attract customers in Europe who are paying in Euros.

In their logic, because all European Union member states use the euro and have a similar legislative framework, it should be simple to expand their worldwide customer base by simply duplicating their global website on a “.eu” domain.

While this makes perfect sense in theory, the fact that most of the markets speak various languages makes it impossible for them to attract enough customers to be financially sustainable.

Orientation To The Visual Or Technical

After settling on a website’s overall layout, you’ll want to give some thought to the possibility of directing visitors to different sections of the site based on their language preferences or geographic locations. This is an example of visual orientation.

Many articles have been written regarding the difficulties of utilizing a user’s IP address to direct them to a particular website depending on their location and the possible cultural blunders of using a single country’s flag to represent a language in many markets.

You must verify the execution of both approaches to ensure that search engines have access to all material.

The selector step may be skipped in the future by setting a cookie on the selection page.

Even while it’s convenient for users, search engines can’t access the local websites since they don’t allow cookies.

Similarly, the system can identify users’ location and language and direct them to the appropriate online version.

This is a widespread practice for e-commerce businesses that tailor their offerings to different regions.
Because of this, search engines may be prevented from accessing specific sites.

Since you can’t control the origin from which search engines like Google reach your site, they must be granted access to whatever page they request.

Conclusion

While the number of worldwide websites you should have and the number of pages inside each might be debated indefinitely, the best policy is to base your selection on actual business and market requirements rather than theoretical possibilities.

It takes careful preparation to successfully manage a global online presence, as you must make sure that the material you deploy is of value to people in the target market to promote their participation.

Google has tight rules for what they will index, and this content must meet those standards to be included in their search results.

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