How to Globally Expand Your AdWords Market Reach

By Lior Levin

Google Adwords is great because it shows you suggested keywords for your ads and optimization based on your own language, but what about other languages? How can you know which keywords to use for those who speak Chinese, French, Russian or any other language that’s foreign to you? Well, you can now search for keywords in 56 different languages via Google’s new Global Market Finder tool.

With this tool, you don’t have to be limited to keywords in your native language, you’ll be able to reach over 80 percent of Internet users worldwide because you’ll now know which keywords to use in other languages as well as yours.

What Does This Tool Do?

“Google Global Market Finder uses data from Internet searches conducted around the world to show the number of times people search for your keywords in [...] 56 different languages. When combined with AdWords, Global Market Finder also showcases estimates of suggested bid, competition for each Google Translate translation for that keyword used in your target market.” So, it’s really a great learning tool that will help you reach customers worldwide using various ad formats like search engines, video, mobile devices and TV.

Global Market Finder automatically translates keywords into your customers’ language and lets you see where they’re searching for your product. If you’re not fluent in any other language, these are metrics that you really would have no way of finding out without hired help.

How Does This Tool Work?

You only need one thing to get started: keywords that describe your business. After selecting your location and language, you’ll need to enter these keywords in order to get see your results. It takes less than a minute to see your Geographic Distribution chart. As you can see from the image below, you can view different locations and then expand those to see other languages and keywords in those locations.

There are 4 other columns besides location:

• Opportunity - Ranks each country’s export opportunity relative to other countries.
• Local Monthly Searches – An approximate 12-month average number of queries for the keywords you entered based on countries and language.
• Suggested Bid – The suggested bid amount for your ad based on the corresponding keywords.
• Competition – The number of advertisers bidding on each keyword in respect to all keywords on Google.

Why Are These Metrics Important?

These metrics can greatly benefit your company because you’ll be able to compare the cost of gaining new customers with your product margins. You can then see whether you can afford to reach customers in a new market and if this step will be beneficial for your business.

Things To Watch Out For

Google cannot guarantee the accuracy of these keywords or that they will improve the effectiveness of your campaigns. Global Market Finder uses Google Translate to create the keywords, so they may not be always be 100 percent correct. You may need to use another source just to verify the keywords so that you can be sure they are a good fit for your ads. Using the wrong or inappropriate keyword could actually cause more harm than good. You don’t want to insult or turn off any potential customers.

Another thing you may want to keep in mind is that there’s no direct way (as of yet) to export keywords from Global Market Finder to your AdWords account. They recommend you use the Google Translator Toolkit in order to automatically translate your keywords and then share those translations with AdWords translators, who can edit and confirm their accuracy.

With Google’s Global Market Finder tool, you will not only boost your sales and customer-base, but also be a step above your competitors who are not using this valuable tool (or anything like it). As you can see, this tool is really great for companies who sell products and are looking to expand their global market. If you’re looking for that extra boost in profits and reach for your business, give Global Market Finder a try.

Author Information

Lior Levin is a consultant to a live chat support software company. Lior also works for an MA in Israel studies program in Tel Aviv University.

Can You Ever Stop Building Links to Your Website?

By Duncan Heath

Most SEOs realise that by and large the distribution of power on the web is dictated by links. In very crude terms, the more links you have and the more powerful the sites are that link to you, the more credibility you will have in the search engines’ eyes, and the better your chances of ranking are – that’s pretty basic SEO.

What is not so simple however is how the age of a link affects the power it yields, and whether you need to keep building links to a site in order to maintain power and rankings? Well, here are a few points to consider:

Domain Age

As with most things in the world of SEO, there is divided opinion on whether the age of a domain has an influence on how much authority it is given by search engines. I think this is a really good post on the subject and without getting into this difficult argument too much, my experience tells me that domain age does matter. If you subscribe to the idea that domain age is an algorithm factor, then if you think about it, link age must be as well. If a domain increases in power over time, then by definition so do the links that are contained on that domain. So I think it is reasonable to suggest that old links pointing to your site increase in power rather than decrease.

Query Deserves Freshness (QDF)

We know that with the arrival of social sites such as Twitter and Facebook, which allow users to search for up to the minute information among their peers, search engines have been pushing to provide more ‘real-time’  and ‘fresh’ results in their SERPS. This spawned the term “Query Deserves Freshness” which basically means that in Google’s ranking algorithm, the ‘freshness’ of a result is taken into consideration (for certain search terms).

As fresh content tends to generate fresh links, there is a clear argument here that you cannot necessarily rely on old links to provide rankings, no matter how widespread or powerful they are.

Using simple logic, if people are not currently linking to content, it’s unlikely that it’s very popular at that time, and probably not what they want to see in search results.  I often see on my surf clothing site for example that the newest pages with the freshest links often outrank my older pages, despite them having a much larger back link profile.

Competition

Lastly, and probably most importantly, competition often forces us to continue our link building activities indefinitely. There is a great expression about link building that states all you need to do to beat your competition in the SERPS is to “match and exceed”. If you can investigate the back link profile of your competition, gain the links they have for your site as well, and then exceed what they have, chances are you will outrank them.  This logic is what drives link build efforts forward and means that you must continue to garner links to your site to prevent being overtaken by the competition.
So in conclusion, old links may get more powerful over time, but if you don’t continue your link building campaigns, you’re likely to get left behind.

Author Information

Duncan Heath is an SEO engineer and Internet marketing expert with over 5 years experience. He runs his own extreme sports site that compares everything from surfboards to flip flops. You can follow his business on Twitter.