4 Companies Winning in the Foreign Language Internet

Christian Arno, October 12, 2011

For the past year, I’ve been banging on about how the future of ecommerce is multilingual and international, for three simple reasons:

1. Foreign languages are growing rapidly online (Internet World Stats ).
2. People need information in their native language to make a purchase (Common Sense Advisory’s “Can’t Read, Won’t Buy” report).
3. There’s less keyword competition in languages other than English, due to there being less content overall.

Take a look at Google’s Global Market Finder tool, a nifty little application that shows you how much you’d have to bid for paid search for the translated equivalents of your top keywords in foreign countries. Try it out and I’ll bet that your PPC costs would be dollars less per click in non-English speaking countries.
Global Market Finder isn’t infallible, as it uses direct translations of keywords, which may not be the best performers, but it is still useful for giving you an idea of the SEO potential of foreign markets.

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