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OPERATOR: Welcome and thank you for standing by. At this time, all participants are in
a listen-only mode. After the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session.
(Gives queuing instructions.)
Todayís conference is being recorded. If anyone has any objections, you may disconnect
at this time. Now, I will turn over the meeting to Ms. Margaret Gottlieb. You may begin.
MARGARET GOTTLIEB: Good morning, and welcome to the U.S. Commercial Service webinar titled,
ìIncreasing Your Global Sales Using the Internet.î
This webinar is the fifth of a six-part series that focuses on export fundamentals. My name
is Margaret Gottlieb and Iím an international trade specialist with the Commercial Service
office in St. Louis, Missouri. This office is one of 100 domestic offices and 100-plus
offices in over 80 countries. Our mission is to help U.S. companies by providing export
counseling and assist with finding qualified agents and distributors overseas.
If you arenít working with your local U.S. Commercial Service trade specialist, I invite
you to set up a meeting with him or her to discuss your companyís goals overseas and
how the organization may be able to assist you with your export endeavors. You can find
us at www.export.gov.
I would like to express our appreciation to UPS for their corporate sponsorship of the
Export Fundamentals webinar series. At this time, I would like to introduce Ashley Boggs,
product manager, UPS Customer Technology Marketing. Ashley, please share your remarks.
ASHLEY BOGGS: Good morning, everybody. As Margaret said, my name is Ashley Boggs and
Iím with United Parcel Service Customer Technology Marketing Group. And on behalf of UPS, I would
like to welcome everyone to this webinar on increasing your global sales using the Internet.
One of the reasons UPS is excited to be a partner with the U.S. Commercial Service is
our shared history of assisting customers to navigate international trade and assisting
them in developing or enhancing programs that have increased our export business. And while
we recognize the many complexities of international trade, weíre also keenly aware of the increased
opportunities for business growth global markets offer.
Todayís webinar involves growing your global sales using the Internet. As many of you know,
the Internet is the foreground of business and allows your business to compete with others
around the world. This can provide enormous opportunities for your business, but it also
increases the level of competition for your goods and services.
To give you some perspective on how UPS uses the Internet to grow our business, Iím going
to share some facts with you about ups.com, our corporate website. UPSí award-winning
website launched in 1994. It is now available in 107 countries in 32 languages. Thereís
an average of 18.5 million page views on ups.com daily with 26.2 million on a peak day, normally
around Christmas time.
There are 22.7 million tracking requests per business day with 35.6 million on a peak day.
Thatís a lot of use. UPSís web channel continues to grow at double-digit rates and itís no
wonder considering some information about the habits of average shoppers today.
In the 2008 holiday season, Black Friday saw 534 million (dollars) in online retail spending.
That was up just 1 percent from 2007, which is reduced from 2006. Eighty percent of our
Internet users, almost 133 million people today will do some of their holiday shopping
online. Thatís up 50 percent from 2007.
And by 2012, the number of online buyers, people actually making a purchase on the Internet
is going to increase by 30.3 million people, bringing the total to 141 million. Thatís
73.5 percent of Internet users. And from 2007 to 2012, the number of new online buyers in
the U.S. will grow at a 5 percent average annual rate.
Itís clear that consumers are moving to the Internet in droves, and itís an important
aspect for your business to compete. UPS has many tools available to assist all of your
businesses.
And as a leader in global transportation and logistics, UPS is committed to providing our
customers the most advanced solutions for their global shipping needs. For example,
only UPS offers the cutting-edge industry first like our paper-less invoice thatís
used for exporting without paper and our new delivery intercept service that ensures you
always have access to your packages, even when theyíre in transit.
Combined with our wide-reaching international returns and our new live chat to help you
along the way, ups.com is making e-commerce easier than ever. And we do hope you find
todayís information very valuable to your business.
We appreciate the opportunity to help you as you expand the global reach of your business.
And we want you to feel free to browse and learn more about UPS in our business solutions
area, which can be found on the Internet at ups.com. There you can view demos, make comparisons
of different technology tools and even view the animated whiteboards.
If you have any questions about UPS services following the presentation today, please do
not hesitate to contact your local UPS account manager. And if you do not currently have
a UPS account or you need additional assistance, you can contact Cathy Bennett in the UPS marketing
department, again, thatís Cathy Bennett, B-E-N-N-E-T-T, at cjbennett, which is C-J-B-E-N-N-E-T-T@ups.com.
Or you can call this number and Iím going to give it to you twice, itís (612) 378-3476.
Again, thatís (612) 378-3476.
Again, thank you for participating today and I hope you enjoy the presentation.
MS. GOTTLIEB: Thank you, Ashley, and now weíll have a quick polling question. And while youíre
answering the polling question, Iíd like to apologize for the minor glitch that weíve
had in the twitching of the slide at the beginning of the presentation. And I would like to remind
our presenters that if your cursor is anywhere near the changing of the slide arrows, they
will change and everyone can see them.
During the conference, though, and having mentioned that, if anyone is experiencing
technical difficulties ñ (gives queuing instructions). Also, at the top of your screen and slightly
right, thereís a feedback box. Please feel free to let us know if you need help, are
having difficulties hearing or would like the speakers to slow down. Looks like everyone
has answered and thank you so much for that poll.
