The International Search Summit Afternoon Sessions included a great Case Study from Motoko Hunt for Adobe in Asia Pacific Markets, Challenges in the Middle East with Lee Mancini from Sekari, Yandex announce new features, and Don DePalma from the Common Sense Advisory discuss tools for Globalized websites and content.
Adobe: SEO In Asia Case Study – Motoko Hunt – Adobe
- Adobe is shifting from agency model to inhouse SEO.
- Manage all brands and markets in house.
- Now there are 8 people on global SEOteam.
- Have 30+ domains and sub domains 150+ products and services in over 90 countries.
Organizational
- Organised Adobe Search Team
- Adobe put Organic and Paid Search under the one team so they can exchange the data, learn from one another.
- One benefit of bringing search functionality in house is that:
- they have a better communications with stakeholders, product teams, web teams
- they all have their goals and targets
- they share it with us. We then combine with our strategies.
Be Strategic
- Be customer- focused through competitive and audience analysis
- Focus on BU priorities
- Engage closes stakeholders in regular training.
When companies use the agency model, they audit your site and give you list of actions to do. The SEO person then has to pass this to the content writing team, web design team and so on. This is really creating the image that SEO is creating additional work for me. That is why people reject or do not want to pay attention to SEO.
Integrated and Data Driven
- Begin with the end in mind on key business metrics
- Be involved from beginning in full project life cycle
- Align Search best practices with All Content marketing goals
Based on this… Put SEO Early and Often
- Provide the SEO data and recommendations throughout the product and web life cycle
- Align the metrics and segmentation used for reports with other BU
- Product Development/Marketing
- IT/Web Strategy/ Web Design
- Content Writing/Localisation
- Reporting
Comprehensive
- Plan ahead to stay credible
- Capitalize on market opportunities of global + non-brand keyword optimization
- Make sure you share the data with the team – because you changed the website, this is what has happened.
Localization
1. In- country keyword research
2. Each keyword mapped to preferred landing page
3. Content localized using keywords (content, video, images, links)
4. Reviewed by Editorial and SEO and added to Sitemaps
5. Localized and optimized content goes live
In Adobe they are lucky, they have offices in each country they do the SEO work.
SEO Engagement Model
Center of Excellence
- Uniform KPIs and Tools – what to measure and why?
- Education – eg best practice, guidelines, training, data sharing
- Governance – common standard, policies and methodologies, uniformed technique, approach and method
- Mentoring and Support
Prioritize Projects Using Agile Marketing
- Scrum Methodology
- Prioritized team projects (200+)
- Twice weekly “stand up” meetings
Benefits
Adapatable, Collaborative, Accountable, Organized & Measurable
Keywords/PLPs Sharing
- Share all this with the marketing team, PPC team, the social media team
- It is important to share the keywords with social team
- Share resources, this helps with internal linking
Search and Social
- Once a company starts sharing the keywords with the social team
- they started to optimise the content and the conversions increased.
Tools for Each Process
Adobe use a number of tools for each element of the SEO process.
Summary:
- Centralize and standardize the metrics, best practices and process
- Localize for local keyword demand, local search trend, local market goals and – local calendar
- Back up the SEO recommendations with data
- Communicate with local stakeholders and Bus
The Challenges of The Middle East – Lee Mancini – Sekari
Getting it Right in Russia – Preston Carey – Yandex
- In 2012 Russia became the largest internet audience in Europe.
- Low penetration – high upside. Only 51% penetrated
- Russian Ad market Is booming. It is growing at 25% a year. And online adspend is also growing.
Where does this money go? (insert photo)
- In terms of all the different channels, paid search is growing the most, 63% a year.
- Yandex is getting half of total online spend.
- Google has 26% market share
- Yandex 30% market share
- Mail.ru and Rambler are two local providers.
- Mail.ru mail but rambler switch search provider depending on who is paying them most money
- Russian is the 4th largest spoken language in the world
Yandex Overview
- Yandex is #1 search leader – 60.5%
- Yandex is the number 1 internet destination in Russia, 44% of Russina users’ home page
- Leading online advertising platform
- Largest Russian internet business (went public 2011)
- Yandex is the largest map provider in Moscow
- Update the maps every week due to new construction
- Yandex’s reaches far beyond search (insert photo)
- Yandex takes the 5th place in the world ranking of search engines
- Yandex is also in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus
- Turkey – first international market
- Turkish market is the fast growing and sizeable
- Yandex’s offers maps and map based services
This growth is because of the continuous focus on innovation. Yandex is the Gateway to the Russian Internet.
SEO for Yandex
- Organic engine rewritten and launched as MatrixNet in November 2009
- Most of the old advice doesn’t apply anymore
- Machine learning based, Archetypal sites chosen as targets by Assessors
- Makes advising on SEO v hard, Yandex don’t even know what the weights are
- There is no formal customer support team for SEOs
- There is a very good webmaster tools (available in English)
- There are also general written guidelines to how to get included in the index
New, maps and services
- Mobile versions on all services
- Yandex are fully capturing the mobile audience in their Maps service
- Yandex is focused on Maps and is on the iOS6 – new iPhone 5 or upload iOS6
- When search in Russia, then Yandex maps on the iPhone will load
- Yandex Market – launched the Apparel clothing and shopping.
- They have it round music and cars as well
This morning, Yandex Browser was launched. It is launched on the chromium technology. Yandex have partnership with Opera and also Kaspersky – went live today !!!
Want to try Yandex?
- Contact the international bus dev team
- Free translation, training and initial setup
- Local optimization and campaign feedback
- Dedicated English speaking Account Manager in Moscow
- Web based reporting, budgeting etc all available in English
SEO Tools for a Globalized Website – Don DePalma – Common Sense Advisory
- We know languages – traditional translation and localization teams
- We know marketing – Marketing, social engagement, customer care, business intelligence.
