Enterprise Ireland - eMarketing Event - Dublin - October 2015

1. SEO and Growth Hacking
to grow your
International Business
Enterprise Ireland eMarketing Event
Using the Internet to Compete in International Markets
John Caldwell
john@creatorseo.com
061 513267
086 2410295

2. • Introduction
• The Search Landscape
• How Search Engines Work
• Keywords
• Growth hacking
• Google Now!
• International SEO
•Tips
Content in this presentation

3. CreatorSEO
Internet marketing company
We help clients benefit
from the power of the internet
to
attract and convert potential customers and sales!

4. CreatorSEO
We always start with an Audit
Your internet presence ...
Your competitors presence ...
What are you trying to achieve ...
We will identify what/if there is an opportunity!

5. Some of our customers ........

6. It All Starts With Strategy
SEO is a set of processes that can be used to optimise the natural ranking of a
website or web page in order to achieve a defined Search / Marketing Strategy
The strategy can include:
• Targeting a particular market
• Which country or countries
• Focussing on a region
• Emphasising particular products
• Etc…
Reach Act Convert Engage
Digital strategy:
Customer
analysis
Competitor
benchmarking
On-line partner
analysis
SWOT
Marker-place analysis:
Vision and
mission
Goal setting Analytics
Managing digital
marketing
Goals and KPI’s:
Segmentation and
targeting
Brand position and
value proposition
Engagement and
content strategy
Integrated
communication
strategy
Strategy:

7. If your not on page 1
of search results
you don’t exist!

8. Ranking Positions – Averages on Google
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Unknown brand
Known Brand

9. search engines and social media
are the gatekeepers of your
Content visibility

10. Search engines – How they work?

11. How Do Search Engines Work?
 Spider “crawls” the web to find new documents (web pages,
other documents) typically by following hyperlinks from
websites already in their database
 Search engines indexes the content (text, code) in these
documents by adding it to their databases and then
periodically updates this content
 Search engines search their own databases when a user
enters in a search to find related documents (not searching
web pages in real-time)
 Search engines rank the resulting documents using an
algorithm (mathematical formula) by assigning various
weights and ranking factors
 Spiders read text and nothing else

12. What a Search Engine Sees

13. Understanding the Search Page
Paid adverts
(PPC)
Paid adverts
(PPC)
Natural or
Organic Search
(SEO)
News

14. The Golden triangle

15. Be found on the internet
• Ranking – its just a
formula….
=
2a+0.7b+12c+9d+2(a-
b+d)-1.5e+2f …………..
• … but Google has more
than 250 items in its
algorithm
• … and growing
1 Search terms in the HTML title tag
2 Search terms in the HTML body copy
3 Search terms in bold typeface
4 Search terms in header tags
5 Search term in anchor text in links to a page
6 PageRank of a page (the actual PageRank, not the toolbar PageRank)
7 The PageRank of the entire domain
8 Quality of link partners
9 Type of backlinks that bring anchor text juice for search terms
10 The speed of the web site
11. Search terms in the URL - main URL and page URLs
12. Search term density through body copy (About 3 - 5%?)
13. Fresh content
14. Good internal linking structure
15. Age of the domain
16. Links from good directories
17. Image names
18. Image ALTs
19. Reputable hosting company
20. Diversity of link partners too
21. Geo located search results
22. Rate of new inbound links to your site
23. Relevance of inbound links
24. 301s, 404s, 414s etc
25. Duplicate title/meta tags
26. Participation in link schemes
27. Quantity of backlinks
28. Quantity of linking root domains
29. Quality of linking root domains
30. Link distance from higher authority sites
31. Outgoing followed links from back linked pages

16. Artificial Intelligence – Machine Learning

17. Which? - search engines!

19. World-Wide Search Engine Market Share

20. … but it is usually enough to focus on the main Search Engines
• Ranking
= 2a+0.7b+12c+9d+2(a-b+d)-1.5e+2f …………..