Iíd like to now review the agenda. The purpose of todayís webinar is to provide an overview
of international search engine strategies and how these can increase international traffic
and potential customers to your site. Todayís webinar will be e-mailed to participants,
along with a link to the recorded audio portion, which will be available for approximately
30 days. This information will go out to you no later than Monday, hopefully, by Friday.
I also wanted to mention that thereís a question-and-answer box. If you look toward the top of your screen,
you will see a Q&A box. Iíd like to encourage everyone to use the Q&A box at the top of
your screen. We will answer questions at the end of the presentation. So donít be shy
on the comments and questions. This will increase the amount of information-sharing between
everybody. Questions in the Q&A box will be anonymous.
And now, Iíd like to begin todayís presentation with our first speaker, Mr. Cory Simek. Cory
is the acting director of the U.S. Commercial Service office in St. Louis of the U.S. Department
of Commerce. And heíll begin for us today. Cory?
MR. CORY SIMEK: Thanks, Margaret, and thanks, Ashley and UPS as well.
We wanted to provide a brief overview of the Internet-marketing topic, again. Of course,
when we have Joe ñ Joe Lieberman, not the senator, the other Joe Lieberman join us in
a few moments. Heíll go into a good deal more detail on all of this. But we wanted
to give you a little bit of an overview and some food for thought that will help you get
a little bit more out of this presentation that follows as well.
You know, speaking of the Internet, itís good to know how to ñ how to master the controls
and move forward from slide to slide. Probably everybody is familiar with the four Ps of
marketing: product, price, placement and promotion.
One thing we emphasize with our clients when we first start talking with new clients about
international business is that all of the things that you know how to do when you market
your product successfully right here in the United States, they generally still apply
when youíre doing global business. You still have to think about your product, the price,
how youíll distribute or place your product and also how youíll promote the product.
Also, with online and traditional international transactions, we find that thereís really
no difference between online international transactions and regular, plain old paper
or other international transactions.
You still have to think carefully about pricing your product; the same fundamental rules apply.
You have to know how to determine your tariff rates, which, you know, probably everyone
on this call is pretty familiar with and weíve covered on other webinars. And if not, of
course, weíre always here to help you.
Also, you have to think about shipping your product ñ whatís the best way to get it
there? And, of course, youíve got to know about your export licensing requirements and
your local import requirements. All of the same things that youíre already concerned
about to pull off good, successful international transactions. They still apply in the online
marketing world.
Some questions to keep in mind as you listen to Joeís presentation is whatís the purpose
of your online marketing efforts? Whatís the purpose of your web page? You want to
promote or sell your product.
Now, at first blush, that might sound like the same thing. But if you want to sell products,
you actually need the infrastructure built into your web page somehow to actually make
the transactions happen, or perhaps you just want to use the web page to promote the product
to let people know itís out there, to talk about the features and the benefits and so
on to build awareness.
Building brand awareness is a very common use of some web pages, and then you refer
someone ñ you refer potential customers to other methods and other means of securing
and closing the transaction. Or your web page might want to do all of these things or just
perhaps provide customer support or relationship management, a way that customers can communicate
with you in a more meaningful way.
You also want to consider other uses of your web page that might not be your primary use.
For example, you might use your web page as a product promotion vehicle, but then also
find that once you do have customers in a certain target market, that you can also use
the same web page in a secondary manner for education or customer relationship management.
Or data collection, for example, the way that we ask surveys on this web page. You can also
use your web page for all of the above plus perhaps to gather some primary market intelligence.
You need to know who youíre talking to. Who is your target market? And you need to really
think carefully about your target market. Are the people that you hope to attract to
your web page, are they employees or customers? Some people might even be shocked at the suggestion
of employees. But many successful web pages are geared primarily toward employees. And
of course, your web page can be geared toward both.
But you need to think about who you want to communicate with via your web page, where
are they when theyíre using the web page? What are they thinking about when they decide
to actually type your web page address into their browser? When do people turn to you
and why? And that will help you make it a much more meaningful web experience for them.
Are you communicating with your agents or your distributors? You might have a whole
different set of information available depending or perhaps your shareholders. And of course,
your web base ñ communicate with all of these different stakeholders in different ways and
I know Joe will go into a lot more detail about that.
You might have password-protected areas for your agents, for example, and entirely different
public areas for websites for the product promotion and other outreach activity. So,
overall, we need to think about what do each of the people that we hope to attract to our
web page, what do they need from us? What are they thinking and doing? Where are they
when they turn to us on the Internet?
And remember, we need to think about our objectives. We should always think about what weíre trying
to accomplish and what we really want to do. That way the classic marketing ñ the classic
marketing equation of building a better mousetrap and then the world beating a path to your
door ñ Joe can tell us itís really that easy just to build a better web page and then
people coming knocking on your door.
But we have to think about, well, what is that mousetrap weíre building? What is the
purpose of the web page? Do we want to grow our current markets? Do we want to sell more
in the markets that weíre already in? Or do we want to attract new markets, new customers
in brand-new foreign markets that we havenít done business before?
And also we have to think of key markets in terms of their Internet use and their e-commerce
use. For example, if you ñ if you develop a web page because you want to target the
market in Timbuktu, but if there arenít very many people online using the Internet in Timbuktu,
that might not be a good combination then.
