Driving organic search traffic and sales through multinational search engine optimization requires a fusion of keyword relevance and geo-targeting to send location relevance signals. The search engines have to decipher a site’s geo-targeting signals to deliver the right page in the right language with the right SKUs, pricing, currency and availability. Optimizing the geo-targeting signals a site sends is critical to driving organic search traffic and sales in multiple countries.

Consider a searcher in the U.K. who wants to buy a toy for her daughter’s birthday. She searches Google U.K. for “dolls house.” Along with her query, the searcher is unconsciously sending location signals that the search is coming from a U.K.-based IP address and the query is in English. She may have also set her Google preferences to favor certain languages or countries. In response, Google quickly serves up all the pages from U.K. sites with English content relevant to “dolls house.”

An ecommerce merchant in the U.K. that serves only the U.K. market is most likely sending U.K. signals without even trying. Google can easily match the U.K. seller’s location signals plus its “dolls house” signals to the searcher’s desire to buy a doll’s house in the U.K. However, merchants with sites based in the U.S. who also serve the U.K. market and other English-speaking countries have a much greater challenge. Regardless of the strength of the keyword’s relevance, the number of relevant product offerings or customer service, U.S. merchants are not going to win the U.K. search or the U.K. sale if their multinational sites don’t geo-target their content to send U.K. signals.

How to Send Geo-targeting Signals to Search Engines

1. Register all relevant country code top-level domains (ccTLDs), such as .co.uk and .ca, even if the site’s content will be hosted on a general top-level domain (such as a .com). The ccTLD can then be redirected to the content’s true home on the .com to channel link popularity and customers.
2. Host the site’s content locally in each country. This can be fraught with business issues, and it isn’t a deal breaker if it’s not possible; but it’s a strong signal if it can be accomplished.
3. Build local links (ccLinks) in each country. The strongest ccLinks will mirror the site’s desired geo-targeting signals. For example, strong ccLinks for an English-language Canadian site would be hosted on a .ca ccTLD in Canada, and the content would be topically relevant and written in English.
4. Establish crawlable country navigation. A simple HTML country sitemap or crawlable navigation ensures a clear path for search engine crawlers to find and index country content.
5. Offer content in the local language. This signal impacts SEO by distinguishing between countries that speak different languages natively, such as geo-targeting the U.S. and France.
6. Register each country “site” in Google Webmaster Tools and geo-target each to a specific country. This is helpful whether a country “site” is hosted on its own ccTLD, or as a subdomain or subdirectory of a multinational domain.
7. Use the standard language and country codes in the URLs as the country’s subdomain or root directory, especially if it’s not possible to host the content at the ccTLD. These URL identifiers serve as a signal to observant humans to influence click-through in the search results, as well as sending a small signal to engines.
8. Establish language meta tags. While not generally considered a strong geo-targeting SEO signal, accurate use of country and language metadata can only help. Use the standard language and country codes to identify each site’s target either in a language meta tag or in the language attributes of the HTML tag.

Geo-location Challenges

Geo-location refers to the delivery of a default country/language content based on the visitor’s geographic location. Generally considered to be good usability practice, it can be disastrous if SEO concerns aren’t taken into consideration.

Consider the geographic footprint Googlebot leaves: California, U.S. Same with Yahoo’s bot, Slurp, and Bing’s MSNbot crawls from Washington. If geo-location occurs on every page of a site with no persistently crawlable navigation to all country/language sites, the search engines may only be allowed to crawl U.S. content based on the IP address. If this happens, only the site’s U.S. content will be able to rank in Google, Yahoo! and Bing, seriously limiting international traffic or sales. Analyze the URLs indexed in each country to determine if geo-location may be impacting SEO.

If you are an ecommerce merchant, your business likely cannot survive without search engine exposure through Google. But Google has over one hundred other services and products that have blossomed from its core web search tool. Just keeping up with the names of these products is challenging, let alone figuring out how you can utilize them to improve your bottom line.

Let’s take a look at the Google services most relevant to ecommerce site owners and some of the newer features that you can leverage for your business.

Google Web Search

Google’s flagship search engine is still the go-to Internet entry point for much of civilization (with Facebook representing a worthy challenger). One of Google’s more recent advances in search technology is called Google Caffeine. Caffeine is not something you can see, but it is the underlying framework that Google now uses to deliver search results. Theoretically, Caffeine allows Google to crawl the web more quickly and deliver more timely information. The key concept is speed. Part of Google’s need for speed means it considers the load time of your site’s pages to be a key factor. You will want to be sure that your pages load quickly and meet Google’s other quality standards.

Google Products

Google has a tendency to rename some of its properties. What once was Froogle, was then Google Base, then evolved into Google Product Search, and now is found under the Google Merchant Center. The important thing to know is that Google has made shopping results more prominent on its search pages. If you have an ecommerce site, you need to have a Google Product Feed so your products will show up in Google Product Search. If you have over 100 products you will likely want to set up a “feed,” which means creating a formatted file and sending it to Google at regular intervals.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a very useful tool for tracking and analyzing your site’s traffic. The level of detail overwhelms many people who use Google Analytics. If you are a new user, I recommend setting up weekly emailed reports. If you are an advanced user, you will want to get a handle on Analytics Intelligence, which you can configure to track shifts in key aspects of your data and alert you when important changes take place.