- Localisation maturity, helping these internal groups break down the walls to other organisations.
What have the SEO teams been doing?
They have been:
- Doing what you have head about all day today
- Developing machine readable keywords and keyphrases for their domestic marketing
- Using specialized tols
What have the translation teams been up to:
They have been:
- Working on top level domains in the target market, sometimes with local IP addresses
- Translating the websites that live at those addresses
- Coordinating that translation activity with branding, marketing campaign, product literation
- They are also helping develop the customer experience.
The important thing about this slide, not just talking about getting sometone to the site, getting them further through the customer experience level (CEL)
- Language only for marketing and customer care.
- To reach 80% of the world’s total online population, you need at least 12 languages.
Marketing and translation team sometimes have conflicting goals
Translation’s goal
- consistency within and among various websites, owner’s manuals, and customer care to ensure findability, accuracy of results, and easy update of all related materials
- Business requirements demand that trnalsators use the same translation memory
Marketing goal
- Get people to the site or product
- Stick to brand identity, marketing message, campaign etc
Assess the value of what the translation teams offer
Pros:
Linguistic assets
- language skills
- Translation memory
- Style guides
- Terminology databases and glossaries
- Transcreation awareness
Vendor management – they know who’s won
Cons:
- Focus on just-in-case translation
- Work on high0volume throughput
- Emphasis on absolute quality rather than accessibility and searchability
Review the tools that translation teams
Vendor Management
Translation memory tool
- Translated works done before, this is source and suggested content.
How translation memory works
- TM uses a one to one pairing of source and target
- If there are multiple matches, a translator or algorithm must select the best match
Why translation memory fails for keyword matches
One to one correspondences don’t work for SEO because:
- the source (original) Language may contain a dozen relevant keywords and phrases
- Benefit – TM is starting point for identifying cross
How terminology databases work
- Terminologist populate and mange term bases
- Their job is to identify, categorize, manage and propagate the consistent use of terms
- Most terminology software allows for one to many relationships (v important feature)
- Terms can be annotated and special cases like SEO can be described in detail (eg hreflang)
There are pros and cons of terminology management
How machine translation works – or doesn’t
– Rules based (morphological and lexical) or statistical
– Options:
- Raw multi tenant MT a la Google and Bing Translator
- Trained layered tenant MY a la Bing with APO
- Commercial solutions both in the cloud and on premises, trained to company lexicon, style guide and other assets.
Caveats:
- Many translation professionals still look askance at MT
- If its not trained, those professionals will be proved right
- But ….. MT may be better than no translation
How to address these two camps
1) Develop a creative brief
- Its function – help SEO sepcialists and tranlsaition teams understand and reflect campaign goals in their work
- Involve the locales (language and country)
2) Develop a style guide for every locale
- Address SEO in a chapter or dedicated subsection
3) Research and build up SEO linguistic assets
Document the keywords in the creative briefs, style guides and terminology system
4) Work closely with the translation department
5) Tweak translaton memory and term bases
Translation teams bring a lot of locale expertise to the table to SEO but it must be managed correctly by the in house marketing team.
Search in Asia: Tips for Success – Michael Bonflis – Webcertain US
- 538 million Chinese (35% growth since last year)
- 2% in Urban East Coastal Areas
- 800 million mobile users
- Baidu has 78.5% market share.
Preparation: Translating your site into Chinese
- Mandarin – China and Taiwan
- Cantonese – Macao and HK and Guangdon/Canton provinces
HK and Taiwan use Yahoo
Written Chinese
- Simplified chinese came out 50 years ago
- Before it was very complicated to write Chinese
- PinYin (taking from characters to western)
- Use numbers to avoid confusion – 4399.com
- Chinese sites have lots of links, cause cant type things, do not know what looking for
Domains in China
- PinYin URLs preferred
- Brand.cn
- Chinese character Limit URL (20 characters)
- Registering Domains – hard to register this on your own
- Hosting domains in China, big deal. China has a big firewall, stops data getting out. Also connectivity as a whole. Access is difficult
- Getting hosting in China, v hard. – need 3 primary certificates for domains, hosting and online advertising and China.
Tips on Baidu’s paid search
- KW research available through Phoenix Nest account
- There is a KW research tool that Baidu provides. Best thing to do is hire expert in that market.
- Ad title – character limits
- Ad copy limits
- Baidu also has site links
- Match keywords and ads to landing pages – keep relevance
- Website and lading pages should be tested
Organic Search
- Title tag is most important
- Meta description has algorithmic value
- No non relevant keywords allowed
- Use lots of links on home page
- Content rich – 700 words +
- No duplicate content (use robot text)
- No flash/java script
- Backlinks: quantity and quality
- Baidu has its own webmaster tools, it is all in Chinese
- Sitemap submission tool
- Crawl pressure test
- Robot tools
- Dead link report
- Page optimization analyser
Social media signals are also a big deal. Weibo is Chinese version of Twitter and is being incorporated in search results.
Ecommerce in China: Toaboa
- Owned by Alibaba More c2c focuses
- Like eBay – more stores than auctioneers
- 400million plus registered users
Alipay and Union pay for payment systems in China
Naver – Organic search marketing
- Planning for NAver
- Naver Agency relationship
- Domain names and hosting
- Paid search marketing
- Korean and English only language
- 3 types ad
- Naver only has keyword groups, no campaigns, keyword type only broad type
Key to Naver is mastering content
- Naver café/ naver blogs
- User generated topics and blogs
- Naver IN (knowledge Q&A)