Generate European Leads on the Cheap: Foreign Language Search Engine Marketing
By Laszlo Horvath
March 15, 2005

European search engine marketing offers a huge potential for US businesses. If you are planning to sell in the European marketplace, search engines provide the most targeted sales channel for you.

There are countless success stories regarding the quarter of a million businesses that regularly optimize their websites and advertise on Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines. It is also well known that the European Union (EU) represents 25 countries with about 450 million customers, comprising the largest well developed market in today's World Economy. However, only a few U.S based businesses realize the potential of the most targeted, yet less competitively priced marketing opportunity to conquer the market: the European search engines.

Many US based businesses rely on trade shows and other traditional marketing channels to sell to the European marketplace. Yet, only a few take advantage of the growing European search engine marketplace. One reason perhaps is the fact that the EU is not one unified market with one language (there are 20 official languages spoken in the block). Therefore, if a company desires to target all EU countries, there is a need to employ 20 different search engine strategies. Sounds too difficult to do? It is simpler than you might think. And the rewards are well worth the effort.

How can you dominate the world's largest search market?

Today the number of active search engine users in the recently expanded EU exceeds the number of US searchers. User habits differ a bit in Europe. Due to the relatively high user charges in the residential market, most Europeans use the net at work. They use it often -- according to research, EU users more frequently visit the search engines for business or personal reasons. At this stage of their development, EU based search engines are relatively easy to optimize in all EU languages. Therefore, a small to mid size company with the right web optimization strategy can dominate its relevant search keyword categories.

What should a company do to "play" in the EU search marketplace?

If a company wants to dominate European search results when users are trying to find products and services offered by a company, it is important to decide about basic business language capabilities in house or on an outsourced basis. If one picks English, German and French, half of the EU population is already covered. This is a solid foundation for a gradual European expansion strategy.

The next step is to determine the target countries. The most important first step is to create a targeted national strategy for each country that they wish to penetrate. Although the EU market as a whole is culturally and geographically fragmented, national search marketing strategies can be created fairly easily by looking at the local search engine markets. Data is available from research institutes and European search engine optimization firms as well. The good news is that the European marketplace is a lot less competitive than what we are used to in the U.S. One can achieve a dominant position on the major European search engines by a lot less effort than in the domestic marketplace.

Which search engines are relevant in the target country?

Google and MSN have about 30% reach each in almost every country in Europe. The rest of the pie is divided between other US - based engines and local players. Every country has a local champion. The UK market's large engine is Freeserve with close to 20% market share. France has Wannadoo with almost 40% of all searches in the country, and Germany's large search engine is T online with 35%. Smaller engines have lesser audiences, but sometimes higher conversions. They may require submission fees that one needs to budget for.

Although planning and marketing on the local engines have to be localized, the task is a lot less difficult than localizing American marketing messages in other parts of the World. Most of the time intelligent translation and a review by native advertising executives would do the trick.

What needs to be done to be effective?

After the content has been translated, and the infrastructure is in place to service inquiries in local languages, it is time to launch a website hosted under a local domain name. This is a significant branding decision -- are you planning to keep your company name, or create a new brand with a local flavor attached? Price for hosting is usually less than $100 per year for an average site, which makes the whole effort affordable for duplicate websites in multiple languages.

Submission to local search engines and results optimization is relatively easy for experienced search engine optimization professionals, mostly based in the U.S. A multi-lingual European search engine marketing program can be executed in a few weeks. If an executive wishes to keep the program completely virtual, one can architect a campaign that is fully based on email dialogue with the self-qualified leads arriving from the search engines.

Our recommendation is to follow the multi-channel approach as much as possible. This is similar to an effective U.S. marketing strategy -- having a toll free number with a live agent online who speaks the language might be essential for success in some industries, while not necessary at all in others. Instant messaging with the ability to send URLs to relevant sites is also a useful tool Internationally.

Case summary

One of our local clients in the travel category has launched a campaign in the second quarter of 2004 to target the UK, France, Germany and The Netherlands. They already had offices in all these markets, with call centers up and running to serve the increased demand. As a result of an aggressive search engine optimization campaign, they have seen a seven fold increase in their sales for a targeted holiday category in about six months. The investment and expenses associated with the program were all project based, and there was no travel to the target markets required. This makes search engine marketing by far the most efficient marketing channel Internationally. The power of direct marketing applied to users in the moment of need delivers very high conversion to sale ratios, hence the seven fold increase in sales in such a short period.

For more information on this topic and web marketing and international search engine optimization strategies in general contact us.
To see how to reach us for a free, no obligation, site appraisal, click here.