My book on Global Multilingual SEO was published on Amazon recently. It is a short, hands on, practical guide based on our 15 years of managing global campaigns.
The main chapters are:
Should You Market Globally?
Should You Translate The Entire Website?
Letting The Search Engines Know What Country You Are
Targeting For Your Website
Additional Factors To Consider With Geolocation
Selected Language/Country Scenarios
Additional Language Issues
Localization Issues Not Related To Language
Interacting With Your Global Customers
Search Engines With Most Traffic By Country
Organic Search
Searching For Research And Spying On Competitors
Pay Per Click (Ppc)
Content Management System
Product Or Service Compatibility/Legality And Other Issues
Creating a global AdWords campaign that excludes a few countries is something that should be simple to do, but for some reason Google does not allow you to create a campaign and delete a few countries from it. Rather than spend a lot of unnecessary time manually adding each country, we recommend this workaround.
The first step is to get a list of all countries listed by continent copied into Excel. You can access a Batch Countries List for AdWords here. Next, you will need to delete the countries that you want to exclude from the spreadsheet.
List of countries by continent, with the locations that need to be deleted.
Then, you simply need to copy and paste the lists of countries into AdWords Editor using Make Multiple Changes, verify the locations and upload the campaign to AdWords.
This tip can save you hours of time. If you have any suggestion for improving it please leave a comment below.
One of the first things we do when we start working with a new ecommerce client is check out the shopping cart. In general, they are much better today than they were a few years ago. However there is usually lots of room for improvement.
One of the best ways to demonstrated the problems is to do a usability test and show the video to the shopping cart owner and development team. That is usually enough to convince everyone there is a problem.
However now there is a shorter way. If you need to convince people to improve their shopping cart, try showing them this parody of online shopping as if it was done in real life.
There is no doubt that this year’s Panda and Penguin updates have caused significant changes. We found that the best strategy is to understand Google’s goals and how they might implement them in their algorithm.
One major goal is to increase the relevancy of the search results. Incorporating backlinks in their algorithm was their major breakthrough to increase the quality of their search results.
Many of the updates have to do with getting better at downgrading links that are for manipulating the search engine results. However there are also updates that related to the quality of the content on the site. For example, duplicate content is a problem.
Google probably also looks at metrics that signal content quality. Lowering the bounce rate will help in this case.
It is well known that you have to be super careful when making decisions based on web analytics. It is so easy to make web analytics mistakes. Common mistakes such as not having analytics code installed properly are well known. 14 years of analyzing websites has exposed us to many of the possible mistakes.
In order to avoid problems the most important think is to use common sense. If something doesn’t make sense, start digging to find the problem. If you dig deep enough you will most likely find the problem. Of course, in many cases there is no problem and there really is something curious happening on your website. But you still have to make sure the data is true.
I was recently reviewing one of our clients’ web sites and saw a big rise in people who sent in forms. We have a goal which is set to measure all pages that have the word thank in the URL to do this. Our webmaster knows that the thank you pages for contests or sweepstakes do not have the word thank in the URL so they won’t be counted as Conversions.
I was happy to see the rise in conversions but I was skeptical and started digging. Sure enough, I found that the thank you page for a sweepstakes had the work thanksgiving in it because it was a thanksgiving sweepstakes. Since the word thank is in thanksgiving, Google Analytics picked this up as a goal completion.
To avoid this problem in the future we sent out instructions that the word Thanksgiving should not be excluded when setting up Goals. There are always potential pitfalls when analyzing websites so keep your wits about you when analyzing and don’t take anything at face value.
Google Analytics is not providing all the keyword traffic information anymore. The most trafficked keyword now is usually “not provided”. If this segment is not too big the accuracy of the organic keyword report is still reasonable. Especially if we assume the “not provided” segment is more or less distributed among many keywords.
However if we want to track a keyword’s traffic over time we have a problem.
For example we may want to compare keyword traffic for “keyword 1” from this August as compared to last August when “not provided” didn’t exist. It is hard to know how accurate our comparison is.
As time goes on this segment may increase in size which means these kinds of comparisons will always be inaccurate. If this information is important you may need to use an alternative analytics package which provides more complete information
So if you see that traffic for a keyword is trending down compared to last year—don’t panic. Many of the searches may be hidden in the “not provided” segment. However if there is a big difference you may want to go ahead and panic.
My neighbor who owns a Bible reenactment village, has a flair for PR. He equipped his donkeys with Wifi –probably the first in the world. Here are just some of the headlines he got.
Giddy App! Ride Wi-Fi-Equipped Donkeys At A Biblical Theme Park Fast Company
When I bumped into him he asked me how he can take advantage of all the traffic. People focus a lot on how to do viral marketing but few people ask my neighbor’s question. In addition to the standard analysis of new keyword traffic, referrals, etc. I told him to put up an AB test.
A successful viral campaign is an opportunity to get AB test results fast. Just make sure you filter out the irrelevant traffic. Otherwise you may come to the wrong conclusions.
With mobile traffic increasing, many businesses have developed special mobile websites to improve usability and increase conversions. It is important not to have Flash on the mobile website since iPhones make up a significant number of these users and the iPhone can’t read Flash.
Many companies may think that eliminating Flash on their main website is less important since the iPhone visitors can be automatically redirected to the mobile site.
There is only one problem with this scenario: the iPad.
The iPad also doesn’t read Flash but it is not appropriate to redirect it to a mobile site since it has a big screen. If iPad users are becoming a significant number on your website it would be a good idea to replace Flash with a different technology.
Although Baidu is the dominant search engine in China, Google does have significant traffic. How significant depends on the specific keyword.
Many people in China who look for B2B products or services use Google. Customer to Business searches however are dominated by Baidu. If you are searching for an MP3 download, Baidu is where most people search.
Baidu will probably have more expensive ad costs for you but will bring in more traffic. In many cases their entire first page is paid ads so organic search traffic is more challenging.
Most B2B companies should work with both search engines in order to maximize profits.
Even if you always keep your website up to date people are sometimes going to end up on your 404 error page. It could be their fault–maybe they typed in a URL with mistakes. Or it could be because you took down a page inadvertently. There are many reasons why people end up on the 404.
What is important is that you provide them with an easy path back to your site. Replace the default page with something that is user-friendly. Don’t blame them for arriving here. Add links to important pages on your site. There are many creative things you can do to turn the error page into a positive experience and increase your conversion rate.
See the video below to see what others have done.
Improving your 404 error page can increase conversions.