So in sum, as we prepare for Joeís presentation in just a moment, we have to think about marketing
in terms of what we want to accomplish, think in terms of our key markets, who are we targeting
and where? And think about the extent of their Internet usage in those target markets? One
example would be flash media for example.
Weíve all logged onto web pages and weíre assaulted with some audio, or perhaps thereís
some really neat videos of the product. But perhaps our browser or our bandwidth isnít
high-tech enough to handle that kind of media. So we have to think in terms of who is using
the Internet? How are they using the Internet? And are they able to use all the rich features
that weíre used to?
And remember, the Commercial Service has plenty of reports on all sorts of markets. We have
Internet reports. We can plug you into data on who is using the Internet in different
countries and so on. Weíre here for you online, just like weíre always here for you in person
as well in your local areas. Right now, Iíll turn it back to Margaret so we can turn it
over to our featured speaker for today.
MS. GOTTLIEB: Thank you, Cory. Now, Iíd like to introduce our featured speaker, Joe Lieberman,
president and owner of SPIDERtel Inc. in Overland Park, Kansas. SPIDERtel is an award-winning
firm that has been providing web redesign, Internet and marketing solutions since 1996.
SPIDERtel helps transform businesses by identifying and achieving their objectives through the
power of the Internet using proven marketing strategies, intuitive and functional programming
and highly acclaimed custom graphics.
Joe has been recognized as an industry expert in the Kansas City area, is a former radio
show host and an author of many published articles. He has also taught many self-written
classes on Internet marketing.
Iíd also like to mention that Mr. Alex Bach, vice president of Internet marketing of SPIDERtel
will be available with Joe after the presentation for questions and answers. Joe, thank you
for taking the time to share your experiment ñ experience and now, you may begin.
MR. JOE LIEBERMAN: Well, thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about
international search engine marketing strategies. SPIDERtel has been providing search marketing
services, as well as web design services since 1996. Thatís coming on 13 years and weíve
seen a lot of transformation as Iím sure many of the attendees on this webinar can
understand.
Search engine marketing has changed about five times, 360 degrees throughout the decade.
And each time, we learned that it comes down to the fundamentals of you how you build your
website, not trying to follow short-term tactics that we think the search engines are looking
for today.
And thatís one of the points Iíd like to drive home, and that is that international
search engine marketing is very similar to how you would go about marketing your website
here domestically. The search engines primarily are looking for high-quality websites that
offer good content to consumers, to your stakeholders.
And the key, as Cory mentioned in his short presentation, is really identifying and understanding
who your audience is, what their interests are and insuring ñ excuse me ñ that your
website is developed to meet those needs. There are many, many tactics and weíll talk
about several of them throughout the next half hour.
But I do want to stress that there are no silver bullets here; if there were, everybody
would be doing it and it would be very simple to implement. But it is very much like running
a business. You have to focus on the fundamentals and make sure that youíre providing extreme
value to your prospective customer base.
If you have any questions after the presentation, myself and Alex Bach, our VP of Internet marketing,
weíll make ourselves available. The final slide will give ñ excuse me ñ some contact
information. And at the bottom of each of the slides, thereís some additional contact
information. And weíd be happy to talk to you about your particular need.
The opportunity here is vast, both domestically and internationally and itís stated in the
slide here. Seventy percent of all searches are not performed in English; thatís both
for the United States domestic and the world. It really shows us that the West has transformed
from being ñ originated here in the United States to something that is utilized worldwide.
Commerce is happening every day. We often get caught ñ questions from clients, more
and more itís rare, but they will ask us whether theyíre target audience is using
the Internet. And while it might have been an interesting question seven years ago, today,
thereís no doubt, thereís no research needed, nothing is doubtful about it.
Your customer base is using the Internet. It crosses all demographics, all socio-economic
boundaries. Obviously, the countries have to have access to the Internet provided, but
people are trying on it more and more to conduct business, to do research, to find answers
to their questions during whatever part of the purchase decision process they may be
in.
Weíre going to focus on five different areas. The first will be understanding the layout
of search engines and how do you go about identifying who is popular? What search engines
are being used in the particular countries that you might want to be targeting? This
is obviously important because you want to be found in those particular search engines.
Some of this may not be surprising, but weíll offer you some insight as to how to get additional
information. Then weíll start talking about what you need to think about in terms of hosting
ñ excuse me ñ I have a cough Iím trying to get over here ñ about hosting your website,
the location of your website and the domain name are very important considerations. Then
weíll talk about how to optimize your website.
There are two basic factors there, the on-site characteristics, those things that the search
engines can read about you or your website. And the second part is how other websites
are linking to you and what they say about you. Then weíll move on briefly to paid advertising
opportunities. They are similar to what we have here in the United States for text advertising
throughout the search engines, also known as pay per click.
And finally, weíll talk briefly about web analytics. And at this time, I think weíre
going to move to the first poll. And the question here is, ìDo you believe there is a significant
demand for your products and services from international customers?î And weíll let
this run for a few seconds.
MS. GOTTLIEB: Thank you for participating in this first poll. And can we show the results,
please? Well, it looks, like, obviously, 92 percent of you believe, yes, thatís a good
thing. And weíll go on with Joeís presentation.