21. … and let’s not forget

23. Strategy
Target audience: Language? Culture?
what
why
whowhere
when

24. Search Pyramid
Social
Link Building
Keyword Research &
Targeting
Accessible Quality Content
You have to get
these right first
Before you get
these right
Bring all this together with intelligence

25. The search demand curve
Source: SEOMoz
1 2 3-4 4+

26. 2015 - Good Google results
• Searchers rarely bounce
• Mostly spend a reasonable amount of time on page
• Seldom go to page 2
• Searchers rarely need to adjust the search term

27. What is Google looking for?

28. Google now also looking at: Keyword relationships and
usage – close bonds between
keywords on each page
Date can be important –
most recent content
– if applicable
What you mean in your
search –
diverse results at
certain times
Predict what you are
looking for!
Phrases are unique
The language you use in
your search
The intent of your search
– information open queries

29. Hummingbird and Carousel

30. Unique content
Google likes unique content
Does your content on a
PAGE meet all the
searcher’s needs?
Are you better at giving the
searcher the information
they need?

31. Moz SEO survey
- 2014 Annual survey

32. Moz SEO survey
- 2014 Annual survey
Definitions

33. Moz SEO survey
- 2014 Annual survey
Page Level Keyword
Usage Features

34. Moz SEO survey
- 2014 Annual survey
Page Level Keyword
Agnostic Features

35. Data and Growth Hacking

36. Internet consulting for non-
profits 36
Internet Marketing Sales Metrics: A collection of data
and information (interpretation of this data) relating to the engagement of your
Internet and business strategy.

37. Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools

38. Mysiteperformance and Google keyword checker
• Test your site on - www.mysiteperformance.com

39. Google Alerts & Google News & Google Publisher

40. What is a good result
Data Grade B Grade A Failed
Page views 1,500 1,000 125
Time on site 2.43 2.01 0.43
E-mail sign ups 10 12 2
Purchased 4 10 1

41. • Data is a strategic asset
• Can be a key differentiator for
sustained growth, efficiency
and compliance
• Most data models tend to are
siloed, outdated and too
narrow

42. Knowledge
Information / Understanding
Data / Facts

43. SEO Process or a set of processes
 Get a champion
 Carry out a review/audit
 Identify information need
 Website user experience
 Website reach
 Website conversion …………….
 Develop plan and document baseline
 Implement changes
 Analyse (data information) – GROWTH HACKING

44. Marketing
incl. SEO
Customer
Needs
Data
Growth Hacking

45. Marketing
incl. SEO
Customer
Needs
Data
Growth Hacking
 Analytics
 Baseline
 Create a dashboard
 Perform AB Testing
 Create interventions
 Make changes
 One Metric That Matters?
 Talk to customers
 Make more changes
Analysebeforeandafterchanges

46. Normally a MARKETERworks
side by side with a
CODER
2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018
• Growth hacking is about doing whatever it is to get digital/user results
- using the right tactics and practices

47. MARKETER and
CODER
Try things till it
works!
• What really happens:
20112012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018

48. Internationalisation
Google.ie,Google.co.uk,Google.de,Google.fr……

49. Trading internationally
• Common situations:
• one country, several languages
• one language, several countries

50. Trading internationally
• What can be done?
• domains by country?
• main domain and subdirectories per language?
• sub domains?
• Geo targeting on Google

51. Trading internationally
• Best option domains by country
• creatorseo.com
• creatorseo.fr
• creatorseo.de
• but
• complicated to manage and coordinate
• one CMS for all or one per domain?

