What is the importance of translating keywords in a url for international SEO?
Specifically for Germany, France, China and Japan.
International SEO Question Overview
I'm asking a question about the importance of translating keywords in a URL for international SEO around the web. I'll collect the answers in this blog post.
Initial findings include the suggestion that Google doesn't weight the importance of keywords in a URL, and keywords in a URL do influence usability because those keywords are highlighted in the search results.
I am wondering if usability and also localization are important factors in deciding whether to use keywords in the URL you are targeting? It makes sense to use the language you are attempting to do business in.
Industry Articles
Keywords in the URL - Search Engine Journal - "URLs are just another on-page factor that we’re all very familiar with
in single-language SEO, but unfamiliar when it comes to international
rankings. Translated URLs get overlooked all too often; ensure that your
URLs contain the spoken language of that section and optimise them
appropriately."
URL Localisation for International SEO - Great article that recommends localizing keywords in the URL both as a search engine signal, and for usability to visitors.
Top 5 Considerations for International SEO - "Drive page optimization by inserting your target keywords in the URL,
title tags, meta description, header tags, and page content. Don’t
forget to optimize pictures and videos with localized captions,
headlines, and alt-texts."
Global Search Engine Optimization - "Keyword rich URLs in the appropriate language are likely to be preferred by search engines and served higher in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)"
Google Articles
Multi-regional and multilingual sites - "Signaling the language in the URL may also help you to discover issues with multilingual content on your site."
I'm off to California in mid-June for my company's annual conference on Innovation. This year's SDL theme is all about 'Global Customer Experience Management.' I really like this term because I think it describes a concept that existed but wasn't easily described in the business literature. Instead people probably used terms such as global operations, global marketing operations, international marketing, or global branding, depending in which department they resided, be that technology or marketing.
I've been writing a number of blog posts around the conference, and you can follow all of the customer experience blog posts on the SDL blog. I'm also hosting a tweet-up at the Fairmont Hotel, the conference hotel on Wednesday night, the 12th of June. So if you are around ping me and we can meet for the conference or at the tweet-up.
When I read a paragraph from B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore’s Welcome to the Experience Economy article in the Harvard Business Review I was thinking, are the authors suggesting that companies can charge for an experience? Here’s the section I was thinking of:
“To realize the full benefit of staging experiences, however, businesses must deliberately design engaging experiences that command a fee. This transition from selling services to selling experiences will be no easier for established companies to undertake and weather than the last great economic shift, from the industrial to the service economy.”
So, it’s not that a company charges for the experience directly, rather they charge for a product, and are able to charge extra for the associated services and experiences. For example, Starbucks charges a premium price for its coffee, yet you are not just buying the coffee, you are buying the service, the brand, and most importantly the experience.
A few years ago, Starbucks wasn’t doing so well financially; Howard Schultz talked about improving the quality Starbuck’s coffee, and he believed that improving the quality of the coffee was one of the strategies that what pull the company back on the right strategy for growth.
When I read Howard Schultz’s comments, I thought about how coffee for me, wasn’t the reason I went to Starbucks, really I continue to visit Starbucks because 1) coffee has never been my hot drink of choice, tea is more my tradition, having grown up in the UK, and 2) I think more of Starbucks as a destination, a place where I meet people, or a comfortable place to work. Starbucks is one of my choices because of the experience, and they sell food and drinks there as well.
Well Starbucks turned things around, in part because they did an excellent job of listening to the customer, and engaging with the community, the Starbucks ideas site is a great example of using social media and customer insights to improve the Starbucks experience.
Recently, in the last few months when I was working at my previous job, I’ve had to find a place to work late at night on a Sunday evening. I live in the South Shore of Massachusetts, and there aren’t too many choices for places to hang out with food and wifi. Living in Scituate, I don’t believe there are any late night alternatives, so I made my way to Panera Bread in Hanover, MA one evening, only to discover, I had my evening out of synch and the restaurant was just about to close, so looking around I remembered McDonalds has wifi and there was one nearby. So I spent several hours at the local McDonalds, working away, and I enjoyed the experience. In recent years, McDonalds has upgraded their experience, the seating, lighting has improved.
However, while I was sitting there with my laptop, drinking coffee, I did receive a few strange looks from one group of customers coming into the store and who made a few comments that I ignored, but caused me to consider. McDonalds wants to upgrade their experience, and make it acceptable for people to work there, but I’m not sure all McDonald’s customers are ready to associate McDonalds on the same par with Starbucks.