MR. LIEBERMAN: Okay. I think Iíd be surprised to see different results; otherwise, we wouldnít
have attendees. (Chuckles.)
Okay. Talking ñ focusing on the search engines that we want to target. There are different
languages. Obviously, depending on what country youíre in, trying to target, is going to
indicate whether you need to have your website translated into other languages. And these
will vary. There are some sources throughout the Internet that can fine-tune this. But
what we have printed here is a list of languages in order from left to right in popularity,
English being first, Chinese being second, Spanish, Japanese and so on.
It is also important to note that your website can be found in a non-English search engine
depending on how the website is hosted and the location of that website. So it really
depends on what the search is about, what your target audience is searching for. If
theyíre searching for English phrase keywords, then the search engine will try to deliver
websites that have English as a base. And so it becomes a little difficult to anticipate
whether you should have one language website or multiple-language websites. And we will
talk about that in a minute.
Each country will have a popularity that will vary from one search engine to another, across
the board, no surprises, Google is the champion of search engine usage throughout the world.
They now represent about 70 percent of all searches. But it does vary from country to
country. For example here when you go into Russia, thereís Yandex, which is a very popular
search engine there. And Iíve listed a couple of others.
In China, this represents about ñ Baidu represents about 70 percent of the traffic for searches
in that country. So it will vary. There are sources of information; some of it is free.
And then other ñ other sources would be paid for. You can go to the two that are listed
underneath the domestic search engines, searchenginecolossus.com and arnoldit.com to get additional information
about how people are searching in various countries.
I will also mention that Yahoo is prevalent throughout the world; they just donít have
the market share that Google does. Thereís a very comprehensive service by market share
hits, which is paid, Iíve noted the URL there at the bottom. And if you are so inclined,
you can go on there and search by country and get very detailed information about what
each countryís search statistics are all about.
Perhaps the most important aspect of search engine marketing as I mentioned earlier, is
understanding your target audience and how theyíre going to search. Search marketers,
of which we all are, oftentimes make the mistake that they understand how people will be looking
for their products or services. We all understand our business intimately. We know the jargon.
We know the industry terms.
But we often overlook that the people that are searching for our products and services
or in the market for them ñ excuse me ñ may not know those terms and may be thinking
about how theyíre going to be using our products and services in a completely different context.
They may not know that we exist. They may not know that our services are available.
But they know that they have needs.
And so really, the most important thing you can do for yourself, whether itís domestic
marketing or international marketing is do research on how people are searching today
as itís centered around your products and services and not make any assumptions about
how you think they might be searching.
Oftentimes, we will start with a list of phrases that we anticipate people will be searching
on. Thereís clearly some that are correct. But when we start doing the research, we will
identify sometimes dozens and dozens of other phrase permutations that we were not aware
of or not thinking of that people are actually using.
And so you need to go to the source. You need to rely on how people have historically searched
on you, on your products and services. And I have listed a couple of really good resources
for international keyword research and theyíre noted here.
The first one is from Wordtracker. Wordtracker is a service that relies on aggregate information
from users themselves and theyíre accumulating this information, not from one particular
search engine, but from people across many different demographics and how they search.
You enter in keywords that you think might be used by your target audience and it will
return suggestions based on what you have entered. And this will lead you in many different
directions, oftentimes, in tangents that you might not have anticipated, and really, thatís
what youíre looking for, the things that you havenít already considered.
Google also has a tool that can be used for a country-specific searching. Both sources
will come up with different terms and they will also come up with different amounts of
usage that they would predict that your audience will use over a monthly period of time. In
Google, youíll get two sources, one is theyíll come back with a suggestion of lists of words.
Thatís the second URL there. And the third URL will tell you what they would estimate
would be the usage for those phrases that you are keying in.
Just a note of caution here that weíre really trying to get an indication of popularity
of phrases and it should not be taken as literal the number or the count that you get back
from either of these two tools. Our research ñ use of these tools over time tells us that
theyíre very good at predicting what phrases will be popular, but not so much in terms
of with the accuracy of the count of those phrases.
So itís important to get a relative perspective on what phrases are more popular than others
and use some common judgment in terms of what youíre going to optimize for. And if itís
not obvious, the reason why you would ñ you would find those phrases and make some determination
on what phrases you want to support is ñ you will then use that list to optimize your
website, both on-site and how other websites are linking to you ñ excuse me ñ as well
as to use those phrases in your keyword advertising if you choose to go with paid advertising.
The note at the bottom of this slide is very important, and that is to be careful with
translations. As Iím sure you can appreciate, literal translation of phrases is not always
useful when you go from one language to another. There are some good translation tools that
are automated when youíre getting into large bodies of text. Thatís when you will want
to consider working with companies that do this for a living and really understand the
nuances of the language.
MS. GOTTLIEB: Thank you, Joe. I think now we have another polling. And that polling
question is: Are you actively using search marketing for non-English international prospects?
Weíll take a few seconds to have you answer. Okay. And here are the results. (Inaudible,
background noise) ñ weíll go to the ñ weíll continue with Joeís presentation.
MR. LIEBERMAN: Well, thatís interesting. That says that a few of us are domestically
marketing to other languages and most of the audience is not yet marketing internationally.
