eBay Advisor
May 27th, 2008
http://www.ebayadvisormag.com/2008/05/sellers-workshop-multilingual-seo.html
Seller’s Workshop: Multilingual SEO
Many eBay listings appear in search engines – Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live all work on the same principle. Optimise your listings, for multiple languages, and you can achieve better sales. Greig Holbrook, a director of Oban Multilingual, explains:
The vast majority of digital marketers in the UK are very familiar with both search engine optimisation (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM). The growth in popularity of SEO/SEM has been quite staggering.
However the really big changes in SEO in 2007-2008 have been in the growth in internet usage and search behaviour which is happening within multilingual environments worldwide.From Russia, through Poland and heading to China, non-English users now represent a massive three-quarters of the online population. As recently as 1997, experts predicted that if you didn’t speak English you wouldn’t be able to use the web – how wrong they were.
English SEO has become ‘clogged’ and hugely competitive in many different areas like travel and online retail. Multilingual SEO offers huge advantages to any company who can see beyond the UK, and look towards expanding their online business globally.
Internet usage/access
The number of internet users of different languages has risen dramatically. Arabic has risen by 1,575 percent in the past five years and Chinese has seen a 472 percent increase over the same period. At just 13.2 percent and 13.6 percent of the population respectively, these markets still have room to grow. This is especially apparent when we note that the UK/ US have around 70 percent penetration.
English now only represents less than a third of the language users online. This has a very significant impact on how to conduct effective search marketing globally.
Cultural Key-phrases
Searchers are developing their own varieties of phrases and are also searching a lot more than they did.
Take, for example, the term:’ Kinder Diaper’ in German – ‘kinder’ being the word for child but ‘diaper’ being the American word for nappy. This phrase has high volumes of search but is totally unique to Germany.
In French, the use of accents is a critical factor, as is their adoption of ‘English phrases’, often misspelled, like holliday (a misspelling of the English word ‘holiday’).
Translation is not an effective SEO tool and has now been largely discounted by serious multilingual search marketers. Although obvious key-phrases like car-hire can be considered for translation, once you look beyond the obvious and most competitive phrases the variety of key-phrases is enormous between countries.
Search Engines
Local search engines in many countries continue to dominate and even grow market share. For example, in India one of the most important search providers is Rediff. Google is not the de facto solution for many countries.
In China, Baidu still dominates the market with around three-quarters of the market. In February this year, Baidu announced its launch into Japan. This illustrates that local providers of search are actively seeking to grow their audiences and are not merely at the mercy of Google.
In Russia, Yandex still continues to be the largest search engine by far.
Global Online Trends
Some of the most compelling data in the last year is shows the growing popularity of e-commerce on line throughout Europe and Asia.
Between 2006 and 2008, B2C E-commerce sales increased from $2.4- $6.4 billion in China, with a staggering 90 percent of Chinese internet users stating that they will buy online in 2008, a 40 percent increase over the past year.
At the end of 2007 China had 210 million internet users, which is a 53 percent increase from 2006; China added 73 million new internet users between 2006 and 2007. This is still only 16 percent of the population.
India saw a massive increase in online shoppers between 2006 and 2007 from 11.9 million to 19.1 million, adding a staggering 8 million online shoppers in the last year alone.
Online spend throughout Europe rose rapidly over the past two years. Some of the biggest spenders are in now in Germany. In fact, the UK now spends less online than the Germans.
In travel and tourism the French now spend more online in 2007 than the UK (5531.9-5251.8 euros respectively), with spending on online travel from Greece showing a 10 fold leap in the past two years.
In Asia, B2C online travel sales between 2006 and 2007 increased by 50 percent.
Across Asia and Europe, more people use search to both find goods and purchase online.
In 2007, three quarters of online purchasers stated they would use a search engine to look for product or service information, up from half in 2006. In fact, the only source of research higher than search engines to make purchase decisions was the news.
Over 72 percent of Chinese internet users now search daily, which is now more frequent than the Americans at 64 percent and worldwide average of 69 percent.
Social Media
Social Media has become a very hot topic in SEO circles in the past year, and many people assume that the same trends that happen in the UK are happening elsewhere. However the statistics reflect a very different picture dependent on the market you are in.
In the past year the Japanese have become the biggest blog consumers in the world. Three quarters of Japanese web users use and read blogs frequently. The country that favours blogs least is Belgium with only 12 percent of users relying on blogs for information.
With social networking sites, there are cultural differences as well. In India, for example, 69 percent of web users, use social networking sites frequently which has increased by 40 percent in the past year. In the UK, only 34 percent use social networking sites. In Germany it’s even lower at less than ten percent.
Conclusions
Huge opportunities await companies which make active steps now to own the multilingual SEO/SEM ground in countries outside the UK/US. The statistics show the demand is there. Globally SEO knowledge is still much lower than the UK which offers a competitive advantage to savvy companies.
The time to act is now. One need only look to Poland to see evidence that this opportunity will not last. One year ago there were four to five Polish companies bidding for pay-per-click on Google for ‘loans and credit’- now there are 25!
Companies which go and own the multilingual SEO ground now will have huge competitive advantage but as with anything in digital this won’t last forever.
