No matter the nature of your business, your online campaigns must be based on Keywords research. A careful analysis of terms and phrases used by your potential clients on search engines is a great way to understand their preferences and habits.

It is fundamental to understand how people use search engines and what they are searching. This is the reason 80% of businesses going global miss a great opportunity to know their target audience better.

What do I mean? The vast majority of companies approach International Keyword research in a wrong and different way, compared to the one they used for their local market.

They think a simple translation of their English keywords can easily open the door to their new market. Proceeding in this way places them in a competitive disadvantage, compared to more ambitious and local businesses, even before the competition gets started.

They are forgetting two important things:
1. High return is never achieved by low-cost investment;
2. International Keyword Research gives you the opportunity to know your audience, and consequently, you find out topics to improve your ranking on search engines.

International Keyword Research is not for Machine Translation

You may find several articles online that suggest using Google Translate or any other machine translation to help you find new keywords for a new target market. Do not rely on those articles and suggestions!

Languages follow different rules from syntax to grammar. And these principles affect the way people think and, subsequently, the way people search. Software and machine do not understand them and do not think as humans. They cannot identify good opportunities for your SEO strategy.

Native specialists can ensure good results and find low-hanging fruits to make you succeed globally. An international keyword research specialist for a target market should be able to:

• translate your content;

• brainstorm new keywords to meet your potential audience needs;

• analyse them to find search volume, level of competition, and the ones that convert better in a specific market;

• find negative keywords you have to exclude in a PPC campaign.

How to do an International Keyword Research

There are only two effective methods to find keywords that convert in a target market.

You can collaborate with an international SEO agency or, even better, a language service provider offering a comprehensive service from translation to keyword research and implementation on your website.

Or if you have been looking forward to hiring a native speaker of the market you want to target in your marketing department, this is a great resource for you.

This guide will help you and your marketing department find the right search phrases and the ones that can convert better for your target market.

Find new keywords for a new market step-by-step

Let’s assume we work for Organic for Your Cat, an imaginary company offering organic food for cats successfully in UK. We have noticed our website receives a decent number of visits from Italy, and we have experienced a few orders from Italian clients.

If we were an unambitious company, we would rest on our laurels. But, we are not that kind of business. Organic for Your Cat is the kind of start-up that throws itself headlong into interesting and new business opportunities.

Unfortunately, our Italian marketer is not an expert in the Italian pet food market. However, he knows well our competitors in UK. One of them is manly focused on the British market, whilst the other one is a Dutch company, and the Italian traffic share is 7.85%.

We can concentrate our research on the second company and ignore the first one.  However, we would have a very limited basis for comparison. And we cannot be sure that our competitor did a careful and effective keyword research for the Italian market.

We need to find more data of possible competitors, based in Italy. To do this, we have to use a great keyword research tool, such as SEMrush. We have to enter the Italian domain of our competitor and scroll down the page to examine the two reports we need:

• Top Organic Keywords
• Main Organic Competitors

We will have a closer look at the keywords later. Now, we need to identify two more competitors.

Find Competitors for Italian Keyword Research

Now, we have a list of potential competitors in the Italian market. We need to select the ones that are real competitors; in our case, that means businesses selling cat food and, even better, organic cat food. We sort the list by “Competition Level” to have the consistent results on top of our page.

In the first ten results, we have identified 5 competitors. That is a good number to start our first Keyword Research for the Italian market.

It is time to look to the second report to find the keywords other businesses rank for, number of searches per month, and the level of competition. We would obtain a better and more analysed result if we cross data from several tools. This is why we will use SEMRush, Google Keyword Planner and MOZ Keyword Difficulty tool.

First, we have to export keywords provided by SEMRush and edit the Excel files we downloaded. We only want phrases that may be useful for our business. After a quick look at the exported files, we have extrapolated 160 Italian keywords.

Time to find the right keywords for the Italian market

Targeting 160 keywords would be very time-demanding. The risk is to create a confused SEO strategy, based on too many keywords. We can and have to restrict our keywords group to rank well on Google.it and other Italian search engines.

One thing to remember is that search volume is not on itself an indicator of the conversion of keywords.  We are looking for high-converting and ‘low-hanging fruit’ keywords for the market we are targeting. It is time to use Google Keyword Planner to see the level of competition of our keywords.

We copy and paste our keywords in the planner and set up the targeting correctly. Google Keyword Planner provides a bit of information. We already have a rough idea of the search volume of our keywords; we are looking for the level of competition and conversion rate.

We download the file and sort it by Competition field. At a first sight, we notice two important things.

None of the top 20 keywords reaches 1000 searches per month.  Quantity does not necessarily mean higher competition and better return on investment.

In the top 10, there are singular/plural variations of the same keyword (mangime gatti, mangimi gatti, mangime gatto). There is no point in targeting them separately; as long as you use the singular and plural of the words in the phrases in the same page, Google and other search engines will rank your content for those keywords.

Find the easiest Italian keywords to rank for

At the moment, we have a list of keywords, their average monthly searches, and a Google calculated level of competition. It would be impossible to go after all of them! It is time to calculate the keyword difficulty. We can do it with the Mozbar and the Keyword Difficulty tool.

The toolbar provides useful information about your competitors. You may find out the domain and page authority and links. However, remember to create a search profile for the county you are targeting to see the results on the local version of Google.

Now, you are ready to assess how difficult it would be to rank for the keywords you selected. Starting from the most competitive ones, analyse the difficulty to rank for a certain number of keywords. The lower the percentage for a keyword, the higher your possibilities to rank for it.

With patience, you will find good opportunities. In our case, if we compare the results of “crocchette di gatto” (390 searches) and “croccantini di gatto” (720 searches), we can see it would be easier to rank for the second one.

With almost twice the monthly searches of a similar keyword that is just slight more competitive, it is a no-brainer to decide which one to use. And if you want to kill two birds with one stone, you can use ‘crocchette di gatto’ in your content to rank for it, as well.

Conclusion

Finally, you have a few keywords to use for the Italian market. You know your potential audience and customers’ preferences. Now, all you need to do is create or translate content in Italian to target the keywords you chose.

International keyword research can be a time-demanding process. However, the hours spent finding the right phrases to target a foreign market are the key to succeed online in a new market.

Do you have any experience with international keyword research? Do you use any other method to find keywords for a foreign market? Let me know your experiences and techniques on the comments.