Michael Bonfils will be speaking on “International SEO” at SearchFest 2015 which will take place Friday, February 27, 2015 in Portland Oregon. For more information or to purchase tickets, please click here.
1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.
I started doing SEO back in late 1996 after spending several years in Europe working with NATO and European military contractors. Made a bet with a large real estate brand that I could bring in leads from the internet and it would surpass the amount of business referred through their relocation system. Turns out I was right and from that point forward it launched my career. I started a real estate portal in the late 90s and from there went on to be Director of Search for Business.com during the boom. In 2001, I started a digital marketing agency and sold that by 2004. In 2003 however, I had plans to take search global and opened an office for SEM International in China to take US best practices and implement them over there. My first big client was Intel, when their agency Silicon Space (now Covario) hired me to execute one of their largest and most successful global search campaigns.
After that, when other agencies heard about us, they asked us to help them with their clients in different countries and we quickly grew all over the world. Now, SEM International (which is a cooperative of agencies) consists of over 300 digital marketers in 22 offices around the world covering over 50 countries and over 40 languages. We provide mainly multilingual SEO, PPC, Social and Display services as well as website localization/translation. I am typically busy day to day managing a ton of working parts, clients, staff, calls etc. Some people think I never sleep.
2) Can you make any general statements about the ranking criteria for the English Country Specific Google Indexes (e.g. Google UK, Google Australia) compared to the main Google Index?
I am glad you asked. One thing that I wish all SEO’s would realize is to try and think of every country…especially…same language countries as having their own independent algorithms. ( EG. this is UK google, this is AU Google etc.) Google is naturally going to favor local companies over multinationals, so BE LOCAL, ACT LOCAL. Now, with that said, having a site hosted in country, a ccTLD for that country, inbound links FROM that country and content that is localized to the language (UK English is different than US English etc…it still needs to be localized) those are all best practices and will garner the best SEO results.
Typically though, its easier said than done. Many site owners don’t have the money or time to invest in independent international websites. In that case, setting certain canonicals, tags and setting changes in their WMT will help. It’s not the best solution, but its Google’s preferred solution when you have a multinational site and you want to make it clear that content x in this country belongs to this page and if someone comes from x country, send them here. That just leaves you with making sure the links in the UK point to your UK pages etc.
3) If a company transacts business Worldwide and wishes to rank Worldwide, what sorts of signals do they need to send Google from their site or otherwise in order to facilitate this?
The above answers both questions 2 and 3. The most important signal any company can do is to tell Google you are a local company and if at all possible, put a local address and currency on the site too (in addition to everything I mentioned) as well as getting local backlinks.
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.
