If your company is always looking to broaden its horizons, this post is for you.
Have you thought about breaking into the international market? If so, follow this series of posts where I’ll explain how to do it.
The internet now gives us the chance to build multinational companies, starting with market research that can initially be done from our own website. All you need is access to relevant data and to get down to work.
1.- International market research online
This is one of the key steps to find out whether we have a chance of starting a business on the other side of the world. Although here we’ll talk about opening an eCommerce site with another country in mind, it can also help you decide whether to enter that market physically.
First, to know whether we have a chance in other countries, we need to see if we have data pointing that way. One of the best indicators for this is Google Analytics.
It’s common to see visits from other countries, but once that traffic reaches a significant share, it’s time to analyze it. International visits are a very good sign that we should consider offering our products in other markets.
How do I know if I’m really relevant in other markets?
To find out whether you have a chance in other markets, you’ll need to run a study with a few tools.
Google Analytics
This tool lets us measure our international visibility from organic traffic. With this data we get a starting point and can prioritize. To do so, we first need to clean up the information.
- Remove SPAM visits.- I think every site ends up with this kind of visit that skews the data. It’s important to remove visits from sites like iloveitaly.com, shared-buttons, semalt and any bot or spider in our analytics data. The less traffic a website has, the bigger the impact of this data, which is why we must identify it and keep it out of the analysis.
- Identify which countries are sending us visits and traffic.- Once we’ve removed the traffic we don’t want to count, we need to see which countries our organic visits come from. In some cases, countries that share the same language will show up, and we’ll have to review the visit volume and behavior of each one.
- Check which pages and products in your eCommerce get the most visits.- We need to find out the CTR and conversion rates of these visits. This tells us which products interest people abroad and what they’ve found in our business. Filtering by country, we need to identify the most viewed pages.
Webmaster Tools
Google offers us another great ally for getting data straight from a reliable source. Webmaster Tools gives us another set of data that’s key to knowing where our visitors come from and where we can be relevant.
- Search queries.- Here we can see in more detail how users who visited our eCommerce behaved. We’ll also get the data by country, either overall or broken down for each one.
With this data you can rank the countries and languages your visits come from and how they behave. Knowing the CTR for each country will show us how users behaved when visiting our store.
With this information you can build a list of potential markets, which will help you prioritize the data to analyze in the next step.
If you have a large volume of organic traffic with a worthwhile number of conversions, you should look at the organic search potential.
If there are only a few visits, don’t rule it out completely. On the contrary, look for ways to make those searches convert better. A few changes might bring big improvements.
2.- Identifying organic search potential in other markets
We now have a list of countries and languages where we see an opportunity. Next, we need to check the real organic potential. We need to see whether there’s a market niche to enter and whether people are searching.
For this analysis we’ll use several tools to find out whether there really is organic search potential in the country and language we’re interested in.
The data we need to know whether there’s worthwhile potential for our business is:
- Relevant keywords
- Keyword search volume by country
- Keyword competition
- Current ranking for the keywords we care about
Among the tools we can use, there are several free ones you probably already know. Here are a few that might interest you.
Keyword planners
Google, Yandex and Bing offer keyword planners that give us accurate search volume data for each keyword we care about, focused on the country we have in mind.
But there’s one tool few people think of that will really help with keywords: Global Market Finder. If you want to know how it works, check out the post we put together a few months ago.
Related searches
Here are some useful tools that will give us keyword ideas related to our business and help us find a set of terms to start ranking in search engines in other countries.
A free tool with a feature that matters for SEO: it helps you find long-tail keywords for the country you’re targeting. Based on Google’s SERPs (Übersuggest has been called “Google on steroids”), it lets you add the words you like to a basket and then easily export them to a document for later analysis.
The main feature of this SEO tool is how easily it structures data as a list, a table or a tree, based on the domain and language you want to analyze.
This is another way to find hundreds of keywords, letting you choose the language and the search engine where you want more visibility. It uses Google’s search autocomplete to suggest relevant keywords.
With this information we can map out where our business stands, so we know what we have and where to focus our international strategy.
Now it’s time to put all this information into a spreadsheet, which will make analyzing the keywords much easier. Spreadsheets help us structure and filter the data easily, and let us compare each of the values.
For the next steps it will be vital to have all the information well organized. From this data, the remaining task is to check how hard it is to rank for these keywords and where they currently rank.
In the second part of this post I’ll talk about how to start ranking in international markets and begin entering other countries.
If you have relevant data in your analytics account and want help finding out whether your company has international potential, contact us!
Image rights: EAE
