Search Around the World : Europe and the UK : Andrew Girdwood of the UK, Thomas Bindl from Germany, Sebastian Langlois of France, and Joost de Valk from the Netherlands.
SEO in the UK
Andrew Girdwood of Big Mouth Media says Big Mouth Media is the biggest search marketing firm in Europe, especially the UK.
- Andrew reckons most Americans are familiar with UK
- British love their mobile phones and text messaging
- Broadband penetration is very high
- Times, Independent, Guardian all top media
Geographic and Demographic Targeting
- UK users are very comfortable and confident online
- Four countries in UK : England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland
- UK population is aging : Less kids being born
- Silver Surfers : older web users are active online
- UK is still very geographically split
- 25% less people clicked on paid search in 2008 than 2007 : Google too relevant?
- Percentage of overall ad spend in the UK on Internet : 15%, in US 6.4%
- UK marketers spend a lot of money online
- UK search marketers read the same blogs as US marketers 🙂
- Search agencies are popping up outside of London in Brighton and other areas
Watch the FSA in UK : They are keeping an eye on online companies paying for links and reviews
Contract lengths are shorter in the UK than the US
Internet Issues which concern the UK market :
- Child safety : US type amber alert online
- Privacy and Data Security
- Social Networking and Privacy
Legal Differences Between US and UK
- John Doe Order : Lawsuits can be made against anonynous bloggers and linkers
- Spartacus Order : Whoever is making the blog post, if ordered to, must identify themselves
Thomas Bindl – Germany SEO
- German Search Market Share : 92% Google
- Similar Pay Per Click amount per term in US (behind most of Europe)
- Local Search is in its infancy.. just growing
- 94.1% of advertisers use Google (others must not know who search is)
- 40% of advertisers do PPC in-house
- Analytic tracking is used by 80% of advertisers
- Lots of special characters in German are very different than the US and translation differences are common
- Germany growing 202%
Sebastian Langlois : French SEO
- More than 30 million French connected to the net
- Most are in broadband
- Google has a 87% search share … Quaero is not on the chart
- Subjects of Interest : Leisure … Women looking for holidays (vacation) men for technology
- Teens looking for technology, Seniors looking for Leisure
- Comparison shopping popular
- Only 15% of Internet users do not use engines
- Mobile search is not popular in France
- In French, a lot of words use accentuation : for some words the use of accents changes the meaning of the word
- Search engines (Google) are having a difficult time defining user intent and differentiating these words (pusche can mean diapers or making love… which can lead to very different search results)
Joost de Valk : SEO in the Netherlands
Joost (pronounced “Yoost” .. I called him “Juice” today) de Valk is next and discusses SEO in the Netherlands.
- Netherlands are the fourth country in ad spend in Europe
- A lot of multinational Dutch companies : Shell, Heineken, KLM, Philips, ING, tomtom
- Internet penetration rate : 87.8%
- Online spend is 4 Billion Euros
- 52% of online ad spend is on search
- 93% Google, Yahoo and MSN are moreso non-existant, some crappy dutch search engines
- Dutch language is more or less a hybrid of English and German
- Startpagina is a very popular Dutch start page full of paid links .. Startpagina is the Internet for the Netherlands
- Marktplaats is the craigslist of the Netherlands (owned by eBay)
- Link buying and link farms, no frames spam is common in the Dutch market, and it’s still working!
Category
SEO
