To make sure each different market’s sub-directory is showing highly on the search engines for the target keywords technology companies tend to hire a search agency in each individual country they wish to sell in.
No Centralized approach
Just as too many cooks destroy the broth, too many search agencies spoil the policy. First, it’s hard to manage. A US-based Head of Global Marketing will be liable for managing the activities of numerous different agencies across the world. This makes it really difficult to maintain a centralized strategy. There is also the danger that content is not correctly utilized.
Not having a centralized strategy can be damaging for not only your site, but for your entire business. Having an organization in each individual country all working to optimize the same field means that it only takes one agency buying spammy links or indulging in Black Hat practices to get your entire website hit with a Google punishment. The more centralized your strategy is, the more control you have.
Attributing Value
Just as an outsourced agency optimizing a central domain in one country can negate the good work of the company’s agencies in other countries through bad work, the opposite is true for those agencies that are under-performing. For example, your French agency could be doing a immense job of optimizing your website while the Italian counter-part is not pulling its weight.
You are paying for two agencies but could only be receiving a good level of service from one – however, with many agencies working to optimize one top level domain (.com) it is going to be nearly not possible to attribute the correct value to each specific agency. One agency’s shortcomings could be masked because the overall domain is still benefiting from good search authority.
Once again a centralized strategy synchronized by a single agency can limit this problem. If your website’s leads from search increase you know who is responsible – the single agency – likewise if your leads drop you know who to blame and more importantly where to go and who to speak to in order to rectify the problem. One agency can only ever guide to one problem. Multiple agencies can create multiple problems.
Bigger Doesn’t Mean Better
Technology companies that don’t hire a different agency in each country generally go for one big agency to work across all markets. This is ideal, as long as said agency has in-house multilingual capabilities. Taking on a big-name agency that has in all likelihood done a stellar job for domestic search marketing is going to see you in the fast-lane to failure if they’re preparation on outsourcing your global campaigns to a translation company.
The problem with using translation companies for search advertising is obvious: translators are not search marketers. Just because you speak the language does not mean you know how to optimize for search engines. Your mother or father probably speaks English, but would you have confidence in them writing a pay-per-click advert for you?
Employing one agency because you want a national strategy – namely all the work done in one place, by one company – is useless if they then outsource all the translation. Once again you have multiple problems rather than just one. If something goes wrong with one of the markets, how do you know it is not the translation company that is the difficulty, rather than the agency?
How to do well
So, how do you make sure you avoid these pitfalls and make your global search engine marketing succeed? The simple answer is to have a truly central strategy, with no outsourcing to individual marketing. This means you need to find an agency that can not only productively optimize your website for numerous markets and search engines but also one you can trust to do the work themselves.
Check that the organization actually has the in-house staff that they claim to by asking to see LinkedIn profiles and to meet the team that is working on your campaigns. clearly the latter may not be logistically viable if you opt for an agency not based in the same country, but you can always plan a Skype session.
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