Are you jumping on the bandwagon and expanding your services to include the International Market? Are you trying to decide if this is the best move for you and your company? Or better yet trying to decide how to accomplish this task?

As the expansion overseas is gaining more attention Ecreativeworks has deepened their knowledge base about the best techniques and strategies for the International Markets. This post is the first of our International Marketing Series. Like our other posts, we are hoping to educate you and get your feedback. What do you know about International Search Engine Marketing or International Marketing in general? Join in on the fun and let’s expand our knowledge base together!

Here are the two most important steps in gaining the visibility you want out of the United States: a ccTLD and a translated website.

A ccTLD, for those of you that are thinking “huh?,” is a Country Coded Top Level Domain. A ccTLD might be: www.google.fr or www.htico.com.mx. The .fr is for France and the .mx is for Mexico. Having a ccTLD is important because it tells the search engines what audience you are targeting. Everyone knows that Google can cater their results for a region. The search results I get for a particular term in Minnesota is going to be a little different than the search results my coworker is going to get in California. This would also be the case in other countries when they are searching Google. The search engines will cater their results to the domains that seem the most relevant. Www.htico.com.mx is going to get better visibility in Google Mexico than www.htico.com.

It also helps that www.htico.com.mx is translated from English to Spanish. If you want to respect your International audience, gain their trust and create a relationship you need to take the step into their culture and language. If you have a Mexico website, you should be able to serve the customers you will be attracting by providing your product information in their language and also respond to them in their language when they inquire via an online form or by telephone. If you can’t communicate with them, your efforts are lost. You can’t expect everyone to be able to read and speak English!

Combining these two steps and you are off to a great start. Expanding your services and target audience can be exciting, but also overwhelming. There is a lot to learn about the search marketing trends of an area, the culture and language of the country and what marketing techniques work or a complete no-no. If you are interested in expanding into the International Markets, let’s chat and see what we can do together!

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 3:03 pm and is filed under General, International Marketing & SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.