Welcome. In this initial lesson, I'll cover some of the challenges of global digital marketing overall, some cultural and language factors, and why it's important to have an understanding of what's required first. This framework is necessary for you to begin thinking in a global manner about website strategy, content, and then more specifics for SEO. You'll learn knowledge of key global marketing principles and how to determine the framework you want to use for developing a global website strategy. Anyone in sales or marketing knows that face-to-face can be the most effective way to truly close the deal. It also can be the most expensive, and when it comes to global work, it becomes very prohibitive to sell in person on a global level. Hence the need for thinking about things in an online global manner. Online shopping is here to stay. It is a very effective way for e-commerce or lead generation for individuals around the world to buy products and services. On a global level though there are definitely issues when it comes to price inconsistency, signage inconsistency, customer service inconsistency. These types of matters are ones I want to encourage us to think about as we work through these lessons. The errors that are often created when it comes to global communication are preventable. This sign says, I'm not in the office at the moment, send any work to be translated in the translation, but that has nothing to do with the initial English that was communicated. So a lot of the solution here it comes down to thinking globally acting locally, or acting on a regional, or country, or language level. This means different things to different people, but I think it is the right foundation and framework for us to continue the conversation from. As we think about our work, our websites, our marketing on a global level, we encounter a number of challenges. The first and most obvious is who is your customer? Who is your global customer? What do they like? How do they purchase? Who are they? This gets into the idea of personas. Who are the different personas that purchase your products or services on a global level? As you get to know the remote customer well and cater for their different customer types that will improve your effectiveness. This framework for understanding your global customer is helpful. Let's start with language. What language do they speak most? What do they speak at work? What do they speak at home? How do they purchase online? Are they fluent in English? Are they multilingual? So this language issue is one to consider. Second is cultural understanding. Are there images, phrases, cultural icons that are appealing to them? What is culturally most resonant or most repellant for them? There are many stories in the localization industry of imagery not being relevant even offensive when taken from one culture to another. Third is purchasing style and preference. In their country, do they tend to purchase online? Do they trust e-commerce? Are they familiar with certain types of websites and not others? You'll see these kinds of trends on a country by country level throughout Europe and Asia? Fourth is purchasing intent. Are they ready to purchase? Do they typically visit stores first? Are they prepared to go through what you have on your website in order for them to buy? Last is logistical issues. Are you able to reach them online easily? Do they tend to buy via mobile? Does your product have mobile e-commerce enabled? Is there anything unique about shipping or purchasing in their country that you need to be familiar with? So this framework is important. It's cyclical in nature because there's no unique way to start or stop, but do keep this in mind as a framework. Challenge number 2 is controlling the environment with so much complexity. There are so many things that become difficult when you start to market online and then market online globally. The most simple way to think about this is the layers of change and the potential for disconnects between the various websites, commerce portals, content, update cycles, and then the various teams that need to support this. So as you think about expanding your business on a regional or global level, take this into account. Now when it comes to global SEO, this is the way that I think about the SEO mix starting with site architecture and technical factors related to trust as a big measure of ranking impact. Then the next level up are linking and social factors dealing with importance. Third is the content and localization piece, and that's most related to relevance. So pivoting this for a global audience means taking site architecture to a global or regional level. Taking linking to the context of in-country navigation and links from websites unique to your country. Obviously with localization, writing in a language that they are familiar with and will purchase based on. Now, when it comes to challenges, there are some things that stay the same. Marketing is still the same. Content is mostly the same except for the localization of it. The analysis of your performance is the same. Those principles still remain. But the type of changes that occur are related to scale which impacts the priorities and resources you need to bring to bear. Obviously languages and translation, and the workflow and workload required to do that well, and then giving consistent global signals to the search engines. They each have a particular way, they navigate index and display global content that needs to be considered. Finally, the nature of complexity. There's such a different order of magnitude of complexity when you take your content from one language to multiple others, this really needs to be taken into account. Want to reinforce this point of creating content with global search in mind, starting with the idea that if my content is in English to begin with, the dominance of Google in particular and their specific request for how global websites are understood becomes imperative that we understand, and I'll talk about this more in future lessons. There are some downsides to global website expansion to consider. You still have to maintain what you create. That goes without saying I hope, but be prepared to update and maintain the content that you put out there over time. Secondly, do you have the data in place that backs up the expansion? Are you able to provide numbers and reports to justify the work done? Third and related to this, do you have backend sales processes, e-commerce platforms, regional systems to take advantage of the new leads or visitors you expect to receive? Many wars had been lost by trying to fight them on too many fronts. So don't expand until you can justify the resources and maintenance aligned to the revenue. In this lesson, we covered some of the challenges of global digital marketing and the cultural and language factors to be aware of. Hopefully, you now know why it's important to have an understanding of what's required before diving deeply into global web marketing in SEO. In order to do global SEO well, you definitely need a team. A team appears agencies or other consultants you work with. In this way, you can take advantage of the opportunities in scale to the type of effectiveness based on a team committed to the same vision.
