Global Search Landscape
Came in very late (at the beginning of Q&A) because I was accidentally covering the Demographics and Behavior session, which Barry did. Moderated by Nacho Hernandez from ihsipanic.com, who kindly spent a few minutes with me after the session to go over this information. He also reminded me about the great forum section at SEW forums about the Multilingual Search market, where people can go to find out about a lot of international search-related issues. Then he mentioned that SES has expanded the World Tour to include SES Latino- focussing purely on the Latino SEM Industry- for two days in Miami in July 2006 (that leaves two days for the beach :), and added a show in China in March 2006.
Speakers were Andy Atkins-Kruger, Web Certain He spoke about lots of opportunity especially in terms of lack of competition in some countries. For example the amount of population versus Internet saturation. More opportunity exists because it is less saturated. He spoke of a model about how to measure a new market: Probability of Ranking + Internet Audience + Market Size. Also spoke about domain targeting, and “trans-optimization.” Use the following order : 1. Keyword research 2. Glossary 3: Translation 4. Optimisation. Spoke about European market and its opportunities.
Lucas Morea, LatinEdge Inc., Another leader in the latin Search industry, Lucas provided his usual excellent insight. His highlights: online to offline is critical…do not assume they will buy w/ cc online…focus on lead. Providing a call center can be a huge lift. How there is a much bigger "head" in Latin America versus huge "tail" in the US (see this coverage for an explanation of Head/Tail search terms). Latin Americans are much more likely to search less specific terms. Talked also about cultural aspect related to conversions, and finally the opportunity of broadband growth and population growth.
David Temple, Top-Rank
Spoke about the opportunity with Asia, and the difficulty there since languages, although seemingly similar, are very distinct. China has largest percentage of growth opportunity.
Q&A
Interesting question about using (dot)eu versus individual country domains in Europe. Andy: not sure, still uncertain . (dot)EU is not very specific but still should be used to protect trademarks, etc.
Organic language optimization for Chinese language websites? There is very little kw research available, so the best way to do it is to work with someone in local market, or at least compare the [popular keywords in English. Nothing like a Wordtracker exists for Chinese yet.
Are search engine stemming accent marks? Looking for an exact match? Andy: it varies between search engines…Google has changed a few times from one direction to the other. Can’t really call it “stemming,” instead maybe a better term would be “normalizing” the result with our without an accent.
Has a publishing term that covers computer and IT industry…is it still important to translate even though many in this field speak English? Andy: would be wise to translate in order to increase the reach. Lucas: some instances exist where different forms of Spanish will identify something slightly differently.
Nacho pulls up Google Zietgeist to shows lots of various search metrics, but only from May 2003 did he ever find reference to what language people used to search in Google.
Lucas: Screen resolutions can vary greatly from Country to Country, based on age of monitor and video card.
Should national URL’s be hosted in local country as well? If you go to a local domain, it makes life easier. In general, it is more about where the site is placed, and the easiest way to do that is by having the domain. Nacho ads that you have greater control in fixing issues with a server, etc, if it is hosted where you are. Consensus seems to be that you do not have to host in in the actual country.
How difficult is it to enter the Asian market vs Europe? Much more diffcult because of greatly different character sets. Look at target countries and target languages, and start there.
Wondering if any data regarding how many people search globably vs choosing “only UK results,” for example. Unfortunately, there is no current data source for those Metrics that Andy knows of, and he would appreciate any such data.
