SEO News

Posted by Lindsay

Today I’m pleased to bring you Aleyda Solis, Madrid-based International SEO at SEER Interactive, a Moz Associate, and State of Search blogger. We’re excited that she’s bringing her international perspective to MozCon, where she’ll lay out how to make the bold but lucrative move into the international market. You definitely don’t want to miss her talk, “International SEO and the Future of Your ROI,� if you’re interested in growing your online business.

Tell us about the presentation you have planned for MozCon.

It’s going to be an exciting adventure, guiding the audience to discover their international SEO potential and what could be the future of their ROI. 

It will be beyond the “ccTLDs vs. subdirectories for country targeting” type of session (although best practices with examples and tactics will be also shared). It’s meant to answer frequent questions I get from strategic, operations, and business perspectives, like: “How do I connect with international audiences and develop an attractive offer and assets when I don’t even speak the language or know anything about the country?â€� Or, “How can I develop original, localized content for all of these non-English websites if I don’t have enough resources?â€�

If this is an issue for your business, then it’s highly likely that your international SEO strategy wasn’t planned and established well enough from the beginning, allowing your investment to become cost-effective and scalable in foreign organic search markets.  

I started to cover international SEO from this perspective in a SEER post I wrote about establishing an international SEO strategy. 

Why would it be unwise for someone to miss your presentation?

Because I will be giving away delicious Iberian ham that I will be bringing from Spain to selected audience members in my session! :D (I’m kidding!)

I really wish I could do that, but unfortunately it is forbidden by US Customs. (Nonetheless, you might want to ask for a change in customs law to make it friendlier to Spanish gastronomy so I can do that in the future.)

Seriously, though, it would be really unwise to skip my session because I will be sharing what could be the next step to grow your online business. You definitely don’t want to miss that.

What types of businesses should be thinking about international SEO, and why?

All businesses that might have an audience in other countries or that speaks other languages should be thinking about it. 

Sometimes people think that only huge businesses that already have a multinational physical presence should be thinking about an international web presence and search marketing activity. But this is far from true and is just myopic. For more, take a look at this Moz post I wrote about discovering your international online potential.  

Regarding international SEO, what is the most unexpected thing you’ve learned along the way?

Maybe not unexpected, but unfortunately usually overlooked: The characteristics of audience behavior in each country.

Beyond language differences, there are many cultural, economic and sociological factors that can affect the success of many aspects of your SEO process, like the level of response from a link-building campaign, for example. At the end, beyond search engines that serve as a bridge, SEO is about the people.

You can have a better understanding of what I’m talking about in this post I published at State of Search about different aspects that drive an international SEO industry and audience research.    

What do you do at SEER Interactive?

My activities at SEER are quite diverse: On one hand, I’m helping to grow the international SEO business, giving SEER more visibility by speaking at diverse events in Europe, identifying and validating leads, giving pre-sales support, and establishing and coordinating the best organization and processes for international SEO. On the other, I’m also developing and helping to implement international SEO processes for current clients.

Tell us about the places you’ve lived.

I’m from Nicaragua, a small, tropical country with a lot of volcanoes, lakes, and beaches on both the Pacific and Caribbean coasts in Central America. Nicaragua’s natural landscape is breathtaking; here’s a photo of Momotombo Volcano (one of the 12 volcanoes on the Pacific coast of the country):  

Photo from Flickr (under Creative Commons): http://www.flickr.com/photos/garrettziegler/7355295166/

I grew up, studied, and worked there until I left to study in Salamanca, Spain in 2006. It’s a beautiful student town full of history, with students from all over the world (a lot of people go there to learn Spanish). It’s also home to the University of Salamanca, the oldest university in Spain (where I went to study), which was founded in 1218. Its front building looks like this:

Photo from Flickr (under Creative Commons): http://www.flickr.com/photos/paullew/3855579280/

I ended up staying in Salamanca after finishing my studies, and got my first SEO job at an online marketing company. I lived in Salamanca for a bit more than 4 years — until I came to Madrid, the city where I live now. 

