On Sunday, several members of the RBDRodeo team attended the first meeting of the Virginia Search Engine Marketing Meetup Group. Many different topics were discussed, and thanks to the varying levels of experience present, we had a nice mix and were able to look at different topics from a variety of different perspectives.

One of the questions that was raised was how to market to a foreign country, one where you weren’t even aware of the default search engines / breakdown of market share in a particular market. There wasn’t anyone there that had a definitive answer for that question, so I thought I’d take a look and see what I could find out.

The first item to research, when looking to market to another country, is to identify the search engines that are out there in that market, and to determine what language(s) they support. For example, one client I worked with in the past worked primarily in a particular Asian market, but marketed in the English language only, therefore they only wanted the English language searchers to find them. So what’s the easiest way to find out what’s out there? Well, there are a few directories of search engines, that list them by country, such as SearchEngineColossus, AIT, and Big Search Engine Index. For most of these directories, simply click on the country of choice, and you’ll see a list of search engines, along with the languages that they support for that country (I had no idea that Google had a Welsh version). Is the information in these directories complete and accurate? Well, AIT didn’t have a list for the US, but the other 2 listed above did, and neither of those had the 4th & 5th largest search engines in the US listed – Ask & AOL. So while these lists are not complete, they are a good starting point for you to find out a nice chunk of search engines that operate in a particular market. How else would you find out about TibetSearch for that Sherpa job site that you’re launching?

Next comes the harder part, you need to research the different search engines and directories listed to see what their guidelines are for inclusion. It may be that you need to purchase a local domain (i.e. a ‘.in’ for India), and perhaps even arrange for hosting in that country, as some search engines will take those items into account when deciding whether or not to index you, and where you’re going to rank, relative to your competition, when they do. It may just be as simple as an inclusion request, or an annual fee.

One item that you’re going to have to be careful with is that different cultures have different standards, so you may have to change or completely remove content that doesn’t gel with their local standards before you can be included. YouTube found this out recently, when access to their entire site was removed in Turkey, as they had content that contravened a law forbidding criticism of the modern founder of Turkey – Kemal Ataturk. Once you find out what it takes to get your site included, you can then start the work of improving your rankings, and reeling in all that internationally local traffic.

So, in conclusion, bonne chance, viel glueck, buena suerte, buona fortuna, goed geluk, and good luck with your international search marketing efforts.

Related posts:

1. SES London 2008 – European Search Marketing Case Studies
2. Sites Are Not Naturally Search Engine Friendly
3. The Global Search Universe – SMX London
4. Does Search Matter?
5. SES London 2008 – Local Search

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