Multilingual Search Engine Marketing – SEM with a Difference
However big your business is, it is always good to think outside the box – on this occasion beyond the English-speaking part of the world. The figures show that English is highly rivalled by Spanish, French, German, and Italian, and depending on the nature of your business it makes every sense to consider international users. Whether you are selling holidays or wall paper, people in non-English-speaking countries may be interested in your services all the same. To reach out to them, you will need a website copy in the language of the countries you are targeting, and if you are running a Pay per Click (PPC) campaign for your website you will need further optimisation of keywords and ad copy.
If you are thinking of marketing your business globally, PushON can put our unique expertise in site building, PPC, SEO and SEM, and International Search Engine Optimisation to your use. We will advise on the site copy, the keyword relevancy, the traffic estimates, the target audience in the Russian and French-speaking countries, and we can offer full optimisation and management of your campaign at Russian and French search engines.
Whats and Hows of International SEM
If you are considering International Search Engine Marketing (SEM) for your business, it is essential that you do not lose out on your customers because you do not know foreign languages, or because you are spoilt for choice with the translation bureaus. At PushON, we have a multilingual SEO specialist who is fluent in Russian and French. The business links between France and Britain have long been established, and some of our clients have successful France-based businesses. If you are a Russian business planning to roll out your campaign in the UK, or a UK company thinking of putting yourself in front of the Russian customers (who are scattered all over the globe these days), PushON is also the right place to go to.
Julia, our multilingual SEO consultant, is a native speaker in Russian and has been studying French since 1997. With degrees in Arts and experience in Journalism, Julia has been writing in Russian extensively on a variety of subjects and for a variety of media (print and online) translation projects (to, and from, English, Russian, and French). Her previous experience in SEM focused precisely on International Search Engine Optimisation and Management of world-wide advertising campaigns. She has successfully optimised an internet marketing campaign for one of the leading e-Banks across several search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Yandex, and Rambler) and in several languages (Russian and French, with some advice on optimising German and Italian campaigns). This particularly included generating a comprehensive keyword list in a foreign language and optimising a creative copy for a PPC campaign, as well as full management of the campaign at the Russian search engines.
Results
Multilingual SEM done by a human, not a program, does take time. Having relevant and correctly translated (or researched) keywords is important, but as with English-language SEO this is only the start of the work. By experience, it is vital to write a copy for your website or creative in the language that the end user will recognise as their native – that is, which is semantically and grammatically accurate. As the examples of BabelFish or Google Translate show, it is still the person, not a piece of software, who recognises and corrects semantic and grammatical differences between two languages. However, the results are worth the wait, and can be truly compelling. Julia says: “When I looked at the creatives in French and Russian languages, I could instantly see the disadvantages of an automatic translation, so I took to rewriting these in a bid to improve the CTR”. The result was particularly stunning in the case of a French PPC campaign, where the conversion rate almost doubled.
And… What Else?
Link building and your website position in SERPs can also be improved by way of marketing your website to a foreign-language audience. We certainly agree with Loren Baker over at SearchEngineJournal that having foreign-language sites pointing to your website does not make your business more popular or influential. However, careful and relevant link building from foreign websites and blogs can have the same positive effect on your campaign, as link building from English-language websites. PushON can do this by selecting the resources and submitting copies in the native languages.
Last but not least, countries differ not only in “regular” language and slang, but – quite importantly – in the website content, if we think of contextual advertising. PushON can advise you on the categories of websites at the foreign-language search engines, as well as on the content of the sites you consider for your contextual advertising.
