121: Tactics and Trends in SEO

May 26, 2021

33:28

In this episode of Globally Speaking, we talk to Aoife Mc Ilraith, Vice President of Marketing at Semrush, an online visibility management platform used by seven million digital marketers worldwide. She talks about the importance of going local with your SEO strategy and tactics and how tools factor into the world of SEO. Tune in to hear all this and more.

Download episode

Show transcript

Speaker	Transcript
Hinde	Hi everyone. This is Hinde Lamrani. I’m the international search strategics with RWS. And today we have Aoife Mc Ilraith, who is the vice president for marketing with SEMrush. How are you, Aoife? Can you introduce yourself?
Aoife	Hi, I’m great. Thanks, Hinde. Really happy to be here. So yeah, I’m Aoife Mc Ilraith. I am VP of marketing with SEMrush and I’m responsible for reaching, converting and retaining new customers through digital strategies. 20 years in digital and 10 plus years in localization. Actually started in localization first, 20-plus years ago. I’m dating myself.
Aoife	How are those local markets actually searching for those products? Because it could be very different to how they’re searching in your source language, whether that’s, you know, English or the source language being German. They can’t be enough to just localize it. That research piece is really, really important and understanding search intent around keywords and trends on topics.
Hinde	Could have a completely different life cycle and how users reach you, how they search for your products and what, like, it’s good to start with, the terms they’re using to research for your products and how to find them and the intent behind them. Do they want to buy direct or they want just to research? And understand them better. And also, are they going in and typing it in Google directly or are they talking to their phone to ask or are they… whatever device they’re using could be completely different from one market to the other and hence, your strategy has to be reflecting that kind of… and matching their intent and pleasing your customers basically.
Aoife	Yeah, absolutely. You’ve hit on a great point. I mean, I think one of the things is, you know, really looking at that customer journey, you know, once you’ve done your research and understand that the part of that research is around customer journey and device, as you were saying, Hinde, right? What devices do they use? I mean, we live in a mobile first world online now, especially when it comes to Google, and there’s a lot of markets that might be just mobile only, right? A lot of… You know, Sub-Saharan Africa might be mobile only or, you know, India is driven by mobile first as well, or mobile only. But another key part of that for these markets is age of that device. You know, we build, in the West, for the most recent devices, right?
Hinde	Yeah.
Aoife	And where we’re, and where we could be losing is when we’re targeting emerging markets that they’re actually on older versions of those devices, perhaps. So, we’re building on testing sites on how we reach our customers statically on our UX and UI, but we may not be… You know, we might be over-engineering it for some of those markets.
Hinde	Yes, yes.
Aoife	Right? So, you know, again, I think that piece goes into, you know, when you’re entering a new marketing scaling globally, that you take all of this into account, and mapping that user journey appropriately with all of those steps.
Hinde	Absolutely, yeah. This is really, really important in the journey. And other markets, like, for example, China, they’re on their own little bubble there, where like—
Aoife	Big bubble.
Hinde	… mobile e-commerce is the thing there. I mean, everyone is buying on their mobiles and, you know, it’s really a matter of adapting your strategy to your market. That’s the thing. And translation is only, you know, the basic right now.
Aoife	Absolutely. And I think depending on where the brands are in their experience with translation and localization and transcreation, I think for smaller brands, as they enter this and enter new markets, it can be quite a large undertaking.
Hinde	Hmm.
Aoife	I think for, you know, the really big global brands that have been doing and always translating and localizing their content, they’re, you know, a bit more advanced with their processes around this, but I think for smaller brands that, you know, might be doing it in two or three languages, they actually have a bit of an advantage and that they can spend a bit more time to do this correctly and do it right at the beginning, ‘cause it costs a lot more money to undo something than build it from scratch.
Hinde	Exactly.
Aoife	And I think we’ve all experienced that with localization, right? How much rework goes into fixing a problem rather than, you know, maybe starting from the beginning and building it correctly?
