A lot of multinational SEO campaigns fall down when the strategy is just to target a set of keywords, set up hreflang, and create content.
Understanding local customs, language, and consumer behavior is crucial for market penetration and creating brand resonance.
Creating a multinational SEO strategy doesn’t mean just doing international SEO.
Multinational SEO means taking into consideration cultural norms, understanding your target market from a user and competition standpoint, understanding purchasing power, buying cycles, and market-specific legalities.
With SEO facing new challenges like AI and increased multi-modal user behaviors, our international strategies need also to start to take into account wider data points and information in the overall business marketing mix.
5Cs Framework For Multinational SEO
There are a number of different models and frameworks you can use when developing your multinational national SEO strategy, but a relatively stable framework that requires wider business participation is the 5C analysis.
This framework helps product marketers identify their product’s unique selling points and understand what they can learn about their business, products/services, and potential market fit.
Company
When working with wider business stakeholders, you need to examine the offering portfolio, evaluate it against competitors, find differentiations, and determine how it best meets customer needs and reduces their friction points.
During this process, you will also identify areas where competitor products have an advantage over yours.
This also includes assessing any innovation or improvements necessary to stay competitive. You also need to consider the brand identity and reputation – how the company is perceived in the target market.
Sometimes perception is formed by variables outside of your direct control, and can even stem to political attitudes towards the company’s country of origin, or negative actions of competitors in the marketplace.
Customers
Analyzing customer buying behavior and their decision-making processes is crucial for understanding how consumers approach purchasing products or services.
This involves looking at how customers research, evaluate, and ultimately choose from various options.
Having a deep understanding of these behaviors enables businesses to refine their marketing strategies to better align with customer needs.
Sometimes, customer preferences come from historic marketing and advertising campaigns that shape markets. Good examples of this are the Ploughman’s Lunch in the UK and KFC as a Christmas tradition in Japan.
Competitors
Identifying key competitors is essential for gaining a clear understanding of the market landscape.
This process involves recognizing the major players targeting the same customer base and assessing their market share, growth potential, and competitive advantages.
Competitors can be classified into four main types:
- Direct.
- Indirect.
- Potential.
- Replacement.
The different types can influence a company’s market position and overall strategy.
A good example of these competitor types in action could be oat milk.
As an oat milk brand entering the U.S. market, you would have direct competitors such as Oatly, Planet Oat, and Minor Figures.
Your indirect competitors would be classic dairy milk brands like Dannon and Kirkland.
Your potential competitors would then be brands that offer similar products and are entering the oat milk market as a portfolio extension, such as Milkadamia and Chobani, and brands that offer other non-animal-based products to the same audiences.
Finally, your replacement competitors would be other non-dairy milk brands such as Malibu Mylk and Flax USA.
The realization you will come to from this phase of the 5C framework is the understanding that only a percentage of your possible Total Addressable Market (TAM) is directly looking for your exact product, but there are other products that also meet the same needs, albeit to different lengths and in different ways.
Collaborators
Several factors come in when making a full evaluation of how something is positioned within the market.
Channels of sales, online and physical presence, distribution method, relationship with its suppliers, price, and marketing strategy are variables relating to an item’s performance within the market.
The way a product is distributed speaks to how it reaches its end consumer.
Are there exclusive agreements with specific distributors, or is the product available through a variety of third-party channels?
Understanding the distribution network helps assess how well the product is actually supplied to multiple markets and regions.
A more diversified model of distribution may result in deeper market penetration, while exclusive partnerships could provide higher margins.
Another key component to understand is if there are any existing importers or resellers of your products and services in the target market.
Climate
Climate can be covered by using the PEST framework.
A PEST analysis helps businesses assess political, economic, social, and technological factors that influence their environment.
This approach gives companies a clearer view of external challenges and opportunities.
Political Examples
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Economic Examples
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Social Examples
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Technological Examples
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Analyzing market trends further helps identify emerging opportunities or threats.
For instance, businesses can leverage the rise of ecommerce or address sustainability demands by adapting their offerings.
Understanding how economic conditions impact purchasing power enables companies to predict demand better and make strategy adjustments.
Purchasing power refers to the ability of individuals or groups to buy goods and services influenced by income, prices, and inflation. Understanding it is crucial for entering new markets.
Higher purchasing power indicates greater spending ability, making a market more attractive. Low purchasing power markets can pose risks if consumers cannot afford the product.
Defining “Organic Success”
Every market has its special characteristics, and the application of global success metrics on the mistaken premise that markets are all alike will often result in distortion.
Success metrics need to be able to adapt to the peculiar features of each market.
Trying to compare one market to another, and holding the same SEO KPIs and success metrics can be like comparing apples to pears.
Success Definition And Understanding User Path To Purchase
The understanding of the user’s path to making a purchase or completing a lead is crucial.
Buying cycles may be different in different regions; hence, the user’s behavior may not follow the same path across all territories.
These differences need to be recognized when defining success. What works in one market may not work in another. The buying cycle may be longer or more convoluted in some markets than others.
A user in one region may go through a quick decison-making process, while another takes longer and involves more touchpoints. This has to be factored into how you measure campaign success.
Multi-Modal Search Differences
In some markets, users may also use different search engines or platforms.
They’ll use multi-modal platforms – in other words, a combination of social media, search engines, and video platforms – to discover new information.
It is also important to understand which platforms over-index your target audience and which under-index them in certain regions.
For example, a business selling multiple fashion and apparel products will find that the audience for “Christmas Jumper” over-indexes on TikTok and Facebook, but the audience for “Christmas Dress” over-indexes on TikTok and Instagram (ahead of Facebook).
Given the surge in AI-related products across a number of platforms, such as Meta AI, understanding how your target segments research and discover products alters your definitions of organic success.
More resources:
- Effective SEO Management Structures For Multilingual And Multinational Websites
- International SEO For 2024: 9-Point Checklist For Success
- Enterprise SEO Guide: Strategies, Tools & More
Featured Image: jannoon028/Shutterstock
