Hi and welcome to Kibo’s Marketing Minute where we share digital marketing tips, trends and news from the eCommerce industry in about a minute. I’m Bryant Goodall, the Digital Marketing Manager at Kibo and here’s what’s happening. In a previous episode I discussed some must-haves for entering the global market and in this episode, I wanted to touch on some SEO specifics for targeting for global reach. The key ingredient is knowing what type of company you are. And what I really mean is: know whether you are a multilingual, a multi-regional, or just a international company. You don’t have to be just one or the other, but it helps to know so you can focus your efforts accordingly. A multilingual company is just that, it’s targeting multiple languages. This means that you’re going to need either a subdomain or a sub directory dedicated to each language, as well as proper hreflang tags to point to each. This can also mean different dialects of the same language. Having to target multiple languages doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re an International or multi-regional company. A great example of this is Canada. If you’re a Canadian marketer than you already know that you have to focus on both English and French. And this can be complicated when you have a single website with a ton of great information, but you don’t want to deliver the wrong language to the user.
A multi-regional company is one that has to market inside of a region that may have different countries and different languages. One great example of this is trying to market in the European Union. Not only are you going to have to work within each country’s processes you’re obviously going to have to work within languages and dialects as well. Set up your website so that you can not only deliver regional specific content but deliver language specific contact for the regions your targeting. A great example of this is using a subdomain or subdirectory for your language and then a subfolder for your country or region. Now keep in mind that you can also target countries or regions using the domain itself. Using a top-level domain like .eu, .us, .ca can help you increase your targeting efforts while still using a subdirectory or subdomain for the language.
Lastly an international company is one that just targets outside of its borders but may not have to be a tune to the language or regional needs of the other types of companies. A great example of this is a company that is only targeting English speaking countries. In this instance you may want to still have a different subdomain or subdirectory for each country you’re trying to target. Keep in mind that is generally regarded as best practice to have these in a subdirectory so that Google doesn’t see each country’s instance as its own website. If you have any more questions, please don’t hesitate to ask and let’s keep the conversation going in the comment section below.