52. Trading internationally
• Sub-domains or Domain name alias
• us.creatorseo.com
• fr.creatorseo.com
• de.creatorseo.com
• Directories by country/language
• creatorseo.com/us/
• creatorseo.com/fr/
• creatorseo.com/de/
• One language, several countries
• creatorseo.com/es/
• mycompany.com/es-pu/ (Peru)
• mycompany.com/es-mx/ (Mexico)

54. Trading internationally
• Directories by country/language
• Cheaper
• Less technical resources required
• Easier to manage and coordinate
• Directories contribute to increase the general relevancy of a domain

55. Trading internationally
• Subdomains by country
• Search Engines consider subdomains almost a completely different
entity than their domain
• they don’t inherit most of the domain's relevancy
• Example of a sub domain
• http://spanish.creatorseo.com
• … but are a more integrated approach than having a number of
unrelated domain names
X

56. Don’t forget to include the necessary language signals
• Meta language tag
• <meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en-gb">
• <meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en-ie">
• HTML language / country definition
• <html lang="en-gb">
• Link element to different language-locales pages
• <link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en-ie" hreflang="en-ie" />
• <link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en-ca" hreflang="en-ca" />
• <link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en-au" hreflang="en-au" />
• <link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en" hreflang="en" />
• Block automated translations in robots.txt

57. Competition

58. Competition
• On-line competition may not be your traditional competition
• Different competitors in different regions
SEO is about beating your competition in the targeted geographies

59. Search is a process
www.creatorseo.com
• Site map
• Errors
• Ease of access for
search engines
Site SEO
Design/navigation
• Choose the right terms
• Which terms per
landing page?
• Consistency
Landing page and
keywords • Relevancy
• Quality over quantity
• SEO and conversions
Links to your site

60. Audience and be local

61. Audience
• Know your audience
• Cultural
• In Mediterranean counties
- Internet use is driven more by social factors rather than anything else,
• where Nordic countries rely on the internet for more pragmatic, functional purposes.
• Language
• What are they searching for?

62. Keyword
Avg. Monthly
Searches World
wide(exact match
only)
Avg. Monthly
Searches US (exact
match only)
Avg. Monthly
Searches UK (exact
match only)
Avg. Monthly
Searches Canada
(exact match only)
Avg. Monthly
Searches Germany
(exact match only)
Avg. Monthly
Searches France
(exact match only)
Avg. Monthly
Searches China
(exact match only)
Avg. Monthly
Searches India
(exact match only)
hotels in dublin 49,500 1,900 18,100 390 590 110 10 90
dublin hotels 33,100 3,600 18,100 880 480 140 10 70
hotels dublin 18,100 590 6,600 170 1,000 390 10 10
hotel dublin 14,800 260 2,400 110 2,400 3,600 10 10

64. Strategy needs to consider Technology
Desktop
Mobile
Browser
Operating System

65. • Register each site with Google Places, Bing Business Portal
for example.

66. Local content
• Use local addresses and contact information
• Add local case studies/ testimonials
• with names and images
• Customise content for each country or market
• More relevant, increases local link building opportunities, and decreases duplicate content
• Currency

67. Design and usability

68. Basic requirements for any website
A web site is a bit like an advert!
• Clear purpose
• Easy to use / intuitive
• High impact
- you have only 4 seconds to impress!
• Optimised for visitors
• Target audience
• Easily found by the target audience
• Content must be dynamic and interesting

69. Design and usability
• Different countries prefer different design aesthetics
• Recreating your website in a different language may not be enough
• Get feedback on your site from locals in your target country

70. Final Tips

71. Some Final Tips
• Create useful page titles
• Use informative URLs
• Provide relevant page descriptions
• Add your business to Google Places
• Manage your site links
• Get a local mailing address
• Use a translator!
• Value proposition
• Call to action
• Speed
• Relevance
• User experience
• Relevant and unique content
Google shows search results based on
what's best for the user

72. Some Final Tips
• Country Top Level Domain's automatically associated to country
• Webmaster tools help directories-by-country sites
• Host in country
• Use Data to gain information and knowledge

73. Enjoy the rest of the day
John Caldwell
john@creatorseo.com
061 513267/ 01 5313061
086 2410295