Try the following >

1. Enter the name of your company into Google Search.
2. Get your colleagues and friends in other countries to do the same.
3. Check your search results – you should be top of the organic search results, right
4. Notice any paid or sponsored ads appearing above or to the right of your search results?
5. Are they by any chance promoting one of your competitors?

What you are witnessing is brand bidding. The example I’ve used in the presentation at the bottom of the post shows very clearly what is happenning – check out the ads on the right-hand side.

Brand bidding or surfing is an increasing phenomenon in search marketing, especially in crowded markets. Search engines positively weight the authority of a long-established website. So any brand that has been active on the Internet for over ten years will be granted some authority by the web crawlers. What new brands always lack by default is visibility and awareness. As we all know, both of these take time and money to build up and in the world of translation especially, reputations can be won and lost over night.

So why not take a shortcut and slipstream off another brand? Open your store next to Nike, M&S or Mango and you are bound to get some passing traffic courtesy of their pulling power. The concept is quite seductive, is it not?

Here at Wordbank we’ve only really started noticing this in the past year, mainly because we’ve started taking search marketing (and other inbound marketing techniques) very seriously.

As I mentioned in the Search Me! Session at the GALA Lisbon conference on 29 March, paid search can be an expensive business. Like a casino, the house always wins. In this case Baidu, Yandex and Google get that little bit richer every time you and I launch a new campaign or up our PPC bid.

However, it is clear from our research on our own Translation and Localization market that those competitors who are savvy and got in early have established a strong presence and authority on the web, as a result of continuous activity. Brand bidding is just one of search marketing’s low hanging fruit, if also one of several rather murky practices.

Way back in December 2008 a story broke about how Interflora was taking legal action against Marks & Spencer for bidding on the keyword “interflora” using Google AdWords. The story has received lots of mainstream coverage over the past two years, with even the BBC picking up on it last October.

On 24 March 2011, the EU Advocate General issued his opinion on the matter and found in favour of Interflora. If the Court of Justice of the European Union follows the recommendation of the Advocate General (which happens in the majority of cases) then this case could well result in the end of trademark bidding across the EU.

The operative or killer clause in this ruling is:

– An error concerning the origin of goods or services arises when the competitor’s sponsored link is liable to lead some members of the public to believe that the competitor is a member of the trade mark proprietor’s commercial network when it is not. As a result of this the trade mark proprietor has the right to prohibit the use of the keyword in advertising by the competitor in question.

Everyone who has a brand can and should defend against this dubious activity and that’s not so difficult if you put a little time and effort into Paid Search. After all, if someone is searching on your brand, your site should be the most relevant and at the very least you should be optimising around your own brand.

Here is a good guide on when and where to defend against brand bidding.

Figure.1 Google Brand Bidding Example.

To quote one example from many: “Now for less than $5,000 US, you can have close to 90% of the world’s web visitors find you when they search for your keywords in their native language. The Window to the World page will then lead them to the rest of your website.”

Is your response to this ‘wonderful offer’:

a) Sign me up, baby! Boy, now the whole world will be beating a digital path to my super acme, organic, recyclable and humane mousetrap website!

b) What exactly do I get for my $5k again? Web-page translation, optimization, local keyword research by country, by search engine – all that for $5K?

c) Snakeoil, charlatan, bull, rollocks etc.

I’m sure that companies promoting these offers are all honourable and only trying to offer a service which fits a certain price point. However, it does have the odour of the Nigerian Lottery or the bank login confirmation spam. There is a school of thought that anyone gullible and/or greedy enough to be taken in by offers such as these deserves what they get.

For anyone still toying with the idea, consider this:

• A home or gateway page, on its own, is neither a website nor a fulfilling user experience. This is one reason that internet marketers and webmasters spend so much time worrying about bounce rate and path through to conversion. Think about it: how many visitors to your site  click their way as far as the contact/request page only to disappear? Does anyone really believe  that a solitary web-page is going to motivate the average Herman, Fabio or Aki  to suddenly break into song and throw their corporate credit card at the site (or am I being too harsh)?
• Suddenly SEO is a piece of cake in any language you care to name. Anyone who can spell ‘search’ knows that SEO takes time and effort is required to reach page 1 on Google. Small point but I feel I should also mention here that you have to pay to get a decent ranking on Yandex or Baidu; on-page SEO alone is never enough.
• I won’t even bother to mention transcreation, but if your content is not tailored for and in tune with your target audience – in any language – your probability of success is low.
• Competition - the global web is highly competitive and you will be up against local competitors who know the local language, market, search engines and media better than you do.

It is a tough challenge competing for international markets, but that is where the real opportunity for growth is. The latest OECD 2011 figures forecast that the top 5 fastest growing economies in 2011 will be:

1. China
2. India
3. Peru
4. Chile
5. Brazil

China and India are now the second and fourth biggest global economies, both with a rapidly growing affluent class.  These are substantial markets and, what’s more, they are here to stay. But only a serious local approach and sustained effort will reap any rewards.  We are all limited by budget but then why don’t we all drive Nissans or Skodas or Ladas?