Hinde	And this is absolutely true for smaller brands. They’re really lucky also with regards to other SEO aspects like local SEO. When you have, like, just like three or four offices, you can develop local SEO strategy based on those, on maps, you know, Google My Business and all that. And it could—
Aoife	My favorite tool.
Hinde	… yeah, and it turn into something really interesting for them—
Aoife	Oh, it is. There’s a big future in that one. Yeah.
Hinde	… yeah. Yeah. And like big brands do tend to miss out on these aspects of SEO.
Aoife	Absolutely. I think also smaller brands can pivot quickly when it comes to building processes for, you know, global content strategies and multilingual content strategies. They can, you could be more agile around those processes. I think one of the biggest challenges that I don’t see solved yet, I think it, bigger brands are becoming a lot more aware of the challenge, but anybody who’s been in this industry for a long time and has had SEO as a task, or, you know, have content marketing campaigns as a task and SEO needs to be part of that, one of the biggest challenges is who owns it, right? Is it the localization team that were tasked with adding SEO to localization? Is it the marketing team at central that, you know, developed the campaign and have sent it for localization? So, you know, is this the marketing team that owns us that send it to localization to get it back? A huge part of SEO is technical now, whereas most people and predominantly the audiences listening to this thinks of SEO as just an add-on to language or an add-on to content. But, you know, 30 or 40% of SEO now and success of SEO is actually technical SEO.
Hinde	Yeah.
Aoife	And when you talk to brands about that, they go, “Oh, well, you know, I’ve been tasked with SEO and, you know, we’ve got KPIs with the localization for provider and you need to help us meet them.” And you go, “Well, we want to help you and we absolutely want your SEO localization campaign to succeed. However, we’ve identified X, Y and Z on the technical side that is going to hinder not just our campaign, but your site’s ability to rank locally.” You know, and then there’s the data analysis piece as well and who owns that because we need to understand data and how the site is performing and where traffic is coming from. So, there’s really a lot of pieces that fit together and I, you, I don’t think global brands have figured it out when it comes to multilingual. They may very well be good at again and source language, if that was English, they’ve got that cycle pulled together. But they haven’t figured out who owns full SEO on website ranking and trends and how to achieve it correctly ‘cause they’re just addressing SEO with content or a campaign and technical—
Hinde	In light, yeah.
Aoife	Yeah. And they’re not thinking about the technical. So, I think for this audience as well, the one thing from a technical perspective you have to look at is a tag called hreflang. And that is a tag we are all so familiar with because it uses language and market. It’s the [inaudible] tags to tell the search engines which part of your site should be targeted to which region and which language. And we have seen some really, really bad implementations.
Hinde	Yes, we did. Yes.
Aoife	I think, Hinde, you and me started looking at this probably eight years ago—
Hinde	Yeah.
Aoife	—and were trying to tell people that the, and brands that they needed to implement this correctly—
Hinde	Please fix this first—
Aoife	Oh, well.
Hinde	—and then ask about keywords.
Aoife	Yeah. And that’s the key piece, right? We’re trying to help brands rank in local markets when there’s technical blockers in the way or technical challenges that are hindering our efforts. So, finding out who owns that and bringing all of those people to the table to make sure that there is no challenges. And the thing with technical SEO is, it’s code. If it’s affecting one part of your site, it’s affecting the entire site, across probably all of your markets, if it’s primary architecture or code in there. So, example, another one example of that is speed.
Hinde	Yes.
Aoife	And it kind of goes back to the devices that we were talking—
Hinde	Yeah.
Aoife	—about. Right? Speed is one of the top-ranking factors with Google. Of course, they don’t clarify any of this with us, but we know that it is. Speed dramatically impacts how [crosstalk]—
Hinde	It is, absolutely. They’ve mentioned it and—
Aoife	Yeah.
Hinde	—it’s becoming like, you know, we’ve suspected it, like, for years, but we knew it was happening. Google never said yes, but recently, yes, mainly, like even the image format and they are recommending next gen image formats as they’re much lighter. You know, and when you said, when a brand comes in to you asking for SEO optimization from a linguistic and contents perspective, again, you need to shed light on the limitations they have on other sites, because that optimization wouldn’t be enough and wouldn’t be successful if the page- I mean, the images are huge and the page loads in, I don’t know how many minutes, instead of seconds.
