Boise Search Engine Marketing

Last summer Rand entered a post in his blog about this very topic - how and why search engines should handle international content. I’d like to add my comments as I have been dealing with this at my company for some time. I work for a global enterprise company managing SEO and am faced with the challenge of SEO by country for this reason.

I’m going to speak to Google specifically, not because I think they are any better or worse at this than the other engines but because most of our search referrals come from Google and therefore it is a priority. I’ve also learned that trying to boil the ocean will likely make me crazy before I even raise the temperature one degree.

Rand’s article was on the mark. The “why” is easy in my opinion - because the search engines want to provide the best customer experience. The best customer experience means providing the most relevant content to the searcher. However, that is oftentimes not the case when someone searches for content from web sites in their country.

The problem is as follows – not just for my company but my company is the example:

The company I work for has international presence in over 80 countries and we have web sites targeting those countries and various languages. However, if you go to a Google web site outside the US and search for my company’s products you get a variety of mixed results - and arguably none that would be considered most relevant to the search query

Let’s use Google.com.mx as the example.

I search for a product my company sells with the brand name included (so as not to argue whether our content would be deemed highly relevant).

When searching “the web” the first two results are my company’s pages targeted at customers in Spain, no results in the top 30 from the site intended for Mexico.

When searching “pages in Spanish”, again, first two results are pages for Spain. Then on the second and third pages I see results from my company’s web site meant for Argentina and Chile. Still no pages from the Mexico site.

Finally, when I search this same query and select “pages in Mexico”, zero results from my company’s web site in all Google results. In fact, I’ve verified that no web pages from my company’s site are in the Google Mexico index.

As you can see, none of these results would be considered most relevant when you know that there is a page out there specifically targeted to this customer in this market for this exact product.

So then why does this happen and “how” (this is the hard part) can we fix it?

Vanessa Fox - Google’s Site Maps Program Manager has blogged about this citing “If you want your site to show up for country-restricted searches, make sure it uses a country-specific domain (such as www.example.com.br). If you use a domain that isn’t country specific (such as .com), make sure that the IP address of the site is located in that country.”

It’s also stated pretty clearly in Google’s Webmaster Help Center.

This is the problem for our web site. We aren’t likely to do either of these things as it just wouldn’t be feasible for such a complex site that has been in existence for so long to make such changes.

Therefore, the “how” is a bit trickier. I don’t believe Google is ignoring that this is an issue that needs resolved - I just don’t think they’ve figured out how to resolve it yet. And I’ve actually been told by Google that this is a priority.

Given the lack of consistency across sites as to how they structure their individual country content, it may be difficult for the engines to figure out the target audience without some help from each company. Rand’s blog and the comments offered some ideas. A couple more might be a standard robots meta tag that tells the engine exactly what country and language the page is targeting. Or is there a way to leverage the site maps program to let the engines know how to translate the site’s URL structure or meta tags they may already use for internal reasons?

My objective with this post is to keep this conversation alive so the engines will continue to pursue a solution. Would love to hear if anyone has seen any recent threads on this topic or if they have ideas for a solution. Until then I’ll keep chatting up anyone who will listen.

As many of you know I’ve taken on a new gig as of late…I’m now the VP Marketing at Balihoo.  Balihoo is a vertical search engine designed specifically for the advertising industry.  You can find out the details at the about Balihoo page.  Also, there is specific information for media buyers and media owners.

So…my first (OK, not first, but pretty early) order of business was to get the website up to par both in terms of content and from an SEO perspective.  I’ve worked at lots of organizations launching websites and microsites, but this has been my first experience at owning everything, soup to nuts, for a specific company.  Certainly a challenge.  A little about the process:

First, thankfully, my lovely wife and in-house SEO expert was around to provide guidance on the infrastructure.  She helped me go through everything we have today and identify specific areas of content.  Then, she helped me go through page-by-page and idetify unique META tags and Title tags across the entire site.  Along with other guidance including ALT tags for the images and specific naming conventions for the navigation, her guidance was invaluable in creating what I believe is a site with a really good SEO infrastructure. 

Next step was development of the actual content.  I think for most businesses this is actually the easy part…speaking (writing) about your own business is actually pretty easy.  The challenge comes in:

1. Ensuring your SEO target keywords are throughout the content
2. Limiting the verbosity of the copy
3. Ensuring you approach the topics from a ground-level as opposed to jumping right in the middle

Finally, the design.  We’re lucky enough to have a very talented designer and I pointed him to some sites that I liked and we ultimately worked it out to come out with what you see today. 

I’m very happy with the final product (well…it’s never really final).  Check it out at www.balihoo.com and let me know what you think.  And, if you’re an advertising media buyer or planner, get in touch and we’ll get you into the Beta Program and see what you think of Balihoo’s solution for finding advertising opportunties!

I was contacted by someone recently inquiring whether I was a true in-house SEO - I’m guessing it was based on a comment by WebMama placed on their Top In-House SEOs blog that might have been a little confusing.  I am definitely a “true” in-house SEO - my title is Global SEO Manager and that is my focus 100%.

I believe the intention of the Top In-House SEOs blog was to gather names to list In-House SEOs and the fact that this role is continuing to grow.  I’m not sure what the criteria were in determining these in-house people as “TOP SEOs”, however, as I saw some folks I know on the list that I believe are entirely focused on paid search marketing. I’m not even sure I’d say I was a Top SEO without knowing my competition a little better but I’m definitely flattered by the mention.  Also noticed a few names missing from the list - but how could you capture them all with the way this field is growing?  This list and the commentary behind it is a clear indication that companies are figuring out that they need to hire SEO expertise in house.  That doesn’t mean we don’t value you agencies out there!  But I do I believe having at least one full time in-house SEO is imperative for most medium to large businesses.  Perhaps a small business wouldn’t need a full-time SEO but having some SEO expertise in house is ideal as those experts are more likely to keep the web strategy on track when it comes to natural search presence.  Again, not to devalue the agencies that specialize in this area; I work with an agency or two myself (including WebMama), not only for expertise and collaboration but sometimes simply for bandwidth as they are my extended team!