The Canadian perspective
October 29th, 2008
Your blog editor, Kaila, has been back in her native country of Canada and shares her perspective on both the Canadian media and the state of Canadian online retail…
Your favourite Canuck (yes, that’s what we call ourselves) is back in Canada for a few weeks. Whilst here, it’s been interesting flipping through our business magazines and (in addition to seeing sentences written with my native grammatical structures – very exciting) seeing how Canadians are interpreting the credit crisis.
It would seem that we were a bit cocky at first. Journalists were musing that the credit crunch may just avoid Canada (though ignore may have been a more apt verb). But alas, our loonie (that’s our dollar) has fallen to the lowest levels it’s been in five years, which incidentally means the value of my student loan has gone down… But probably not so great news for the rest of Canada.
In addition, Time magazine (you may have heard of it) had an article this week on what’s called ‘globality’. The term was first coined by Daniel Yergin in 1998 (wikipedia it). It represents the end state of globalisation, where everyone is competing everywhere for everything.
Though the Time article did not go into much discussion of the implications of this ‘globality’ for the world wide web, I think that it’s pretty obvious that much of this staggering influx of competition would be taking place online. Thus, SEO (and especially, you guess it, multilingual SEO) will play a big role in this new world of anybody’s-game competition.
Now, obviously Time magazine articles are focused on the US, but since most people don’t seem to notice much of a difference between Canada and the US, I feel that I can draw certain conclusions from this article that are quite applicable to my big country.
I’ve only been back for about a week and a half, but from browsing through Canadian e-commerce websites, it would appear Canada lags behind the online times. Not only are our sites not optimised in other languages, they’re often not even optimised in English. (note: if you Google Roots Canada, one of our top Canadian clothing retailers, the US-tagged site comes up first…)
Canada, being a very multicultural country, has massive expat communities from all over the world. Since people prefer to search in their native language, as we at Oban have been saying all along, then actually even those Canadian websites that are only targeting Canadians would do well to have languages like Tamil, Japanese, Punjabi, etc.
All the Canadian newspapers are talking about how retail shopping is down in Canada, and ‘whoa is me, what are we to do’. The trick in the new year will be for Canadian e-tailers to get some serious optimization done on their websites not only in English (and of course our other national language, Québecois French), but also in the various languages of the rising international giants including China, India and Brazil.
Cheers! Kaila
