We've had a number of interesting conversations with both clients and potential clients recently about how to maximise sales through international SEO.   So here's an attempt to massively simplify what is a complex area that can make or break a business! Assuming that you already have an English language .com site, there are a number of things that you need to consider before making the international plunge, outside of the extremely obvious such as the appeal of your products to an international audience.   If you're a retail business, then you'll need to consider: Whether the size of your business and the potential opportunity justifies a local language site Changes probably required to your customer database to take into account international addresses Local hosting of foreign language sites Whether you have or need an in-market sales/marketing team and whether you work to a centralised search strategy Multi-lingual customer service queries Consistency of...

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Last week, Google started serving up a new (massive) version of organic site links. Site links are the extra links that you can see beneath search listings in Google SERPs and they're there to provide shortcuts that help people quickly find the information that they're looking for. Site links in one form or another are now commonplace in both paid and natural search results. So far, these 'jumbo' site links are only appearing against branded searches, where Google is pretty certain that the searcher is looking for that site. Whether you're a brand owner, interested in protecting high converting brand traffic, or a reseller that relies on traffic from your product brand terms, it's important to take notice of this change, which has the potential to significantly impact your traffic from natural and paid search. Are they relevant or are they the ones that you want? The first thing to check is whether you're lucky enough to have the new site links enabled. If you are...

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We've had three weeks or so now to get used to Google's latest foray into the world of travel - Google Hotel Finder and it feels like a good time to reflect on what it could mean for the hotel industry. What is it? Google Places started out as Google Local in September 2004, which was then combined with Google Maps when that went live five months later. Listings started out as three local business listings and a map for queries that included a location, expanding to ten (the “10 pack”) in January 2008 (finally becoming the “7 pack” in October 2009). The renamed “Places” went live in June 2009, with individual Place Pages for Google Maps rolling out in the following September. This update also expanded the Places listings to include not only businesses but transport networks, landmarks and importantly, hotels. The expanded interface for registered users meant opportunities for optimising their listing with categories (i.e. keywords) and service...

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