If you're just starting out with optimizing for your international search presence, there are multiple factors that you'll need to take into consideration. And while most will speak to your company goals and your business model, there are also some things to think about when deciding which markets you'll target for these efforts, and the resources you'll allocate against them. Let's look at a fictitious UK-based clothing company that's successfully launched into China recently and is now considering expanding to the rest of the European Union. The first thing to realize is that the website infrastructure required for global operations is going to take a lot of work, especially if their efforts to date have focused on a well-optimized presence for the domestic UK customer base.
Now we're talking about many different countries, each with one or more languages, and each with unique cultural aspects that need to be understood. By expanding to countries in the EU, this means they'll now require significant infrastructure adjustments to not only ensurethat the core functionality of the website will work in these new markets, currencies, languages, and customs, but also that search engines can understand the now global nature of the business. And on top of that, they'll also have to make sure that these new multilingual and multiregional customers have a positive user experience.
Because this can be a huge undertaking, it's often a good idea to walk before you run. You don't wanna make an enormous investment in getting everything perfect before you launch in, say, Italy, only to find out that the market wasn't quite what you thought it was. Instead, this company might choose to do the minimum viable option, then get some data, and then evaluate that data to see if additional investment is warranted. So let's follow this example a little further. In the EU, and especially in Western Europe, Google tends to be the search engine of choice, so that will allow us to limit our focus a bit for now.
We'll be able to get a good feel for these markets without having to take into considerationadditional search engines. A good first step to evaluating country-level interest in your website is simply to take a look at your current analytics data. Research in current activity lets you see what level of international visibility you may already have. Any major analytics package will support location-based reports, but in this example, let's take a look at a geographic report from Google Analytics that shows us where our website visits are coming from, country by country.
Here, we've filtered down to EU countries, and we can see that Germany and France are way out ahead of the pack. We can see about three more countries that have some significant volume, but beyond that, we might be wasting a lot of time and energy optimizing for such a small set of visitors. So far, we've got some strong indications that we've found two countries to go do some testing in. Another report to look at in your analytics package is the languages report. This is going to show you the languages that are installed on the operating systems of the devices used to access your website, and they can be a good indication of not only where your visitors are coming from, but what their first languages might be.
Here, we've not filtered out any countries, and we can see that success of the Chinese program, along with the strength of our domestic UK program, and the next two rows tell usthat French and German speakers are the next largest audiences already. Now, make sure to take all of this with a certain grain of salt. Italy, for example, may actually have the largest market in the whole of the EU for these products and services, but since there's currently no Italian website, and there's no promotion of the brand in Italy, of course the data in these reports won't include a strong showing for Italians.
It's also possible that the reason Germans and French are arriving in such numbers is because English language proficiency may be high in Germany, or brand recognition might have crossed the English Channel into France. So for this reason, while analytics data may get you a good start, it's always a good idea to do your formal market research. From here, you can launch some pilot programs, make some initial inroads into specific markets, and collect the data that can justify the continuation or the cancellation of these efforts. But back to our example, and assuming the market research backed up our foray into Germany and France,there are a few logistical things that will need to be done to give them a fighting chance.
First, because the native languages of these two markets represent a strong segment of traffic, the company should probably develop translated and regionalized content, and update their website to serve distinct languages and regions. On the other hand, if you're a US-based company just looking to expand into Canada, you may choose to forgo the cost of translating everything into French at this stage, as you would still be able to capture a large volume of the Canadian market without it. Next, they'll need to adjust things like pricing, and figure out how to support local currency and shipping options.
Many of these things can be handled by a content management and e-commerce platforms,but they'll still require a lot of work, and it's important to plan for these things, and just as important is to understand what changes the business dictates in these new markets. Will there be products that can't be sold in these new markets? Are there new or different products that should be sold in these markets? Are there things like shipping and logisticsthat are going to require changes to the way orders are taken, processed, and fulfilled? Are there legal or tax issues involved in operating in these countries that need to be considered?Obviously, it takes a lot of planning to identify your target markets, and of course the details of these decisions are highly dependent upon the business objectives and the resources that can be invested in developing the infrastructure needed to support these efforts.
In the meantime, however, hopefully this video has given you a few rudimentary things to look at early on in that process, and has you thinking about the scale and the importance of the factors that you need to consider when going global.
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