Aoife	Yeah.
Hinde	Instead of milliseconds.
Aoife	Milliseconds, yeah.
Hinde	You can optimize all you want the texts, it’s not gonna work. So—
Aoife	Yeah.
Hinde	—it’s all those technical things that need to be taken care of as well.
Aoife	Absolutely. And I think, you know, one of the core things, and it’s quite unusual for Google to confirm any part of their algorithm, but they’ve been very vocal about a new piece. Well, it’s not a new piece, but it’s called Core Web Vitals.
Hinde	Yeah.
Aoife	And they have been very, very loud about how important this is. So, if anybody wants to go talk to their technical team and check, Core Web Vitals report is within the Google console report and it consists of three basic metrics. And largest consoles paint input, our first input delay and layout shift. And don’t worry about what that really means. All you need to do is talk to your technical team and make sure that all three are in the green.
Hinde	Exactly, exactly. This is—
Aoife	It’s not okay to have one green and one red—
Hinde	And one red.
Aoife	—and one orange. All three have to be in green. They have been very vocal that it’s really important that brands address and have all three. And this is to do with speed and customer—
Hinde	Experience, yeah.
Aoife	—engagements and UX on it. So, and that all comes down to how a user uses your site or your app. But again, this comes back to there is, you know, challenges with technical SEO that localization people are not necessarily aware of. And why would they be? That wasn’t in their remit or tasks. But I think every localization company now has added SEO as a core pillar of their service. And as far as I know, like, all of the big ones offer audits, right? And all of those audits cover technical. So, you can ask your localization provider to give this back, right? Hinde, I know you’ve been doing this for a long time.
Hinde	Yes. So this is like you said, I mean, it’s all parts of the technical limitations that mostly brands don’t necessarily think of as something they need to do as part of an SEO optimization for different markets. Google have been sending emails since last year about them, I’ve received like zillions of those. And now they’re reminding website owners about them. And they started showing on Google Search Console the tabs under experience, you can have like a page experience tab, Core Web Vitals tab and mobile usability tab.
Aoife	Yeah.
Hinde	And it’s telling you how a percentage of how many, what is the percentage of the URLs on your websites are good? They call them just good URLs.
Hinde	But this is mainly for mobile visibility for now. Again, it’s all to do with your industry and your business, is if most of your consumers come to you through mobile, you better look into this.
Aoife	Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, it’s core part of our platform that we have a site audit. So, you know, you can go in and throw in any website. And, you know, you could do this for your own site, and you can also do it for your competitors’ [crosstalk]. If you’re doing that research and want to understand how well they’re doing or how quickly you could outrank them because their site isn’t actually well technically optimized, you know, you can get all of that data in our site audit. And it’ll tell you. So, yeah, and I think just even if you don’t understand any of this, just going in to a platform like SEMrush, putting in your own brand URL and getting back some information on your site health, you could then go and talk to those other teams. As I said, bringing all those teams to the table so that when you are entering the market and you’re structuring your content, you’re optimizing your content, you don’t have any technical hurdles in your way.
Hinde	Another thing I wanted to ask you about today while we have you with us: did you see anything, any specific trends regarding digital strategy during the pandemic, during COVID?
Aoife	We’re actually working through a lot of that, I think globally, I mean, everybody went online. You know, we did see obviously an uptake on online shopping, right? E-commerce grew pacifically, I think around, you know, sports requirements, right? Sportswear, outdoor equipment, all of that. You know, I think it’s kind of, everybody’s talking about the impact of COVID and Amazon’s, you know, scale of going up and use, but Amazon is one of the biggest search engines in the world and when it comes to products.
Hinde	Hmm.
Aoife	So, you know, anybody that has products and is looking to sell in markets, absolutely Amazon needs to be part of that research on whether or not it’s, you know, worth selling. But Amazon obviously sales went increased a lot. And obviously then we saw local, to your point, Hinde, on local SEO, right? We saw, and everybody saw, globally a dip on near me searches.
Hinde	Yeah.
