Greetings WOW members and Web professionals everywhere. Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute.
Today?’s podcast is a continuation on the topic of Search a2z. To help us to better understand Search Best Practices from an international perspective, I placed a call to Anne Kennedy,Managing Partner at Beyond Ink a consulting service based in Maine.
With three decades of experience in marketing communications, Anne moderated a panel at the Search Conference entitled “Search Around the World”. I?’m delighted to be sharing the first in a series of interviews covering the countries of Asia, Latin America and the EU.
Check out the five minute interview on today’s WOW Technology Minute website.
Today’s podcast is sponsored by the An Event Apart Conference taking place in Chicago in October.
The Event Apart Conference is a the design conference for people who make websites, announces a special discount exclusively for WOW members.
Join Eric Meyer, Jeffrey Zeldman, and their guests on October 13-14, 2008 at the Sheraton Chicago for two jam-packed 9.5-hour-long days of learning and inspiration!
Transcript of Around the World interview with Anne Kennedy
BILL CULLIFER: Greetings WOW members and Web professionals everywhere. Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute. Today?’s podcast is a continuation on the topic of Search a2z. To help us to better understand Best Practices from an international perspective, I?’m on the phone with Anne Kennedy, Managing Partner at Beyond Ink, a consulting service based in Maine.
With three decades of experience in marketing communications, Anne recently moderated a panel on the topic of “Search Around the World” at the Search Strategies Conference in San Jose, California. And I?’m delighted to have her on the phone with the first in a series of interviews.
Anne, can you provide the listeners of this podcast with an overview of the session and can you also provide us with some insights that we can use today?
ANNE KENNEDY: We had three panelists, one covering Spanish-speaking, one Asia and one sort of an “everything else around the world.” I?’ll start with [indecipherable] with Asia and particularly Japan, there are several things to know if you are marketing into that market. One is that the penetration of mobile devices is far greater than in the US or Europe so websites need to be available on mobile devices, whether they are actually produced in a mobile format or just by their design work well on mobile. That?’s one take-a-way that?’s very important in that market.
Another one that?’s very important in Japan is understanding that there are as many as four different character sets for the Japanese language. So when you are doing keyword research it becomes a quadruple effort because you have to approach it on all different keyword sets.
One of the overall points that comes up at every “Search Around the World” that we?’ve done is that it?’s really important to have local country nationals providing content for you and whatever else you are looking for, link strategies, because the cultural differences, apart from the language differences the cultural differences are quite extreme and working simply with translation is not going to convey all of the tactics that you need for, or convey all the information that you need for success. So while you need to have a centralized, coordinated approach from wherever your website headquarters is, to work in different countries you really need to depend on country nationals. And all of the international players who I know who are successful do just that, they have people in each country. And that?’s not just Asia, that?’s everywhere.
So we move on to what [indecipherable] has to say about Spanish speaking. She talked a lot about the US in addition to Latin America and in the US one of the things that becomes clear is that there is a great deal more, I want to say it?’s a larger market than had been previously suspected and also there?’s a great deal more spending power in that market, in the US Hispanic market, Latino market. So the opportunities are very great there. When we start talking about Latin America we have to remember that a variety of different, 16 different countries, 16 different cultures, you can?’t market just to one and say it one way. Again, you need to depend on local, in-country input to what you?’re doing and understand a variety of different things including how things are paid for.
And as we move over to Europe that is also true. Even though there?’s an EU, there?’s not one European culture. There?’s not one single way of reaching people and obviously not one language and somehow it seems to me, I spend a lot of time in Europe and it seems to me that the existence of the EU has made each individual country even more interested in putting forth its own language and culture, if you know what I mean.
BILL: Sure, I do.
ANNE: So here again it?’s really important to have country nationals who are guiding your search marketing efforts.
BILL: And how would you propose to address those very complex issues? How would you recommend SEO or those interested in marketing their sites in those countries, address those complex cultural and language issues?
ANNE: Well the first thing is while I know a lot of , heard that a lot of people in the EU are still dot com snobs, and they prefer to deal with a dot com, it is still true that what is going to be…Google for instance is going to, by default, put a searcher in the Google that is in their country, like the Goolge.sr. And I?’ve found that true, even on other sites, travel sites, like kayak for instance, if I?’m in the UK it?’s very difficult for me to get on to kayak.com, it?’s always kayak.co.uk, which gives me prices in certain languages, not what I want. But what I?’m saying is the technology is always sending people back those sites, so to operate in a variety of countries it?’s very important if we want to rank well in the search engines to have the extensions of those countries.
Secondly, to have the site in the native language. And even with English that becomes a problem because we speak, like you say, we?’re divided by a common language. My favorite example is what we call soccer shoes in this country in England are called football boots.