Google AdWords

Google’s main revenue generator is its AdWords pay-per-click program. Not all ecommerce owners want to spend money to garner traffic. The reason so many site owners do partake in AdWords, however, is because it works for them in producing a positive return on the ad dollars they spend. At the very least, you should educate yourself about AdWords and whether it makes sense for your business. To jump into AdWords, you should either invest the time to learn how you can use it to build ad campaigns and monitor results. If you are not prepared to put in the time, you would do well to hire a professional firm to help you. If you are a do-it-yourselfer, we recommend reviewing the Google AdWords Editor, which will allow you to build your AdWords account from a Windows or Mac desktop application.

Google Maps/Local Search

Google Local Search might not be relevant for every ecommerce site, but there is a rapid shift occurring across all the major social/search web properties to emphasize the local aspect of search. You will want to develop a local strategy and stake your claim in your city or region. The best place to start is by establishing your Google Local listing. Here’s something new with Google Local: Google is testing a paid ($25 per month) Enhanced Local Listing service that allows participants to create a more developed listing that displays in Google Local Results and includes links to photos, videos, coupons, and other specific business information.

Google Webmaster Tools

Webmaster Tools is yet another service with no up-front or recurring fee. Using it is very easy. Webmaster Tools gives you valuable stats about how Google views and crawls your site. You can see data, such as the most common keywords Google associates with your pages or the anchor text found in external links to your site. Tying into Google Caffeine, Webmaster Tools now has a Site Performance section that gives data on the load time of your pages.

Google Website Optimizer

The optimizer is an awesome tool for testing the effectiveness of your website’s pages. You can deploy A/B and multivariate tests for a range of characteristics. Suppose you want to test whether your home page will produce more conversions if you add a message emphasizing free shipping. Setting up a test in the Optimizer requires a little technical knowledge. But once you figure it out–and assuming that you have enough traffic to gain some meaningful data–you can really boost your site intelligence and make some more powerful decisions about deploying your site.

YouTube

Are you utilizing videos for your ecommerce business? It is cheap. It is easy. And it is effective. You would do well to figure out how to incorporate product-related videos into your marketing strategy. Google’s video service, YouTube, is not the only place to post your videos on the web, but it pulls the most traffic of any video hub. A good YouTube approach involves building your own channel and using some of the same optimization practices you would for organic search.

Google Affiliate Network

Google has rolled out its own affiliate program called Google Affiliate Network. Google has strict criteria for participating merchants, but if you qualify, you can set up pay-per-conversion campaigns and have access to Google’s large pool of publishers who would be happy to drive traffic to your site in return for an affiliate commission.

Google Checkout

There is a range of reasons why utilizing Google Checkout is a good idea. Above all, if you feel that a significant segment of your customers use Google Checkout, you want to be there to offer that option when they shop on your site. In addition, Google Checkout gives you additional exposure through other Google properties, such as Google AdWords and Google Products.

To protect customer information, an online merchant will comply with the Payment Card Industry’s Digital Security Standard and, also, use a 128-bit or great secure socket layer (SSL) to ensure that sensitive data passes back and forth between the web browser and the web server. Having taken the steps necessary to secure a payment transaction, online merchants want some way to show their potential customers that they have done everything possible to make shopping secure.

Enter VeriSign’s Secure Site Pro with Extended Validation. First, the service provides 128- or 256-bit SSL encryption, meaning that it offers the most powerful encryption available to protect payment information as it passes between your servers and web browsers. Second, the service provides you with two clear ways to market this to your customers.

Top Notch Encryption

SSL is a protocol that was originally developed to facilitate secure communications over an insecure network.

When a consumer surfs to your website, checks out some products, that consumer has no real way of know if you are who you say you are. You might claim to be reputable, but how would they know?  An SSL solves this problem since SSL certificates are unique to a particular server and domain name. When a consumer’s browser makes contact with the web server, the SSL ensures that your customer knows who he or she is dealing with through a process called public key cryptography. It is used to encrypt data. The other key is private and secret. It is used to decipher data encrypted with the public key.

Next, when a customer sends data over the Internet, which is generally an insecure network, how does that customer know that some hacker is not lurking, and waiting to intercept credit card or account data.  The more complicated the encryption, the more secure the data. VeriSign’s Secure Site Pro offers up the 256-bit encryption. This means that if someone were trying to guess the encryption code it would take that person several billion years to have tried every possible combination.

Recognizable Security Badge

Once a site has been secured with the Secure Site Pro SSL certificate, the site owner gets to display a VeriSign Secured Seal. The seal lets a site owner brag about all of the good work that has been done to ensure that a customer’s data isn’t intercepted or stolen. And seals like this one have a positive effect on sales.

Price

VeriSign’s Secure Site Pro with EV SSL is $1,499 per year if billed annually.

Read the full article here: www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/documents/DIR_Media_Planning_2008.pdf