It is all very well the international SEO community rattling on about Hreflang tags and the like – but if you are a global marketer what are your real options?
Global SEOs face a daily conflict between their own internal politics and pressures – and the needs of the market outside. That is actually not new and has been around since marketing began and large corporations developed in the last couple of centuries.
If you are innovative, however, and think outside the box, there are ways in which you can usefully capitalise on the tools which are available to you and make the most of them – whilst navigating around corporate rules and staying on the safe side of safe.
Keyword-focused niche product marketing sites
One very important point to make is that the strategy I am about to describe is a QUALITY CONTENT strategy. Please do not read into this I am suggesting some kind of link set-up or method of cheating the system. This strategy really achieves two very important goals:
- It is designed around the needs of your potential customers
- Search engines will like it too
Let’s talk about “niches”
I am a fan of niches. I always have been an probably always will be. The web is the perfect vehicle for niche marketers because customers can really find the solutions they are really looking for and the marketers can create niches that historically would have been insignificant – but on a global web basis can be giii-normous. (The last word is not really English – please forgive!)
The really key point is that the niche serves a very specific type of customer well – now that for me is a definition of something which will automatically lead to great quality content.
So, here is how to craft this strategy together
- Identify a niche
- Develop new product or choose an existing relevant product
- Pick the most significant and relevant high traffic keyword
- Buy a new relevant domain – local to the target country (ccTLD)
- Make sure the domain includes the relevant target keyword
- Create a very attractive website focused totally around the product
- Make sure there is attractive content to go to from the homepage
- Put effort into the design and presentation of the site
- SEO-Localise for the target language
- Ensure there is a conversion route on the site eg contact form
- Set-up promotional social media activity to promote
- Link through to relevant content on the main site
- Watch the site rise
Here is an example
Let’s imagine you are an insurance company and you offer many different insurance products in different categories on your main site:
- You have some weird domain like gbexcel.com.
- You do not have particularly good rankings in France-French and would really like to improve those.
- You have a good insurance product for young people who ride low end motorbikes or mopeds.
- There is a relevant keyword “assurance moto” which has reasonable search volumes which you would like to target.
- You buy the domain “assurancemotojeunes.fr” to go with your keyword and you niche product targeting.
- You create content for the site which is all about the fun of owning a moto with perhaps a gallery showing 20 things you can do with a moto you cannot do with a car.
- You give advice on how to buy cheaper insurance.
- You provide an enquiry tool to get a quote from your company.
- You set up a social media campaign focused around have fun with motos, riding safely and saving insurance costs.
- Include tracking code to incorporate into your overall traffic figures – so no-one says you have taken traffic away from the main site!.
How this strategy can help!
- Gain freedom from the restrictions of the corporate site
- These niche sites can be mobile focused
- They can significantly reduce your localisation costs
- They are competitively difficult to beat
- You can divert your link building budget in this direction
- A great way to launch new products – even when included into the main site
You can use the niche site to talk more about the individual product whilst promoting it to a market that is particularly interested in that solution – without having to make huge changes to the main site.
The niche site could be mobile-friendly even when your main site is not.
And you can achieve greater success on a very useful keyword than you might otherwise be unable to succeed with.
Andy Atkins-Kruger
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great example to provide a concrete perspective on a topic which often gets “hypothetical” treatment. I am a huge fan of niches, and microsites to promote them as well. what a powerful tool, so often overlooked by “marketing folks” who have a single, static, on-line brochure site – and how boring to work on. Your approach makes it fun for the marketing folks, fun for the target and effective for the company. Effective international marketing takes creative approaches which are anathema to many marketing folks who use design as their creative outlet and often follow well worn paths in other areas.