Now, Iím going to focus on this area of when you do decide to try and market to particular
countries.
How do you go about doing it? Itís not enough just to have a website and wish that you will
get people from China to come to it. Itís not enough to translate your website into
Chinese and hope that Baidu will pick it up or that people will be searching for it domestically
or coming to google.com to trying to find your website.
We really have to be very deliberate about these decisions and it can be ñ it ends up
being a very strategic decision. And itís also a very critical one because it has long-term
implications. There are two basic concepts here, the first is the TLD, which is your
top-level domain, which is the last segment of your domain name, whether itís .com or
.uk or IE or whatever countryís extension it might be. The search engines will give
highest relevancy to the extension, regardless of where itís hosted.
And weíre going to talk about this a couple of different ways, and Iím going to move
on to the next concept and then weíll try and bring it altogether. The next concept
is the IP address. Every website is on a server that has a unique IP associated with it. In
fact, a server could have multiple IPs.
So your website will have a IP address. Some people may be familiar with them. There are
four quadrants and thereís a range of numbers. Itís really not important for purposes of
this discussion what numbers those are. But itís like a phone number that points to your
particular website.
And those IP addresses are allocated internationally. And so itís very possible to know definitively
where the website is hosted. And so you will know, for example, that a website is hosted
in China or whether itís hosted in the United States.
The search engines can give preferential treatment to IP addresses if they so choose, depending
on where your website is hosted. And of course, your website can have a single IP address,
although itís possible to have it spread in many different locations across the world.
And those are strategies that can be utilized with varying results.
So if you are targeting particular countries, we now have a couple of options at our disposal,
in addition to the language. We have the option of hosting the website under the TLD associated
with that country. And we also have the opportunity to have that website hosted in that particular
country with that IP address. Some of these can be more costly decisions than others.
So it will depend on the importance, the significance of having ñ you target that particular country
as to how youíre going to make your decision about where youíre going to host and what
languages youíre going to feature.
There are, essentially, two main strategies. One is to have a single website and the other
is to have multiple websites. If you have multiple websites, you now can host them in
different locations with different TLDs and different IP addresses. Weíll talk about
this is in a minute. But ñ excuse me ñ I do apologize for my cough.
We now have the opportunity to get inbound links from various websites that are targeted
to that particular website. And I cannot stress how important that it is. Iím jumping forward
a little bit. But when you get into search engine optimization, there are basically two
different categories.
Thereís how do you optimize the site and what the search engines read about it, the
text essentially. And then thereís what other websites are saying about you. It is becoming
more and more important to have good quality inbound links from other websites thatís
being used as a measure of how authoritative and relevant you are for particular phrases.
So having websites located in different countries or with different TLDs makes those inbound
links more relevant. You also can optimize for particular languages and particular phrases
more easily if you are dealing with multiple websites versus single websites. Obviously,
itís much more expensive to do it this way.
Many companies choose to go with a single website and it is still possible to have success,
although clearly you have to choose one location, have one TLD and one IP. Although this website
could be replicated throughout the world, it becomes a little more complex because inbound
links are still pointing to one domain name.
Itís possible to have a replicated website throughout the world on different IP addresses
as well. This becomes a little more sophisticated. And for purposes of this discussion, weíre
just going to focus on a single site in one location. But regarding inbound links, if
you have inbound links from various countries, thereís still very, very important.
But the aggregate of them becomes a little more diluted because they would be across-the-board
as opposed to from one particular country. And the search engines will in comparison
to other websites that are singularly focused on a particular country or language, weíll
have something to compare it to.
Clearly, itís harder to optimize for particular languages because you are more diluted across
those languages. And it is ñ the advantage here is that itís much less expensive to
maintain one set of files, et cetera. Iím sure itís easy to envision that.
To register domains with different TLDs, there are accredited registrars that are available
to do that throughout the world. Some of them are domestic and each domestic registrar like
Go Daddy or Network Solutions will have their own set of TLDs that they are authorized to
register. But if you cannot find them available there, you can go to ican.org, which is the
international agency to get assistance on identifying other registrars.
Now, weíll talk about optimizing the site for your particular country. Itís critical
that you donít use automated tools to translate into that particular language because youíre
sure to make mistakes.
Iím sure weíve all seen that, where you see non-English providers of service translate
their websites or text into English and it just looks really poor and unprofessional.
And although you may understand it, youíre not giving the right impression. So it might
get you part of the way there, but it certainly wonít get you all the way there.
Because this is a presentation on international search marketing, itís not designed to give
you all of the information associated with how you optimize the website for search marketing
in general. Thatís a five-hour class, and probably in over five different courses. So
what Iím doing is just highlighting the things that you need to consider. We certainly recommend
you work with a professional who understands how to optimize websites.
These are just highlights on what to consider. Title tags are the most important element
of any search-engine marketing campaign. They should be treated very, very carefully. Description
meta-tags, which appear on the header of websites, should also be treated carefully, although
with Google and the top search engines, they donít use them these days for determining
whether youíre relevant. They use them to list in the search-engine listings. So they
become a very important marketing tool.
Thereís a keyword meta-tag that is very unimportant here in the United States but possibly very
important to other search engines throughout the world. It really depends on which search
engine youíre trying to focus on.