Aoife	You know, I was reading a piece recently there the other day with the non-CEO of Google. He’s not called a CEO, but he owns all the Google products. And you know, he was talking about, you know, their bot that dialed up the restaurants and asked the restaurants to give them their information on when they were open or closed due to COVID and Google was updating that information for them. So I think, you know, the near searches, that struck out, but as countries open back up, that’s coming back up online and I think people need to be really creative on how they use Google My Business.
Hinde	I’ve been saying it for years—
Aoife	Oh, so have I.
Hinde	—and advocating for it. And now it’s like, it’s like during the pandemic, it just showed that it’s, I mean, it’s totally crucial.
Aoife	Yeah, I mean if you—
Hinde	—even if you’re a big business, you need to take care of it for [crosstalk]—
Aoife	Absolutely. So just to like, let people understand what Google My Business is, it is a product that appears on the right hand side of Google search results, when you ask for a local query, so coffee shop near me restaurant near me. But it also applies to B2B. So, it is a hyperlocal search, but if you have a bricks and mortar store or you have an office, you should absolutely claim the Google My Business page. There is opportunities in there to put up promotions. And promotion doesn’t have to be like a restaurant promotion where I say, “Right, you know, here we can have coffee and a muffin today for five, right?” Just to give you an example, how little people are using this, I built a Google My Business page in January for myself. I built a Google My Business page in January and I was ranking within five weeks for digital marketing consultants in Dublin, Ireland. And I ranked in the top position for that and I basically took over the home page—
Hinde	That just—
Aoife	—on mobile.
Hinde	—that just shows how—
Aoife	In five weeks.
Hinde	—fantastic results.
Aoife	Yeah. And it’s just businesses are not leveraging it correctly. And I went in and I updated it every week with a new promotion. And a promotion could be anything, guys. If you’re doing your sales calls for free, that can be your promotion, you just need to word it. But yeah, anybody that has any type of, now, you do need a physical presence. That is very important. You cannot just take a virtual Google My Business. It is for physical businesses, but anybody [crosstalk]—
Hinde	—it’s tied to Maps. You know, it’s tied to Google Maps—
Aoife	It’s tied, yeah.
Hinde	—anyway. Yeah.
Aoife	Yeah. And that’s the whole point. It’s a type—
Hinde	Yeah.
Aoife	—[crosstalk]. So yeah, there is some very low-hanging fruit out there for anybody that wants to go after that, for sure.
Hinde	The other thing I really would, I thought would, it would be a good discussion topic while we have you with us, Aoife, is this new the Multitask Unified Model. They’re saying it’s very different from BERT and it’s actually like a thousand times stronger than BERT, better than BERT. So, what is your take on this?
Aoife	Yeah, really interesting question. I think BERT was a game changer for anybody that’s not in the localization industry. Right? I mean, BERT is, it’s, you know, it’s natural language processing plus machine learning equals AI, right?
Hinde	Yeah.
Aoife	I think also the localization industry were like, “Yeah, machine translation [inaudible] language processing. Yeah, we get that. We understand what it is.” I think BERT was around matching semantic intent, which was a bit of a game changer for Google. So yeah—
Hinde	This is, this is next level BERT, it’s like, remember with BERT, they rolled it first on with English and then they added a few languages. Then I think, after a few months—
Aoife	Yeah.
Hinde	—we’ve seen other languages being wrapped up in there. Now this has been rolled, they trained the machines on 75 languages simultaneously. And it’s gonna—
Aoife	Wow.
Hinde	—understand information in the form of, it could be anything; images, text, videos. See, like the example they gave, like, they scanned, they gave, like, you show, you scan a picture of your hiking boots and then you ask your systems, “Are these good enough to hike in the Himalayas,” or something? You give a name of specific mountain. The machine would go and pick up all the information about that brand of the hiking boots and the information of the mountains you ask information about, about anything like height, humidity, whatever, all the things hikers look into before they go and then it tells you, it gives you the answer, whether, you know, this is suitable or not and it give you why. This is like next gen—
Aoife	Right.
Hinde	—Like, BERT’s, I don’t know.
Aoife	Yeah.
Hinde	It looks fantastic. And I hope it really works that way because this is, again, they always in their demos, they show something that’s not… it looks so futuristic, but most of the time it takes a few months to get there really in the real life.
