After just a few months of being part of the company, I began to notice an exponential growth in visits coming from Colombia and that set off an alarm in my strategy,
which led me to ask myself the following questions:
- Why am I bringing Colombians to the blog instead of Mexicans?
- Why did my beautiful article about Marketing rank in Mexico, but not bring any relevant traffic from this country?
The answer was that I had to undertake the arduous task of not only delving into the characteristics and needs of the Mexican market in relation to marketing issues, but I also had to begin relearning Spanish for local purposes.
In the midst of the insatiable search for Spanish
concepts for Mexico, I came across our golden jewel to date: the keyword Mercadotecnia (again, Marketing in Spanish, exclusively for Mexico). And so I wanted to get results in Mexico with Mercadeo , a very Colombian word!
There is no point in insisting on a term in a thailand phone number list particular language if it does not bring results among the public we are working with. And this was a beautiful lesson; it applies not only to Spanish, but to Portuguese, English and any language.
If we have marketing objectives, language will only be a means of communication, but the target country will always establish the rules of the game for correct communication.
And Google, as always, understands better than anyone the correct internationalization techniques.
Lesson 2b: User search intent is essential for
Once we understood the importance of taking care of the linguistic context of a country , Google brought us an extra challenge: no matter how curate christmas content for your audience much we searched for information about Marketing , being located between Brazil and Colombia, Google was always going to show us information according to the country we were in and not information about Mexico, our target country up to that point.
From there we learned to:
- use tools like VPNs,
- configure Google according to the desired region and language,
- make us more complete SEMrush plans to identify latent opportunities by region,
- and, mainly, to better interpret the famous: Search intention ; which in the end, is not about what the user is searching for, but rather the information they want to find.
And well, just as a Brazilian does not have the same information needs as a Colombian, a Colombian does not have the same needs as a Mexican, and so on.
Of course, sometimes a need may coincide between countries regardless of their language, but this is not always the case.
It was then that we began to replace terms in our routines such as translation with content localization and began to study in more detail the political and economic maturity of a market regarding an issue in order to solve local problems using our marketing.
Google is a genius
In the end, google.es or google.pt do not correspond to Español (Spanish) or Português (Portuguese) but rather to countries such as España (Spain) and Portugal.
This is why the domains google.com.co (Colombia), google.com.mx (Mexico), google.com.br (Brazil), etc. exist.
That is, Google knows very well that in order to deliver relevant information that satisfies the user’s search intent, it must divide its domain corresponding to each country, to allow localized searches.
And well, with this information learned and mastered, today we have very deep research processes.
We take into account the needs of people by region, and thanks to this, we are managing to get in touch with almost 3 million users through our blog in Spanish, between Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Spain, Peru and other Spanish-speaking countries.
Google is allowing us to rank well in all these domains, due to the education we provide and the localized relevance with which we build our content for the Latin American market.
Lesson 3: You must invest in the right technology for Google
SEO and content production never take a break, and even less so when combined with internationalisation issues.
Rock’s international problems were not solved simply by correctly localizing content and interpreting user search intent.
The problems started again after a year of peace, when we decided to do a domain migration, in order to have our efforts from Brazil, Mexico, Spain, Colombia, among others, in one place.
And in this migration, we made a new mistake: we ignored geographical distances.
The Internet has sold us the false idea that geographical barriers no longer exist, due to rapid communication with the entire world.
We have already seen that regional linguistics are quite present throughout Google and this does represent a barrier for those who are not familiar with it; but they never openly mentioned to us how a geographical distance could really harm our entire SEO.
The truth is this: from Mexico to Brazil it took us 13 hours of direct flight (13 hours because I won’t count the stopover time at airports). From Brazil to Argentina, it would take us perhaps 3 hours of flight.
It is obvious that on the Internet it will
never take us 3 or 13 hours to reach these destinations, but what is certain is that it will take us a certain number of milliseconds to get there in Argentina, and a few more milliseconds in Mexico.
Technical issues versus UX, good technical SEO vioffer practices, the speed of a website both in loading and in being found by search engines, are nothing new. But the algorithm had to make them more visible, so that we would take our technology seriously.
At the time of migration, the issue was already being discussed, and it’s a good thing that the error occurred at this time, before the algorithm came to charge us all and in different countries at the same time.
According to Sam Underwood of seotoolbelt.com, “SEO skills increase as we develop design, critical thinking, UX and communication skills.”