Driving Customers to Your Website

Translating your website content and setting up the proper technical requirements are the foundation for having a successful, global-first website. However, you still need to drive traffic to your website using paid and organic methods.

Multilingual Performance Marketing

Performance marketing is digital advertising, where you pay only when specific actions are taken, such as a click, sale, or lead.

Many factors come into play in performance marketing, including targeting the right keywords and audience, writing impactful ad copy, optimizing bids, and creating relevant landing pages.

For international performance marketing, there are additional considerations. You cannot just translate the ads you are using for foreign audiences.

As with localizing your website, you should also localize your ad copy and creatives. This includes considering cultural differences, using appropriate images, and researching keywords that local audiences use to find information or solutions.

Getting started in multilingual performance marketing:

Assess

Use your existing data to determine how your website performs in different markets. Review the competitive landscape and the demand for similar products in those markets.

Understand

Find out more about your target audience, including their demographics, interests, search behavior, and cultural differences. Test and analyze. Run paid ads with a small budget to see which messages and images your target audience responds to and which convert best.

Roll Out

Once you have established conclusive results and made the necessary tweaks, execute your campaigns to a broader audience and with a higher budget.

It’s also possible that simple translation is not the answer to performance marketing. You may have to take the transcreation approach, which combines translation and creation. This involves creating marketing campaigns from scratch while retaining the original intent and context.

International SEO

Technical SEO is one aspect of SEO. The other two critical areas are on-page optimization, optimizing your content for search engines, and off-page optimization, which involves building external links that help your website build authority.

Here are the best practices to adopt:

You can’t apply the same SEO strategy across all markets. You need to research your target audience and local competitors for each country.

Research

You can’t apply the same SEO strategy across all markets. You need to research your target audience and local competitors for each country.

Prioritize

Start optimizing your website for another market where you already get significant traffic. Or, if your company is specifically targeting a country or region, prioritize that. You don’t need to do SEO optimization all at once.

Identify Keywords

Don’t just translate your keywords and expect these to be the same ones that users from other countries also use to search for information. Do keyword research for each country and prioritize based on relevance, search volume, and competitiveness.

Build Links for Each Market

You can improve your local ranking for search results if local websites link to your website. So, invest the time and effort to reach out to high-authority local websites for links.

Consider Other Search Engines

There are some countries where Google is not dominant. For example, Baidu rules in China, Yandex in Russia, and Naver in South Korea. Find out how to rank on those search engines if you target those countries.