For McDonalds to sell the experience sufficiently, I think the company will have to make their restaurants a place to run business meetings, in the same way Starbucks has become the go to place for informal corporate meetings.
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It appears that McDonalds has imported the European experience to the US…what’s interesting here is that in order to be successful in Europe McDonalds had to change its product, and facilities, its experience. Every restaurant and grocery store has to think about changing their menu, if you will, American’s are no longer buying into traditional American fast food, and they want healthier alternatives.
Here’s where I ended my post, then went off to conduct some research on McDonald’s brand strategy. I found a really interesting post by Sundar Ganapathy, critiquing the McDonalds brand in “McDonald's International Strategy: Squander Brand Equity,”where Sundar stated;
“In Europe, unfortunately, McDonalds is straying from its fast food roots. In an effort to compete with coffee shops like Starbucks, McDonald’s is turning the restaurant space more upscale and comfortable, while offering healthier and more locally palatable foods. They are also offering Wi-Fi and rental iPods. However, this strategy not only dilutes the brand equity by adapting to local tastes, but also moves McDonalds even further away from its core competency of fast food. With Wi-Fi and music, who needs their food served fast? Europeans no longer expect American food from McDonalds.”
I’m wondering if McDonalds discovered that the combination proved more profitable and as result changed their strategy when it comes to brand experience at least here in the US? So one benefit of being willing to offer local experiences to customers is that you may develop a brand experience that you eventually decide to transfer across the rest of your markets, looking back to my recent article on the customer talk test, what if in the 1960’s McDonald’s entered a new market where drive-in’s were already the norm, or alternatively providing drive-in’s wasn’t really an advantage because no one had cars! You have to develop a different experience to compete.
Mission & Values - McDonald's brand mission is to be our customers' favorite place and way to eat. Our worldwide operations are aligned around a global strategy called the Plan to Win, which center on an exceptional customer experience – People, Products, Place, Price and Promotion. We are committed to continuously improving our operations and enhancing our customers' experience.
This mission is interesting… and leads me to ask who McDonalds is targeting? But also, how would McDonalds become your favorite place to and way to eat?
I remember watching a presentation where a restaurant in New Orleans was mentioned, the wait staff at the restaurant would simultaneously deliver the food and plates to 10 diners at the same time. The experience wowed the customers who also said the food was as good as the service, amazing!
Steven Walden's article, "What is Customer Experience Management? Did Pine and Gilmore get it wrong?" discusses the process of testing customer talk. Here's an extract:
‘Customer Talk Test’.
The rule is, if a customer would demand the ‘product or service’
experience first then it is not CEM, if they say it second it is CEM.
Here is an example:
In the 1960’s McDonalds introduced new drive-in
restaurants. Customers would come far and wide just to see the
drive-ins. They would say:
First: ‘Wow come and see these drive-ins’
Second: ‘Oh! And we can get a burger’
Hence, it is CEM.
Of course there is a temporal dimension to CEM, which
means that the drive-ins after a few years ceases to be an attraction
and start to become part of the service ‘personal and memorable experience’. In the 1970s it becomes:
Francisco Ghelfi Fontela has created a new meetup group in Spain, as part of the new group he wants to set up a blog and gather agile marketing articles, he wants to translate existing English articles into Spanish, and give full credit to the authors.
So if you have an article on Agile Marketing would you be willing to have your piece translated?
If we are to spread the Agile Marketing Movement into a Global movement, this sort of effort is going to really help, I commend Francisco for the effort, but also the idea. Why not do this for more languages?
02/28
Update: About one year ago, Jim Ewel and I met in a coffee shop in Harvard Square, and as a result of that meeting we organized SprintZero, now the Agile Marketing community is really starting to take off. In this amazing update about the agile marketing movement, San Francisco has grown to 610
members! We added groups in Spain, London, and São Paulo, Brazil.
Shanghai has another event schedule as well as San Francisco!
Blogging is all about starting a conversation with another individual. I don't mind if someone from a company posts useful and relevant information on my blog. But that information has to be within the context of an existing conversation. I reserve the right to delete or edit content and links from comments on this blog if I think you are just making a sales pitch or trying to increase your SEO standing.
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