Potentially, though, as I stated earlier, you want to have good-quality content that
focuses on the key phrases that you are targeting. Thereís so many rules and tactics that people
prognosticate on. Most of them are worthless, and you really need to be careful not to optimize
ñ over-optimize, because search engines can tell that these days. It needs to read very
well for the consumer.
Word-stuffing, massive repetition of phrases should not be approached. That can get you
penalized and , at worst, banned. There is an opportunity to repeat key phrases, and
it should be done, but it should be done in as natural a way as possible.
Clearly, we need to consider the culture and the lingo when you go through those conversions
to that language. And ultimately, what youíre trying to do is drive consumers to make a
decision about contacting you or, if you have commerce on the site, ultimately buying. Thereís
a good website called lisa.org (ph) which can give you some insight as to tactics that
you should use for those particular countries.
Other design considerations ñ hopefully, this makes good sense to most people. You
have to consider the culture. There are sensitivities to colors, and the lingo and the pricing and
the payment process could vary from country to country. Weíre not going to spend much
time on that.
Search engines do try to determine whether your website is relevant for a particular
phrase. And clearly, if you are focusing on a particular language, those phrases need
to be prevalent. You might want to consider having dedicated pages focused on the phrases
that you want to be found for. The more content the search engine can find related to those
phrases, the better off you are. Itís not unusual for us to develop unique pages focused
specifically on the phrases that we want to be found for.
You could also consider having phrases with the country, because some people may be searching
for a particular phrase and add the country that theyíre in because they want to know
that you provide service for that. You will not be penalized for using duplicate content
if your ñ if you have translated English to another language. Thatís not considered
duplicate content.
And for those of you that are wondering, if you have content that is duplicated in other
websites, the search engines will not penalize the website that has the duplicate content,
but they will make a decision about which website to use for that particular content.
And this is the same if you have pages that have duplicate content within them. You wonít
be penalized, but one page will become more prevalent than the other. So it becomes an
important exercise to understand how you are driving people through your website.
Landing pages are very critical. You might want to consider having landing pages focused
on keywords, plus the country that you want to be found for. It really depends on your
research, how people have searched previously.
Google has the ability for you to submit local addresses if you are located in particular
parts of the world. Thereís a process to go through to submit your local address through
Google and have it show up if people are searching on that particular locality, or they can identify
what location theyíre searching from.
And also, there is a tag that you can use that would appear in the header of your website
to indicate what language you are having the page focus on. Then, this is information that
the search engine will read, and they can give preference to that, to your pages, knowing
that thatís what youíre focusing on.
Particularly domestically, thereís little use in trying to register your search engines.
There may be search engines throughout the world where you have the opportunity to submit
forms ñ submit your website to them, but more and more, the major websites find your
website and crawl through it.
Google and Yahoo and MSN all have processes called site maps where you can create a list
of your websites in XML and submit that to the search engines so they are able to find
your website and crawl through it and see virtually every single page. This is essentially
ñ extremely important, and you can also do this for your website internationally, at
a minimum, to Google.
Having external links to your website will help facilitate the search engineís finding
you. Thatís one purpose. And the other, as I stated before, is, itís a vote in favor
of how important your website is, for the authority of your website.
So if youíre doing business with vendors overseas, have any relationships with other
companies or organizations, itís important to seek out links from their website to yours,
because it will help the search engine A, find you and B, cause you to be more relevant.
As I said, we can go on and on. This is just covering the basics. For paid placement, fortunately,
itís ñ the world is much smaller. You can get your ads distributed through all of the
same major channels, plus one, as Iíve listed here, that we can do domestically ñ through
Google, Yahoo and MSN. Itís fairly straightforward to run but requires a lot of sophistication
in understanding your audience and budgeting and reducing your cost of click by having
the highest-quality ads that are out there.
Thereís really no difference between how you would market in English domestically versus
how you would do it internationally. Youíre just focused on different phrases, different
terminology, different culture, et cetera. The tools are very similar, and China in particular,
Baidu would be the one search engine that you would want to utilize.
Iím going to try and wrap this up so that we can leave some time for questions. There
are ñ in terms of web analytics, thereís two different types. The first is based on
the log files. The second is based on whether youíre running a script from your web pages
that send referral information to the system thatís tracking.
The log-based files ñ very popular program called Webtrends ends reads those files and
produces information statistically. The others will produce information in a similar format
to you. Weíve noted a couple ñ Piwik (ph) which has a great tool. Itís free to use.
And Google Analytics, which is also free, allows a very robust set of information.
The kinds of things that you can and should be looking at are how people have visited,
how often, the countries, the geography, what page views. You are able to look through and
find (pathing ?) information, how they have typically gone through your website, where
they have exited, abandoned your pages, and how they are finding the website in the first
place ñ what search engines are driving them there, what phrases theyíre using to key
in, to get to your website, and ultimately, how they are converting.
Some of these websites ñ or, search-engine tools require some customization and back-end
work to get very detailed information about return on investments. But it is possible
to track how somebody came to your website, what search engine, what phrase. If itís
an ad, how they clicked on that ad, ultimately, what it cost you and what it returned to you
in terms of revenues and, ultimately, profit. All of this is possible today, and itís a
real marketerís dream to be able to have all this information at your fingertips.
