Autumn in Barcelona means International Search Summit is back. This year was the biggest event they have had to date. I first went to International Search Summit in September 2012 when it was in New York City. I have been a fan of it ever since.

There were three tracks with speakers from over 30 countries. I wrote a recap of the day from the sessions I attended. Webcertain will be sharing the slides of all those who spoke and the recordings too soon.

Meanwhile here is gallery of some of the photos from the day.

Link building for international targeting

Rad Pauluszak – Husky Hamster

Rad started the Content Track with his presentation about link builiding sharing his case studies from his company Husky Hamster.

Rad talked about two case studies that show that Google still pays to attention to the link profile of your site.

Case study 1

The site was 18 months old and the team were building 4 – 5 links a month only in one language. They first stared building links in Spain and LATAM. Then they increased the links per month to 6 and traffic started to increase. However, after they built links from English sites, they saw a drop in traffic. 

Case study 2

The site is a lottery site in Argentina site for the lottery. Initially they built 10 links then 4 to 6 a month. The site went live Feb 25th. There was initially growth of the domain. They built 4 – 5 links per month for LATAM and Spain. Then added the EN links and this saw a drop of the traffic. Then there was the Helpful content update and the traffic dropped.

It shows that having English links was irrelevant for this site in Argentina and it negatively affected the site.

Take aways

• Use folders instead of subdomains  – keep all under one roof.
• Link power compounds at the domain level
• Subdomains are usually treated as different entities

ccTLDs and gTLDs can undergo language change

• In the past only gTLDs were affected by international targeting.
• NOW current ccTLDs can also change their country targeting and it is controlled by the algorithm

International link building rules

• You can leverage links from a country that is less competitive, for example Brazil instead of looking only at Portugal.
• Link from other countries can get you a lot of link juice
• Link from the language you have on the targeted page
• Use hreflangs
• Do not over use links from languages or locations you do not support.

Cross-cultural digital PR strategies

Laura D’amato from Verve Search gave an interesting presentation at International Search Summit. She shared some great examples and tips to generate more coverage.

Agenda:

• Get started
• Content 
• Outreach 

How do you define your KPIs?

• Define with the clients. What success means depends on many  – the resources, the market. Do your research. 
• Look into your competitors, can you do something different? Look at the industry in general.
• Start with realistic targets. If in a new country, then it may be hard to get as much traffic increase.
• Focus on top-tier publications
• Hire a native speaker as they know the language and the media landscape and they have a cultural approach that no one else has.

Laura says when hiring she looks for this: Autonomy, persistence, adaptability and curiosity.

Being the only native speaker for one market, can be hard. Do not forget to check in and give them support.

Content that travels

• Can you just translate a campaign that worked well in one country and got a lot of coverage? Laura does not recommend this. Laura shared a case study that did not work.
• It was not a fit for the journalists and the audience.
• Journalists may not be used to being approached by digital PRs

3 Learnings for your content to go global

1. A story that is culturally relevant for journalists and audience 
2. A solid methodology.
3. A campaign with several stories. If you have one story then maybe it doesn’t work.

The local approach

We need to get coverage for a beauty brand. We looked at journals and papers and the regional press is very strong. Regional pride is very strong.

Verve Search took a well known headline and analyzed in a different way which was “Where are the happiest cities in the world”

They therefore decided to look and analze the faces of celebs who were the happiest in the photos in those different cities to see if they are happy or sad according to Instagram.

You could also use this approach on events such as the World Cup and have the happiest and saddest footballers.

Why use global approach?

• For countries with smaller media landscape
• Can reach several countries with one campaigns
• To expand your backlinks profile

Creating a campaign with a global appeal can be tricky. 

• Decided to focus on an issue about property prices pricing out locals. Did a campaign. Was very powerful. Told the same stody in each location.
• The issue was gathering the data for tmore than 300 cities around the world.
• Laura said we had to build up authority  to then outreach to journalists. 
• Focused on clear and simple data points. Had one metric the  5 year comparison. 
• Went out with more than 40 different stories for 15 countries.

Steps to go GLOBAL

• Prospecting is the first one
• Media platforms
• Social media
• Author biographies
• Local global – important to use the experienced Digital PR, use interesting sublinks. 

Global approach

Start by targeting UK and US top tier publications, more geneatl that gives overview of the sotory.

One tip per country

• FR – provide a number
• In Spain – target editors who will redirective content to freelancers and follo ups v important
• Denmark – They say yes will do it be do not
• Sweden  – be approachable and cultivate
• Norway – very strick rules with sources.
• Germany – don’t expect coverenage to go live straight away.
• USA – provide state by stage data
• Argetina – target editors, Argentina  can be interested in EU data.

Why most international digital PR campaigns are also missed opportunities

David White is always so energetic when giving his presentations. He always shares so many tips as well. David is Head of Content Marketing at connective3 and at International Search Summit he shared an exceptional presentation about the fact that links should not be a tick box exercise, it should deliver real business growth.

David said there was a lack of collaboration which would reduce your digital PR impact.  Links should be more than just a number on a spreadsheet. The links need to drive real business growth so you need to collaborate withthe other teams around you.

Questions you should be asking your SEO team?

• What keyword categories/topic are we looking to drive visibility growth?
• What is happening in the competitor landscape
• How many campaigns/links are competitors acquiring?

Questions asking paid team

• What are the top converting domains from display?
• What audience data do you have?
• What current ads are yo running?
• Who are the most engaged audiences and channels? 

Questions asking your social media team

• What questions are most commonly asked on social media?
• What audience data can you share?
• What are the highest engagement times?
• Which influencers are we working with?

Then David did a walk through about Blacktower financial management.

Make sure you have always an “always on approach” 

• Reactive
• Planned
• Proactive

Campaign work is only 60 to 70% of the link opportunity in front of you. David suggested to use all of your resources and your team to generate more links and exposure.

• First of all, David spoke to the customer service team, what issues customers were having. He also used Alsoasked.com. He wanted to create content that customers could use. David suggests to speak to your SEO/Paid teams 
• David created relevant content with an audience pool. He shared that example that Spain is the bst EU country for retirees and Iowa is the best US state for retirees.
• Use audiense.com and sparktoro.com as it shows all the sites people visit your site but where they go as well.
• Look at ahrefs, where are the competitors getting links and you are not.
• Got coverage on tv and radio – this is great, loads of journalists pick this up.

There were impressive results. His team generated 180 links, 86,7k special shares, 8.77 million in terms of est online coverage.

AND he saw a 194% increase in conversion rate and a decrease in CPA.

This was an excellent presentation David.

The post International Search Summit Barcelona – November 2022 first appeared on SEO Jo Blogs.

The post International Search Summit Barcelona – November 2022 appeared first on SEO Jo Blogs.