Aoife	Yeah. ‘Cause they’re going to need real life. There’s only so many use cases they can build that, you know, they need users to actually go use it to get that information.
Hinde	Hmm.
Aoife	Yeah. Like I think this is the challenge of search generally I’m not sure will ever be solved because there’s a kabillion variations that can happen. But with that, they’re really trying to go past just search intent and truly understand what you want to know with as little information as possible. Right? As you say, right? Take a picture of your hiking boots and say, you know, “Are these good for the Himalayas?”
Hinde	So this—
Aoife	It wants to know exactly what you know, the bigger picture of what you’re trying to understand or what your goals are.
Hinde	This is definitely in line with what Google has been doing all these years, is making everything user centric. It’s all for the conference of the user. So, it’s making it really easy for the user. However, you, as a brand selling hiking shoes, hiking boots, or hiking shoes, depending if you live in the UK or in America.
Aoife	Yeah, yeah. And if you’re… We don’t hike. We just go for a walk.
Hinde	Exactly. So this, it means that you, as a brand, you need to give as much information as possible on those boots when you’re providing the descriptive, you know, the description of your products on whatever platform you’re talking about it. Because the machine needs to get the information from somewhere. And you know, like the idea, if you, as a website owner, as a product owner, as a service owner, give as much possible information, details, anything about your product services, on multiple types of Google services or, you know, universal search that could be image, could be video, could be texts, it’s actually goes and collects all that information, plays with it, with AI, algorithms, and then gets the, it gets the user what they’re looking for based on that. So if you’re a brand selling those hiking shoes and you didn’t bring, you didn’t give us, you know, you give a little information about the hiking shoe, the hiking shoes, another brand that did all the work and provided all that information would be the one being suggested to the user by the machine basically.
Aoife	Yeah, no, absolutely. You know, this is, I suppose, Google is, has the biggest dataset ever collected, right? I mean, over the last 15, 20 years of people searching, they have so much data to feed into the machine to train the AI to learn. But yeah, to your point, like, how brands really need to think broader, right? How do you touch the customers in every point of their journey? But also, how do you touch them with potential queries that we haven’t really thought of yet? Right? How is that hiking boot? Like what scenarios across everything that you can brainstorm or think of would they be used or would people want to find them, or, you know, and also across all of your content types, right? Whether… image is a huge one. We’ve been talking about it for years. We still see such bad mistakes when it comes to image optimization or lack thereof. You know, also, how do you… Something we haven’t touched on here that kind of goes back to the technical SEO of like how do you get structured data on the back to make sure that, you know, it matches to your image optimization, to get, you know, the featured snippet or the voice search that’s basically driven out of a feature snippet result?
Hinde	Yeah.
Aoife	Right? So I think, you know, with M and this new platform and then on the next level of BERT, that’s taking all of that together and really, truly trying to understand the purpose of what somebody is looking for and the other things that they haven’t asked for yet, right? So, it’s predictive modelling. I’m like, “Well, if you look for the hiking boots here and you’re talking about hiking the Himalayas, therefore you’re going to need this other list of stuff—”
Hinde	Yes. Yeah. Yes.
Aoife	—[crosstalk] flight and hotel recommendations and restaurants. And what happens if you’re allergic to something? And you know, what is the… you know, then you might want cultural pieces to go to. So, it’s connecting all of that, those dots together for forecasting of what your intent is. If you’re going there, you’re gonna need everything else that’s associated with it because it knows where you’re coming from. It knows that I’m in Ireland or that you’re in the U.S. when you’re searching for the Himalayas or Fiji or Kilimanjaro, right?
Hinde	Yeah. And it could serve you, the brands that, I mean, the brands that did their homework and—
Aoife	Yeah.
Hinde	—provided as much information as possible about their products. And obviously, they will show you also the ones near you as well first.
Aoife	Yeah, yeah, absolutely. [crosstalk] Exactly. Right? “Here, here is the hiking shop. The nearest store that sells boots to you.” Right?
Hinde	Exactly.