I am going to wrap this up, because I know the hour is fast approaching and I want to
leave at least a few minutes for question and answer. So weíll go to the last poll.
MS. GOTTLIEB: Thank you, Joe. And the last polling question is, do you believe you can
greatly increase your sales through improved international search marketing efforts? Weíll
take a few seconds to answer the question. And looks like weíre going to show the results.
Looks like most of you are ñ say yes, and fewer are not sure. Thank you for that. And
now I wanted to let you know that weíre going to go into the question and answers now. And
just to remind, the Q&A box questions remain anonymous. Phone-in questions will be announced
by the operator. Operator, please explain how questions and answers work through the
operator system.
OPERATOR: Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. (Queuing instructions.)
MS. GOTTLIEB: And while weíre taking a moment for people to get into the queue to ask their
question live, my colleague Chris Tolley (ph), in the St. Louis office, has been taking questions
from the Q&A box. And weíll open that up to her now.
CHRIS TOLLEY (PH): Thank you, Margaret. We did have a few questions. First one: ìIf
one doesnít have a specific market one is targeting other than Spanish, which is a given,
into to what languages does one ñ (inaudible)?
MS. GOTTLIEB: Could you please repeat that question? We had a little difficulty hearing
you.
MS. TOLLEY (PH): Okay, Iím sorry. If one doesnít have a specific market one is targeting
other than Spanish, which is a given, into what languages does one translate their site?
Was that better?
MS. GOTTLIEB: Yes, that was.
MS. TOLLEY (PH): Okay, thanks.
MR. LIEBERMAN: Okay, I think maybe the question is: What countries should we be focusing on?
Because as I understood the question, it is given that weíre going to want to focus on
Spanish. And there may be some variations on the theme here. But as Iím interpreting
it, this would be where would we want to focus if we have an audience that is Spanish-speaking.
At a minimum, we clearly want to translate it into Spanish and then we have questions
about whether we convert the site into one or more countries that would cater to the
Spanish language. There would be many in Mexico, obviously. Overseas, there are a couple. And
so in general, itís impossible to answer that question specifically without knowing
what the product and service is.
If the budgetís not there, then we either make the decision to focus on one or keep
it more generic and focus on a .com, where weíve translated the website into Spanish
and hope that the search engines overseas will pick them up. But ultimately, if you
want to be found in a particular country, we have to make a stand. We have to choose
where we want to have our emphasis and that can be done by getting the TLDs and having
the website hosted here domestically with that particular TLD, translate it, of course,
into Spanish.
As I think about it, this might be one of the easier ones where you could have multiple
TLDs for Spanish over the same website and each of those countries, then would see the
same website. There wouldnít be any penalization and you really would be optimizing for that
particular language.
MS. GOTTLIEB: Okay, thank you. We do have a second question. ìIf one decides to maintain
a single site and the company decides to translate that site in several languages and the site
is a large one, should the company translate the whole site in each language or just the
products and their features, the about us and contact information?î
MR. LIEBERMAN: Well, itís a good question. Again, it will depend on who your audience
is, how sophisticated they are. Itís clear that English is a secondary language for many
people across the world. So it may not be absolutely essential that the entire site
is replicated. However, there are lots of models to look at. Depending on your industry,
we may want to do some comparison, benchmarking.
For example, UPS, to see how theyíre treating it. The larger organizations are going to
have completely unique websites or rather sections of their websites that are stand-alone.
But hereís the most important element and that is that the content on the website is
rich enough that the search engines see youíre relevance for those phrases.
So it may not be enough just to have a product database that is stand-alone for those particular
languages because if the site or the product displays may not have enough content within
them that the search engines for those particular countries would see them as relevant. Thatís
another aspect that we would look at.
MS. GOTTLIEB: Thank you. At this time, Operator, do you show any questions in the queue?
OPERATOR: Yes. Our first question comes from Joey Johnson (ph). Your lineís open.
Q: My nameís Kelly (ph) ñ is that who youíre talking to? Are you talking to me?
OPERATOR: Yes.
Q: Okay. So my question is, if Iím not going to translate a website into another language,
is there anything to be gained by putting metadata in, say, Spanish, onto the ñ into
the HTML code so that the Google spider can see it?
MR. LIEBERMAN: So if I understand the question, would be benefit by having some meta tags
that are ñ that are translated for that particular language, but the body of the site would not
be translated? Is that correct?
Q: Correct.
MR. LIEBERMAN: Okay, nominal. You can only have one title tag, for example. And that
has the most weight of any tag that you can use throughout the search engine or rather,
throughout the site.
So youíve got to make a stand as to whether youíre going to translate that or not. The
search engines are increasingly smart, particularly Google, about knowing whether thereís contents
on the page that is of that language or not. So it might give you a little opportunity,
but probably so insignificant that it wouldnít help.
Q: Okay, thank you.
MS. GOTTLIEB: We do have another written question. How do you find out if certain countries block
some sites from their population?
MR. LIEBERMAN: Weíre pausing. (Chuckles.)
MS. GOTTLIEB: Okay.
ALEX BACH: This is Alex Bach. As a general case basis, most of the search engines out
there are private, okay? And unfortunately, with them being private, theyíre not very
receptive to sharing a lot of their information. The U.S. search engines are much the same
way.
