This is my PubCon 2024 presentation on Minimizing the Challenges of Going Global.

Video with Voice Over  45 minutes with some additional commentary that was not in session due to session starting late.

Overview of the session:

I started with a mini rant that too many describe what is market or language-specific SEO as International or Global SEO. In my opinion, International or Multinational SEO relates more to the effective organization and alignment of the following:

Your go to market strategy,

Your web infrastructure,

Your integrated workflows,

Your cross-market collaboration.

Coincidentally, it has the same focus areas as our International Webmastery Podcast.

I detailed the challenges areas across 4 areas of performance impact:

Understanding Market Opportunity 

I told the audience your eyes and brain are the most important and what are your business goals.  In school, I worked on a model weighing 10k micro variables for the optimal mode of entry. I listed a number of research services for US businesses – Michael Bonfils went through an amazing AI process.  I also showcased the GSC Search Appearance Translated Results report in GSC that shows where your pages were localized as a snippet and the clicks.  Pretty interesting indicator of opportunity and a lack of local content.

Content & Localization 

I explained the issues with mass content production using AI translation and carpet-bombing markets.  As we have mentioned, sites that were localized into 5 to 10 languages and launched those sites for 100 markets resulted in 50 million more pages than engines need.  Bing specifically is cracking down on this as less optimal content. We discussed different searcher interests and ensuring that your content fits culturally, linguistically and legally.  

CMS and Site Infrastructure 

From simple issues of a lack of URL uniformity to different platforms to regional deployments without context to other markets.  We have discussed this in about half of our episodes, where the web infrastructure needs to align and be scalable. 

Organizational Issues 

Explanation of some of the political and geographical management challenges of a multinational and multilingual deployment and how to navigate this by generating collaboration and how to work as a team from consistent templates to hreflang 

• Collaboration over uniformity and best practice sharing