What Is International SEO?
Current statistics indicate that more than 1.5 billion individuals worldwide use the internet, of that figure no more than 440 million internet users speak or read English. Not surprisingly, this number is dropping as more international users log on. Is it any wonder that international SEO has become a key strategy in the search engine master plan?
After all, by not reaching out to the non-English speaking populace, you simply aren’t selling your products or offering your services to a world of people who would most certainly be willing to engage your offer.
Of the global internet user population, more than 500 million are located in Asia – that’s more than any other continent in the world. In China itself, the online community has soared to a rate of 755% growth since 2000. It has already changed the playing field in the financial and manufacturing markets, the internet is certainly following. But how does this affect online business as we know it? The truth is you will never know if you only operate in an English only environment. You have literally cut out 3 quarters of the global population if you choice to continue operate as a one language online market player.
Leveling the Playing Field
One has to consider the Internet in its entirety – a vast, almost endless network of computers, of people and of information. It has had a globalizing effect in which the borders of the real world have ceased to exist; well, most of them, except perhaps the constraint on language.
In fact it would be prudent to consider the state of our current English internet marketplace, where evolving Internet technologies have been radically developed and freely available to everybody who understands English. This fragmentation in itself has leveled the playing field by providing smaller companies with limited advertising budgets the same market opportunities as well-funded conglomerates. In addition, it wouldn’t be wrong to suspect that our online English cyber-sphere that has become saturated with marketing ploys and tactics, is the only place big business exists, to send the point how, the opposite is true, the rest of the world is catching up rapidly and English is becoming only a fraction of the online marketplace.
International SEO – International Search Engine Optimization
So what can we hope to gleam from all of this? Well, for one thing multilingual SEO will be the new ’sliced bread’. It will mean an expansion of the playing field, new ‘low hanging fruit’ and an evolution of the economic possibilities on the Internet. New markets will open up with exciting and refreshing marketing possibilities to those businesses that identify these markets. It will even change our current target audiences as localized positioning will yield new approaches to marketing only to expose new and exciting avenues for ideas, technologies and ultimately products and services to satisfy local consumers. Those companies taking on a new language vertical are on the verge of making these discoveries happen. In a couple of years, it will be in full swing.
Of course, many will wonder about the associated cost with regard to international SEO. Will it be an expensive affair? Many seem to think so. Research, implentation and maintaining that vertical does take time and resources. But consider this: although the English-speaking online community only represents about 30% of the global online population, English is in fact a second language to many and a lingua franca, even if only on a basic level, to many more.
In the end international SEO may perhaps only be needed to catch those Mandarin and Spanish native speakers as they perform their searches on the internet. The real issue however, will be to identify the keywords from the perspective of the Chinese, Indian or Spanish internet user, to name a few. Will their geography play a role? What about politics and culture? Looking at all these questions, the real issue is not whether to implement international search engine optimization as it is most certainly a given; the real issue is to be able to find the English SEO service provider with an intimate knowledge of the minds and language of the international audience your business is targeting.