Theyíre not going to tell you whether youíre banned or not with the exception of, now,
Google, who has tried to assist webmasters in keeping their websites and their information
within the Google index. Most other search engines are not going to provide you with
that information. So itís pretty difficult to tell whether youíve been banned or not.
MR. LIEBERMAN: But Google, which represents the vast majority of traffic, does have a
tool that you can go to. Itís not updated 100 percent of the time, but if you are banned,
generally speaking, you will be able to identify whether you are or not.
And theyíve become increasingly more cooperative in helping you help yourself in getting unbanned
from the search engine. If thatís what the question was regarding, you are not going
to be able to find out what other websites are banned. I think thatís safe to say. But
if itís your own website, you would be able to find that out with Google.
MS. GOTTLIEB: Thank you. Operator, do you have other questions from the queue at this
time?
OPERATOR: We have no other questions.
MS. GOTTLIEB: Thank you. We do have one more written question. ìWe want to put a price
for our item on the site so that potential buyers have an idea of cost. However, pricing
varies due to quantities purchased and type and country of buyer, the mode of shipping,
et cetera. What kind of a phrase should we have on our website regarding pricing?î
MR. LIEBERMAN: Well, it sounds like you will need ñ if you canít deliver the price automatically,
thatís something that you should consider. And it can be programmed to deliver that price
based on the number of factors.
You could get very sophisticated and identify what countries are coming in and deliver it
automatically or you could have the searcher, the customer, online answer what country they
want pricing for. But very simply, statements around pricing will vary based on location
and quantity and then the rest depends on what information youíre able to deliver online
or whether they have to submit a request and then you follow up with you know, a quote.
We do have clients here domestically that have such statements. And when international
clients are purchasing from them, they will need to wait for a quote because sometimes,
international shipping of large items ñ itís not practical to be able to get automatic
shipping information. And itís used. People overseas are accustomed to that.
MS. GOTTLIEB: Thank you. We do have an additional written question. ìIs using the .com extension
considered more global or international than using a national suffix? More and more non-U.S.
sites seem to be doing this.î
MR. LIEBERMAN: Well, the answer is yes. Non-U.S. sites are trying to market to the United States
for obvious reasons and so it can apparently look like they are being hosted here in the
United States.
That might be one of the factors that they are ñ they purchase the domain with a .com
extension on it and theyíre hosting it here in the United States even though itís not
.us, which would indicate that itís in the United States. It is regarded as primarily
a United States website. That being said, the international community does regard .com
just as the rest of the world does, the United States, as being more familiar and more comfortable
and more global.
MS. GOTTLIEB: Thank you. We have an additional question. ìWe currently use a vendor for
hosting our website. Is there a way to use a secondary web analytics source to determine
how effective our website is internationally?î
MR. LIEBERMAN: Absolutely. If you refer back to the slide on web analytics, we mentioned
a couple of sources for script-based statistics. We use Telex for example and itís just a
small piece of ñ I mean I think thereís two different areas that a small JavaScript
that will send the referral information to wherever that statistics program is being
hosted. And you can then monitor traffic, compare it to what the log files say and drill
down into particular countries for usage there.
MS. GOTTLIEB: Thank you. Operator, do you show any additional questions in the queue?
OPERATOR: We do have one question.
MS. GOTTLIEB: Thank you. Go ahead.
OPERATOR: Our next question ñ your name was not recorded, so please state your name to
ask your question.
Q: My name is ñ (inaudible, cross talk).
Q: Hi, this is ñ
Q: I wanted to ask ñ if Iím going to start a website in Canada, same exact duplicate
of my current site, does it ñ will it be a good move to get Canada IP addresses so
that Google search engine ranks me equal to the Canada-based sites?
MR. LIEBERMAN: Yeah. If the budget allows for it, your best optimal strategy is to have
.ca ñ Iím going to wait for that noise to stop. Okay, your best ñ your optimal strategy
is to have .ca as the website TLD and an IP address located in Canada. Thatís two criteria
that Google.ca will use to determine whether youíre hosted ñ whether youíre hosted in
Canada or not. And you will have preference over similar website ñ similar content that
would be in the United States with .com.
Q: Is there any way to get the Canadian IP address, yet still host your site where it
currently is now?
MR. LIEBERMAN: I donít think so. I canít say with 100 percent certainty. I donít believe
you can do that. And so in other words, these IP addresses are not portable.
Q: So we would have the server farm in Canada in order to pull that off.
MR. LIEBERMAN: Thatís correct. And I think, though, that there are things like proxy servers
where there may be some host companies that can effectively manage it for you in the United
States that will do that on your behalf.
Q: Okay, thank you.
MS. GOTTLIEB: Thank you. Operator, do you show any additional questions in the queue?
OPERATOR: We have no further questions.
MS. GOTTLIEB: Thank you. At this time, we donít have any other additional questions
in the Q&A box. We would like to thank everyone for participating in todayís webinar. And
we also would like to thank our sponsors and presenters as well. We do look forward to
you participating in our final webinar in the Export Fundamentals series. The last one
will take place on March 18th and the topic is ìExporter Obligations/Export Control Update.î
At this time, we can conclude our webinar. Thank you. Bye-bye.