Globalisation through optimisation continued...
How to...
An increasingly popular way to optimise for global markets is through search engine optimisation and marketing. Survey after survey has shown that search engines are the most popular means by which web users find web sites, ahead of banners, pop-ups, viral campaigns and email. At the same time, search engine listings have been shown to outperform banners by nearly three to one in terms of sales, In other words, someone clicking a search engine listing is nearly three times more likely to buy than someone clicking on a banner. This is due to the fact that a search engine user is actively seeking information, products or services and is therefore more highly qualified as a prospect and, as a result, search engine marketing campaigns tend to get a higher return on investment than other forms of online promotion.
What's more, search engine marketing, when implemented in conjunction with a visitor tracking system, is inherently measurable - and therefore accountable. The marketing department can use the resulting data to see exactly where visitors are coming from, which search terms they used to find you (assuming they came from a search engine), how they're behaving on the site including how long they're spending on each page, and where they are leaving from. This data not only provides valuable feedback on the success of your search engine optimisation and marketing strategy, but delivers fascinating insights into the visitor experience of the site. For example, if there's a weakness in the site's navigation that has created a 'quit spot', a point at which visitors give up and leave, it can be identified and fixed simply by tracking visitors' behavioural patterns.
This leads us on to another, little-known benefit of search engine optimisation and marketing - that it makes a site more visitor and customer friendly as well as search engine friendly, as a by-product of the optimisation process. For example, an optimised site is not only easy to find on search engines, but is fast to download, intuitive to use, has the content that visitors are asking for and - vitally, in the light of recent legislation - can be made accessible to disabled visitors who are using assistive technologies such as text readers.
Best of all, search engine marketing is ideal for the global Internet marketer. Firstly, many of the leading search engines, such as Google and Yahoo! offer a country-specific search service to each local audience, which gives global companies the opportunity to build a local presence. Likewise, many countries have their own, regionally-focused search engines. France, for example has 31 while Germany has 59. Even Afghanistan has 2, while China has 21. In other words, it is possible to reach customers all over the world, using a combination of global, local and localised search engines, while managing the campaign from one central base, via email, fax and online banking facilities.
Global search engine optimisation in short...