Aoife	That’s absolutely what the hyper-local is about, for sure. But I think, you know, this all goes back to brands really understanding what are all of the elements that you need to do to, when you look to optimize for search? Whether it’s Google or Bing or Naver, you know, they all have slightly different ways of doing it. But, you know, we talked about tactical SEO, you’ve got to get in and do an audit to understand where you stand for that. We talked about structured data, right?
Hinde	Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Aoife	How do you get the right structure data on the back? And structured data has to be localized. You can’t create structured data in English and hope it works in Germany.
Hinde	Oh, my God. I…you…did you see structured data in English in every single market before?
Aoife	Well, yes, at a very high level, if they had any, they might’ve used just company information. They haven’t localized it. It’s still in English and they’re still using their HQ office address, even though they have a Berlin office.
Hinde	Yeah.
Aoife	Yeah. So, like making sure that you look at all of these elements. And to your point, right? When brands are looking, when we’re looking about the future of search and how Google is gonna move into this M, they’ve already told us in the past what we need to do. Fix our technical, get our structured data, make sure it’s local language, make sure we optimize for it. We’ve, you know, they’ve told us what to do. And they’ve, they’re always telling us what to do ‘cause they’re five steps ahead of what we know they’re doing. Right? They know what their roadmap is. So, they generally tell us what to do for what’s now, but also for what’s coming. If we, you know, read it right, so structured data, absolutely critical, I think for like an M piece as well.
Hinde	Aoife, do you have anything else in mind that you feel we should mention today during this session? Did we leave out anything that’s really crucial to multilingual digital strategy [crosstalk]—
Aoife	I, yeah. I think there’s one piece that we should talk about and with regards to local. And, you know, it’s part of the research piece but also part of always ongoing campaigns. And that is actually understanding where are you going to drive PR in that local market and where are you going to get backlinks from? So, you know, one of the pieces that you need to do around research is understanding, you know, that lay of the land and who your actual competitors are in that market as we discussed. But also, as you plan marketing campaigns and PR campaigns to drive traffic to your site, you need to be able to target the right sites to drive backlinks. The amount of backlinks is one thing, but actually the quality of the backlink is really important. So a backlink is when somebody else puts a link on their site that drives back to your site and understanding where you can target and drive backlinks for in each market requires its own backlink strategy. Because as we said, the new sites are different in every market and the other sites that might drive a PR link or for you will be different. So, doing a backlink audit, if you exist in that market, and understanding how many backlinks you have, what quality they are. Toxic backlinks can be a challenge, so make sure you find those, remove them and then actually build a PR campaign around a very targeted list of sites that you want to target for backlinks. So, you know, we have a full, we actually have a full suite of backlinks within SEMrush that lets you do all of this but as you go into markets, if you’re going to create a campaign like any good marketing campaign, you’re going to know who you’re targeting, your audiences, your segmentation, but also what media outlets that you’re going after and understanding where you’re gonna get those backlinks from.
Hinde	It is crucial, Aoife, and I’ve seen in the past, for example, in one specific market I looked into, this specific client, they didn’t have a French website, they had only English. But they’re a known brand and people are searching for their products. What a local competitor did, they went in and they changed, in their title, the title of their homepage, they put the name of this big brand and they said, you know, “I’m gonna replace the name of the big brand with three Xs.” Three Xs, similar to three Xs, and in French.
Aoife	Right.
Hinde	They put that in their title and other, there were other comparison websites. France is very used, very known for comparison websites. People tend to compare a lot before they buy something, even software. Comparison websites was ranking this brand pretty highly and the only thing that was missing, and they said, “Unfortunately, it’s not available in French.” You know, without us going in and doing that research locally we’d never know that these things are happening and, you know—
Aoife	Right.
