International keyword research and analysis
We identify and understand how audiences in local markets search for your products and services. Why research? Because all search engines are geared to delivering relevant results, so with better insight into how people search, we can provide better SEO results. Keyword research also offers invaluable information on user intent, illuminating wants, needs, likes and preferences in a uniquely reliable and valuable manner.
Keyword research starts with a seed list – a brainstorm of words and phrases that might be important. The better the keyword seed list is, the better the opportunity to generate comprehensive keyword portfolios. The seed list reflects categories and subcategories most relevant to your markets, customers, products and services, and are usually split between brand terms and generic terms.
In addition to these main types, and subject to the specifics of your business, we may also add keywords relating to events (such as national holidays, religious festivals and so on), and competitor terms where relevant. During the research process, we will consider:
- What are the core products that you sell?
- What are the core services that you offer?
- How do you distinguish your products from your competitors?
- How do you distinguish your services?
- What industries are you involved with currently?
- What industries would you like to get involved with?
- What marketing material do you have for your products and services?
- How do customers usually find out about your business?
- How do search behaviours differ from market to market?
The overall objective is to agree on a parent list of keywords which offer the potential for gains in visibility, traffic, engagement and acquisitions. The parent list is organised into keyword portfolios aligned with both your business needs (e.g. the way you cluster products) and with your paid media account structure (to maximise the potential for SEO and PPC synergy). Benchmarking then takes place to cover:
- Visibility via organic (rankings and visibility in the marketplace)
- Organic share of voice reporting (compared to competitors)
- Organic missed opportunity matrix
- Search console review of clicks
- Paid media cost per click and per keyword portfolio
Plotting and scoring of each portfolio is actioned to ascertain high priority areas – for example, medium level organic visibility vs high paid spend portfolio group could become a focus area to push up rankings organically to enable reduced paid media spend.
Once portfolios are clarified, the keyword research data will be used to inform many aspects of subsequent digital marketing activity including on page optimisation, content planning and creation, paid media activity and more.
A simple translation based approach to keyword research will at best only capture a small proportion of the total opportunity. This method can provide a keyword set which is inappropriate to optimise towards – damaging both SEO performance and brand reputation.
Our approach is to focus on culturalisation, using the SEO skills and local knowledge of our Local In-Market Experts (LIME) network to ensure that we are finding genuinely relevant keyword opportunities.
In an excellent example of the benefits of this approach, we found an additional 645,000 monthly search opportunities, across 125 core navigation terms. These opportunities would have been missed if the client had stuck with a basic translated approach.
Many times, we will find that the market similarities are as interesting as the differences; where we find commonality exists we can then look to re-purpose content across multiple markets.
