Now that you have established yourself and become familiar with your home market, its time to expand to other geographies. You look at the market research reports and realize that there is a tremendous growth potential. Poring over the new country demographics you decide on the best location for your store and set up shop. The market research report also advises you to setup a local website in that geography. You take your SEO optimized website and put it through Google Translator or through a local translation agency and presto your Search Engine Optimized local website is ready. Well that was quick & easy - wasn’t it? That cost even lesser than the cost of registering the local domain.

But is my site really optimized?

International SEO is a complex process as it involved several variables like the local language and the local search engines. Most of the SEO companies optimize for Google - what do you do in China - there is no Google? What do you do in Japan - where mobile internet is the norm and Yahoo is the most preferred search engine.

International SEO needs to be an important element in your online marketing strategy for the new geography. Now why go through the entire process of keyword selection and web page optimization with an SEO agency? Say for example you are a website selling ‘car insurance’.  The correct translation of this into French would be ‘assurance voiture’ where ‘car’ equals ‘voiture’ and ‘assurance’ equals ‘insurance’ which does see a small number of searches.  However, most search volume is for ‘assurance auto’ where ‘auto’ is an abbreviated form of ‘automobile’.

Few companies take time to research their global export or marketing programs. Research does not have to be expensive and time consuming. For example say you want to check if the geography that you are entering has an appetite for videos. You have an entire library of videos but they all happen to be in English – it will take another 3 months to translate them or redo them with local characters. A quick method would be to create tags in the local language for the video – and add in local subtitles to the videos. Watch the viral effect of the videos – for the number of views and comments that people add to it – this can be basis for you to actually spend time and money recreating the video.

Some of the common mistakes made by Fortune 500 companies in the international arena.

1. Directly Translating keywords

2. Using a dot com

3.Same URL’s for different language pages

Listen to our free webinar on International SEO where we look at some of these mistakes and look at some of the best practices for optimizing your international website.

http://www.regalix.com/index.php/international-seo-101