Hinde	—give you things to do and to work on. It’s like, yes, the people love your, you know, your software, but, hey, these people don’t want to be dealing in English. They want you to have a French website for them. So, and the competition is basically using that against you. And also, their, the comparison website could be that piece, like you mentioned, the linking could be, you could reach out to that comparison websites and correct it and say, “Hey, now we have a French website,” for example. “Please link to this.” You know, it’s a whole strategy around this.
Aoife	Yeah. And it has to be done on a local market level or on per market level.
Hinde	Yeah.
Aoife	Because English backlinks to a Spanish site don’t work. Right? You need—
Hinde	Yes.
Aoife	—Spanish backlinks to a Spanish version of your site. Google, it’s kind of never really been answered ‘cause it hasn’t been dug into too much, but like, I think anybody that’s worked in localization and SEO knows this, right? The value of the site. The link equity, Google said [inaudible], but it might pass to the parent site, but it doesn’t pass to the local site, which is what you’re trying to optimize for.
Hinde	Exactly, yeah.
Aoife	Yeah. So yeah, I think absolutely understanding where you’re going to drive backlinks, relevant backlinks to your site because they have to, you have to have local backlinks, it’s a key ranking factor.
Hinde	If you want to rank locally, you need local links to your, that product you’re focusing on. And all the other things we mentioned, yeah, it needs to be obviously translated, it needs to be optimized. Your, the speed of the image, is it loading quickly or not? Are the images too big? Are there any hindrances? Is the hreflang tag working properly to target that specific market? We did mention also the user experience and the user intent, are they reaching you through a mobile, through big browser, through, I don’t know, more iPhones, Androids? We don’t know what, it depends on the market. You need to do your research and see if it’s mobile friendly, if it’s working properly for them, you know, and also keep up with all the latest from Google or all the change, the changes are happening all the time, to keep up with the, you know, keep up with best practice to stay on the safe side.
Aoife	Yeah, absolutely. And that’s a lot, right? That’s a lot for brands to do, which I think, you know, there’s always two ways to do it, is either build it or buy it. Right? And I, you know, having like Hinde working one at the top localization companies, like, go talk to Hinde, right? Because you really, you need an expert that understands all of this and you need a partner that’s gonna do a lot of this for you and bring that information back to you. So, you know, ask for the audit, get those insights. Even for markets that you’re already in, if you’re not seeing the results in Spain for your Spanish content that you were expecting, like, you know, go and have a digital audit done on your content to understand why it’s not working. One of the, you know, the key things I always said to clients in the localization industry is like, “You spent how much on localization but you’re not gonna optimize us?”
Hinde	Yeah, yeah.
Aoife	Right? You know, you’re spending big budgets to localize web content for your website or digital campaigns, but you’re not willing to spend the extra money on SEO so it will work long time in that market? So, really, you’re gonna struggle to get an ROI on that spend if you don’t add the extra requirement of SEO. And they, you know, they say, “Well, we did SEO in our core market. Can’t we just do the same? You know, leverage it for other markets?” But it actually doesn’t work that way.
Hinde	Hmm.
Aoife	So if you really truly want ROI on localized content for global campaigns or for your website, you have to add SEO. It will pay massive dividends long run.
Hinde	Thank you very much, Aoife. This has been really a fun chat with you.
Aoife	Yeah. Thank you so much, Hinde. This was a lot of fun. Always good to chat with you.
Hinde	Thank you very much.

Guests

Aoife Mc Ilraith

Aoife Mc Ilraith is Vice President of Marketing at Semrush, an online visibility management platform that has been used by seven million digital marketers worldwide. She has over 25 years of experience in marketing and spent the last decade in localization, making her an expert in the field and a leading voice in global digital marketing. In 2019, B2B Marketing Magazine put her in their “Top 20 women making the biggest impact in tech.”

Hosts

Hinde Lamrani

Hinde Lamrani is RWS’s in-house subject matter expert for International Search, specifically focusing on SEO/SEM. She has a decade of experience helping organizations achieve online visibility on a global scale. Hinde is fascinated by IoT and next-gen technology. She enjoys occasionally horseback riding and she’s fluent in three languages.

Listen Everywhere

Play episode

0:00

121: Tactics and Trends in SEO

Guests

Aoife Mc Ilraith

Hosts

Hinde Lamrani

Stay Tuned

Contact us

Follow us