I came to Madrid after accepting an SEO manager position at a company here at the end of 2010. Madrid is an amazing place, since it has the great alternatives that big cities offer, and at the same time allows you to have a good quality of life. Here’s a view of Gran Via, one of the main streets in Madrid:

Photo from Flickr (under Creative Commons): http://www.flickr.com/photos/nico_/6887000482/

What is it about Madrid that keeps you there?

Madrid (followed by Barcelona) is where most of the bigger types of business activity happen in Spain, from trade shows and professional networking events to a wide range of cultural activities. There’s also good weather (there’s always sun, although it might be a bit cold during winter) and great culinary offerings (delicious tapas everywhere!), so I’m happy here at the moment. Although, of course, I’m quite open to experiencing new places to live in the future. I love to travel and experience new cultures.

Are you doing what you thought you’d be doing when you were growing up?

I had the somewhat common “dreamsâ€� among children of being an astronaut (I really just wanted to go to space, it wasn’t necessarily because I knew what an astronaut actually did). So that’s really a pending point in my life: going to space! I definitely need to start saving more for that.

What is the last thing that you have seen/heard/experienced that has inspired you?

I’ve recently had two experiences that have been inspiring in different ways.

A couple of weeks ago, I had the chance to go to Israel to speak at KahenaCon and had the great opportunity to spend a Saturday walking around Jerusalem Old City. It was a truly inspiring experience, seeing places with such a rich historical and also religious background, like the Western Wall, the Holy Sepulchre and Dome of the Rock. Even if I’m not religious myself, it was a somewhat magical experience.

Photo from Instagram: http://instagram.com/p/Zucpg1N8yT/ 

Another (and totally different) inspiring moment happened a week ago when I had the chance to try Google Glass. I felt like I was already living in the future, interacting with that small, translucent movie theater-like interface in my glasses with just my voice. Truly amazing.

Photo from Instagram: http://instagram.com/p/Z8tuxJt8yd/

What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?

To ask myself “What’s the worst that could happen?� when I’m making an important or scary decision. This question allows me to get my risk-averse considerations under control, and gives me a great opportunity to start assessing a new situation with more balanced criteria. By asking this, I’ve been able to go out of my comfort zone more frequently and live new experiences.

Thank you, Aleyda! It was great to learn a bit about your background and how international SEO matters for all types of businesses, not just the big multinationals.

If, like us, you just can’t get enough of Alyeda, you can find her as @aleyda on Twitter (where she juggles Spanish and English).

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Using the wrong configurations on non-responsive mobile sites

Yes, responsive design is quickly becoming the norm when serving up an optimised experience for mobile users, but that doesn’t mean it’s usage is yet universal.

The two other methods you’ll come across are:

• Separate mobile URLs
• Dynamic serving

Both of these ways of delivering mobile specific content require unique configurations that, despite how intelligent Google is becoming in knowing how to crawl and index your site correctly, are essential when optimising your site for mobile.

While I won’t be going too far into the specifics, I will be giving you an overview of what you should be doing, and link to resources that can explain in more depth.

Separate mobile URLs 

This was the more common method of delivering a mobile optimised website before responsive design came along. You have a mobile site on a different sub-domain, such as m.bbc.co.uk, keeping all of your mobile content on different URLs.  

The two most important points if you’re using this method are:

1. Use the rel=”alternate” tag pointing to the mobile URL on the desktop version of the page, helping Google find your mobile content. 
2. Use the rel=”canonical” tag pointing to the desktop URL on the mobile version of the page, helping Google understand which version of the content is duplicated.

You will encounter other problems such as people linking to the mobile URL and not the regular version, which while not a huge issue in itself, is still annoying nonetheless.

Dynamic serving

Dynamic serving of content delivers a user experience not dissimilar to having separate mobile URL’s as above, only you are able to keep the URL’s the same. This is achieved by serving up different HTML to desktop devices than to mobile devices. 

While this method is preferred over separate mobile URLs, it is more complicated to setup and configure. Because the mobile content is not immediately apparent, Google recommend that you hint to the different content by using the Vary HTTP header, so that Googlebot-Mobile knows to crawl the site as well.

If you need to use this method, I recommend that you check out Google’s own developer guidelines on the subject.   