Finally, coming back to the instant global website offer. It’s only a wild guess, but does the phrase ‘loss-leader’ ring any bells? And we all know what comes next, don’t we?

p.s. No prizes for guessing that Baidu dominates the Chinese Search market but who has 98% of the Indian market and in which languages? The answer in the next post.

Adwords, TMs and translation go together like ‘fire and petrol’ or ‘dictionary and gorilla’.

Translation Memories (TMs) are an accepted, if not mandatory, part of the web content translation process. Indeed, it’s regarded as nigh on a hanging offence by most corporate procurement departments for any vendor found guilty of not applying TMs to each and every translation project.

Yes, well maintained TMs can reduce translation cost and turnaround time when applied consistently to high volumes of content, both of which are stated and laudable aims for any supply chain manager. But, like the old cliche about crocodiles and swamps, it is easy to lose sight of the reason for translating the online content in the first place.

Why do any of us spend money on PPC campaigns? Is it because we are lexophiles or just because we love love throwing money at Google?

Neither. Our aim is to convert traffic from a landing page into a sales lead!

Let's not just throw money at Google

We craft our ad text, select our keywords and vary our landing page design to maximize the probability that our targeted audience will respond to our ad and submit an enquiry. All of this is highly customized to the needs of a specific campaign. The same applies equally to all campaign languages.

We want the German landing page to convert local German leads and the Turkish page to generate lots of qualified Turkish enquiries. Our criterion of success is not how accurate the German translation is; rather, did we use German keywords that have high local search volumes or was the call to action appropriate in Germany?

The last thing we really need is some statistical engine with megalomaniac tendencies automatically dictating phrases that may have been used before ad nauseam. For PPC and SEO, one size definitely does NOT fit all.

As I may have mentioned before – it’s not getting it translated that’s the problem per se, it’s the brief you give and the way it’s translated that matters. Of course, it is always a good idea to select a vendor that knows what’s special about international SEO and PPC.

Reminds me of the man who had a photographic memory which was never developed.

Search marketing is big and commands big spend in companies large and small with the demand for search analysts reaching the levels that html programmers achieved in the 90s. While the US market clearly leads the global field in terms of the adoption and sophistication of search marketing techniques, international brands are hungry to generate similar improvements in lead-generation and conversion across all their major markets, particularly the growing or more resilient ones.

While multilingual search engine optimization requires thought, structure and time, paid search does offer the promise of more instant gratification in terms of click-throughs and potential conversions.

“You pays your money and makes your choice.”

Need Adwords for your international lead generation campaigns? Easy. Follow our simple 4-step process to international success:

• Step 1 Grab those ad groups and campaigns that worked in the US
• Step 2 Download them into a spreadsheet from Google Adwords and send them for translation
• Step 3 Load them back into Google Adwords, build local campaigns
• Step 4 Ante-up the PPC bids until the ads are prominent in the “Sponsored links”.

Right? Not really. You just reduced the probability of success by a factor of ten!

If you know anything about Adwords you will be aware that they are made up of a list of trigger keywords, three fixed length lines of copy and two URLs. All of which have a specific role to play. Every component needs to be localized to suit the target local market, including the destination landing page.

Starting to have doubts about my “Simple, easy 4-step process?” If not, you should be. Have a look at the following sentence – lots of words all of them familiar but what does it mean?

Prices houses and cottages, Cottages and houses – Reviews and Prices, Forecasts cottage market

Here it is in its original and hopefully more recognizable form:

Russian:

Цены на дома и коттеджи

Коттеджи и дома – обзоры и цены
Прогнозы коттеджного рынка

English:

Prices houses and cottages
Cottages and houses – Reviews and Prices
Forecasts cottage market

What is interesting here is that the Russian search phrase used was “дом в финляндии” or “House in Finland” and we also tried “Property and Finland” (недвижимость в финляндии) but guess what is the most common search term for Russians looking for a house in Finland?

коттеджи в финляндии (Cottages in Finland)

Yes, ‘Cottages’, not house or property or even dacha, but ‘cottages in Finland’. Notice that whoever created this Adword knew that and made sure that house and cottage where not only in the Ad but also trigger keywords.

From this you can see how important it is to do proper local keyword research as part of your ‘Adword Translation’ process or you are going to both miss out on relevant searches and score a low Google quality rating. Which will either force your bid price higher or drop you down the sponsor list.

The moral of this post? Don’t just translate your Adwords; go to a competent International Search Marketing Agency or, better still, come to Wordbank, where we understand search and marketing and get your Adwords properly localized for the target market. Otherwise it is just more expensive mud on an ever bigger wall.