Whether you are operating an international business or have recently closed a deal with an international client to help with their digital marketing and global SEO, it is definitely a challenge to achieve global success with your digital marketing strategy.
It is very difficult, but possible!
Today in this post, we will learn to make it easier. We will discuss about the various challenges that come when doing enterprise SEO for an international business and how to build a perfect enterprise SEO strategy to achieve global success.
By the end of the post, you will learn to create a practical strategic approach that would help your enterprise SEO program scale globally.
But before we get into the details, it is important for you to know that a strategy built for one company may not work for another company. And, it is different for different industries. There is no “one size fits all†formula here, so the enterprise SEO strategy must be tailored to a company’s own brand, business operations, employees, resources and requirements.
So, what you are going to see in this post is a generic model or structure of the program that is based on some of the key elements. You will get an overview and an idea of how you should build the strategy, and apply the knowledge to your own business and SEO teams to form the best enterprise SEO program that will take your brand’s global success to the next level.
So, let’s begin.
Here are a few important things you need to focus on:
Understand your audience’s needs and preferences
This is so true in any form of marketing. Before you even start making your product or get ready with your service, you have to do a lot of research to know about your customers and audience. Knowing about the target audience is a must. Unless you do that initial research to know your audience, your entire SEO strategy might turn into a flop show.
Proper knowledge about their actual needs and preferences will help the rest of the marketing and search engine ranking process get a lot easier. Those few initial hours of research is worthy enough to save you a lot of time going forward. When doing the enterprise SEO, make sure you are optimizing the website for a good user experience first and then for search engine ranking.
Learn the culture of the target regions
You have built an enterprise SEO strategy to help boost your global SEO results. There will be a few different locations or markets on your list that you will target. You will aim your website or pages to rank on a number of server locations, so you must learn about the locations and the culture of the regions by collecting the location data.
Today, search engines are evolving and are giving a lot of priority to the behavior of local searchers. They are keeping track of the search behavior, which is greatly influenced by the culture of the location. This is what you need to take into account.
Learn about the cultures of all the different locations before you make your international SEO strategy.
Examine your own teams and their knowledge
Good communication between your staff and your teams is important. You need to examine their knowledge, skills and performance from time to time. If you don’t have time for that, have someone to do that and report to you.
Having multiple teams operating from different locations working towards the same goal can be daunting. It needs strong communication and understanding of different elements. It needs to be ensured that they have the right kind of knowledge to do the job.
Test your teams’ strength, knowledge and capabilities based on the following points:
SEO’s current trend
Tools that your team utilizes
Your content creation process
Your team’s initiatives and experiments beyond SEO
The level of maturity of your SEO staff
Measure 3 Ps – People, Process, Platform
The 3 Ps – People, Process and Platform could be termed as the 3 building blocks of your enterprise SEO program.
In the previous step, you learned the importance of testing the knowledge and capabilities of your staff working in different remote locations and how can actually test it. In this step, you will go a little deeper learning to measure the “People†working towards the global SEO success, the “Process†they’re all following and the “Platform†they are using.
Measure your People by defining different levels of maturity.
Measure your Process by defining communication and different levels of KPIs.
Measure your Platform by defining different levels of technology integration.
Train your staff
Training is necessary. Once you’ve successfully measured your people based on the levels of their maturity, knowledge and their training or certification, you can then make highest standard training available to them. Make sure they avail advanced training and certification and be able to contribute to the overall development process of your global SEO program.
The entire search system keeps changing constantly with so much happening every day, so unless top level of advanced training and the current data metrics provided to the staff, they may find it hard to keep themselves up-to-date.
Proper training keeps your SEO people up-to-date and helps in the growth of SEO success.
Set goals wisely
Once you’ve provided well-organized and advanced training to your teams, you can set goals and targets for them. This is so crucial because even if you make the same level of professional training available to all of them, the teams, staff, audiences and locations differ, so you cannot set the exact same goals for each of your SEO team.
You can engage in thorough discussions with the leaders of all the teams to have a better understanding of how much each team can deliver. Based on that knowledge you can set attainable goals for each team and then it passes to each individual working in the team.
Goal-setting is not just SEO teams, but also for your development teams and content teams. You need to ensure that the multi-location website with tons of pages still loads fast and doesn’t have technical issues. And, there has to be a foolproof content marketing strategy in place.
Attainable goals have to be set for everyone.
Prioritize the tasks
The enterprise SEO program goes along with a multitude of small to big tasks. Some tasks are more important than others, so being able to prioritize tasks is essential.
The tasks could be like site design issues, loading time, bounce rate, content strategy, back-link profile and so on. Once you have prioritized the tasks, you should be able to know which tasks need to be done first and which tasks can wait.
Addressing the issues important, but it shouldn’t take long or hurt the site’s reputation.
Measure the outcomes
The process or the approach matters but what matters more is the end results. What outcomes your teams have brought should be big and noticeable. You can measure the outcomes in the form of ranking, reputation and good organic traffic.
If your target audiences like your enterprise SEO program and your multi-location site is able to rank well on search results, your global SEO strategy becomes a big hit.
Reward your teams
Finally, you should reward your teams for whatever contribution they’ve made to your global SEO success. Rewarding increases their motivation to work harder and make better contributions to the big picture.
If you are looking for a successful global SEO campaign to boost your international business, and are looking for hire a professional search agency for your global SEO success, then SEO Extent could be an excellent choice for you.