Thinking Googlebot-Mobile will treat your site like Googlebot

With responsive design, you have to worry much less about Googlebot-Mobile specific crawling issues, but that doesn’t mean you can forget about them altogether. As part of your routine technical health checks on your site, remember to look at the regular and mobile user agents separately, otherwise you might miss issues that didn’t originally surface. 

You have two primary tools at your disposal:

• Google and Bing Webmaster Tools. I will focus on Google Webmaster Tools, as this will be the most commonly used, but remember that Bing’s own version has some fantastic features itself.     
• A search engine spider and crawling tool such as Screaming Frog SEO Spider. Your other main option is Xenu’s Link Sleuth, but as far as I’m aware, you can’t specify different user agents using it. Do correct me in the comments if I’m wrong.

Google Webmaster Tools

When using Google Webmaster Tools to look for crawl errors, remember to select the mobile tab to look for mobile specific problems. You’ll most likely see a different set of results for web and for mobile.  

You can also use the fetch as Google tool crawl specific URL’s (typically you would test the most important pages) and verify the HTML and HTTP status codes, although this will primarily be for debugging.

Also, while we’re in Google Webmaster Tools, when looking at the incredibly useful search queries report, remember to filter the results by mobile so you can see what you’re appearing for in mobile search results.  

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is an excellent tool, and one that is an indispensable weapon in my arsenal. One of its many uses is to see and understand how Googlebot-Mobile, the user agent Google uses to crawl mobile sites, crawls the site you’re working.

From the Configuration menu, you can specify the user-agent Screaming Frog uses to crawl with.

Forgetting that mobile searchers are not identical to desktop searchers

One of the benefits of the previous ways of designing mobile optimised website, prior to responsive, was that developers/designers had to think about the desktop audience from the mobile audience separately. 

This is because those audiences are not the same, and often, they can have quite different needs. This is not an excuse to deliver mobile users a dumbed-down or reduced experience though – one of my pet hates is when websites give me a version of the page with only a fraction of the content when viewing it with my mobile. 

With responsive design you are delivering the same website to all users, meaning the same content and the same keyword optimisations. But, the sorts of searches people make on their mobiles tend to be different from the ones they make on their desktops, therefore you always need to be considering context on your website. 

In what context is your content most likely to be accessed?

Separate your keyword research

When you are conducting keyword research, look at values for searches from mobile devices separately from desktop devices to understand the differing search habits.

Armed with this knowledge, you can understand how to optimise the content on your site. 

Consider mobile in your on-page optimisation

Your potential audience on mobile devices might be searching for different things to desktop users, so be sure to consider this in your on-page optimisation.

For example, if you know a particular page is important to mobile searches, e.g. the contact details of a local branch of your restaurant, make sure that page has a title and meta description that is short enough to make sense to a mobile user (they have less space available in their SERP’s). 

Make sure to also consider your mobile specific keywords when writing your copy: don’t assume your desktop optimised copy is sufficient. 

Not segmenting your mobile traffic

The last mistake you shouldn’t be making regards analytics. While I’ve left this to the end of my post, don’t leave your own analytics efforts to the end.

If you’re seriously considering going mobile, start by understanding your audience and their browsing habits using your analytics platform, most likely Google Analytics. Then, continue to segment your data to understand how different users are using your site.

Thankfully, Google Analytics makes this easy for you as the advanced segments are already there and ready to be used.

Take this beyond simply looking at traffic numbers however, try and understand usage habits. Areas to look at include:

• Organic, to see the search queries people are finding you for on different devices.
• Engagement metrics on content reports, e.g. Landing Pages, to see whether users are treating content different depending on the device. What may be a good experience on desktop might not be on mobile.
• Conversions/goals/events, to see whether people are taking the actions you want them to. If your conversion rate is significantly lower on mobile, have you checked that your call-to-actions are appropriately easy to spot and use?

If you have an ecommerce website and are looking for a mobile dashboard, check out this mobile commerce dashboard that’s great for tracking some top-level data.

What other mistakes would you add to this list?

Are there any other common problems you see with SEO for mobile devices? Let us know in the comments below.