[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera and this is the Unscripted SEO Podcast. I'm here with Christina Spalding. We're going to be talking international SEO this time. I'm super excited about it. And we were talking before the drop a little bit about some of your international experience.
Why don't you give us a recap on where you've been in the world and what led you into international SEO?
Tons of questions bubbling up in the back of my mind. I'm going to stop talking so you can talk. Tell us a little bit about your expertise and what's given you the authority that you have in this area.
[00:00:36] Speaker B: Well, Jeremy, first of all, thank you so much for having me on the show. Really appreciate it. As we were talking about pre start, my focus is international SEO especially, so I do German and French SEO myself. I have colleagues who cover the other languages. I started learning languages in grade school, I did languages in high school, majored in them in college, and then got an internship that took me over to Germany. So I lived there for six years. While in college, I also did study abroad programs in Quebec City where they speak Quebecois, and in Strasbourg, France, where they speak not Parisian French. They speak a local version of French, but they also speak Alsatian. So I didn't get to learn Alsatian. But it was really helpful when I moved to Germany because I moved to the Swiss German border.
They spoke Switzerland, so they.
They which is probably closer to Alsatian than it is to German. So I was there for six years. I was. I did jobs in marketing in Germany. It was super fun. I came back to the US for personal reasons, moved out to Las Vegas and started with a German startup.
They had good business in Europe and then expanded to the us. I was their first employee.
Now that company is called textbroker. It's a content creation company. So I had to learn about SEO really fast because that was our Target client was SEO, folks. This was in 2009. So the SEO world looked very, very different than it does now.
The thing that's the same between 2009 and now is that there was massive changes.
Right in 2009, you had Panda, you had Penguin.
So you had to shift your marketing and SEO strategies to get away from keyword stuffing and really move into quality content.
And now you've got AI.
And we've seen a few examples where keyword stuffing is back.
Like low quality blog posts that mention your topic. A lot are back.
But my perspective on it is that if you are delivering content that meets your Customers, needs and questions, then you will get found.
And I think AI does a really surprisingly good job of that.
And it's sometimes those tiny little details. Maybe you're the only person who actually mentions a price you win.
Maybe you're someone pointed out that size of something you win.
[00:03:23] Speaker A: Yeah, someone I was Talking to, Michael McDougall, pointed out that with rankings with Google, you're topically identified in a rag process of the 10 sites that are most relevant, that have the answer. But really LLMs are a selection model.
They're choosing one item out and featuring it, which is a different end goal, you know, and part of that it can be synthesized, it can be mashed, it can be molded based off of what the math in the model learned off of. To say that, hey, this is a relevant answer, but it's not looking for a specific snippet, a piece of text specifically in whole, it wants the answer and it will match that in or what thinks might be likely. It's all math, you know. So I think people forget that I am super curious what is the accuracy of LLMs in different languages?
Because I've only had the experience, you know, with the type of hallucinations that we have in English, you know, inventing authorship, that doesn't exist.
Coming up with facts that are, you know, adding plastic to a Mac and cheese recipe, you know, and just kind of left to its own devices.
It's a people pleaser. So it's going to try to please. Even though it didn't have access to the data that you actually told it to get, it just pretended that it did until you pointed out that it lied and then said, oops, sorry. So I'm curious what mushroom was actually poisonous?
Yes.
What is the LLM experience like in foreign languages? And then is there anything unique to that as far as, like how the language learning models seem to spit out answers?
[00:05:18] Speaker B: So one thing I'll say is that LLMs, okay, so half of the content on the web is in English.
Well, 50% of content on the web is in English.
The next largest languages have 5% of content on the web. So what does that mean? That means our database for LLMs is massive. 10 times more than any other language. So that doesn't mean there's no content available. There's still reams and reams of content available in different languages. But there's a reason that Google waited to roll out Gemini in different languages because they needed more time to do the work, to get it where it needed to be, because you just had less data Available.
[00:06:08] Speaker A: Right.
[00:06:10] Speaker B: So I'm going to be honest, I haven't done a lot of experimentation in interacting with LLMs in my target languages yet. But one thing that I think is important for English speaking marketers who are looking at going international is that we should talk about deeplee or Deep L, whichever way you want to pronounce it, which is a fantastic tool for translation work. Deep L is an LLM, but it is a deterministic LLM instead of a probabilistic one.
So if you put in I want to go to bed, please translate that for me. It will translate it the same way every time you ask it to do that. Whereas probabilistic LLMs, you know, like ChatGPT, like Gemini, are calculating in a slightly different way and they're always generating a different result for the same prompt. Same prompt, different result. So I think DeepL has added the rules of grammar, at least for certain languages, so that you get sentences that are more refined and more grammatically correct.
Interesting. There's still issues, there's issues with context, there's issues with, you know, you've got four items in a list that are sentences and one of those, they're all in your source language, they're all formatted the same. They start verb predicate, verb predicate, verb predicate. But in the translated copy, each format of the item in the list is slightly different. So you're like, oh, I gotta go fix that so that it looks better internal sense and follows kind of the logic that we're looking at. So whenever you're working with LLMs, my personal mantra is verify.
Usually you say trust, but verify. I don't even trust them. Verify.
Look at the stuff that you're putting out before you put it out. Because probabilistic LLMs are not fact finders.
Deterministic LLMs are also not fact finders.
But they will, it is less likely they will hallucinate and if they do, it's kind of in a patterned type way. So when you're, when you're using it, figure out is it probabilistic or is it deterministic and then you can proceed forward with the right amount of skepticism, suspicion. Right.
[00:08:41] Speaker A: So it's fascinating to me. Let's talk about that use case that you mentioned of English language marketers looking to go international.
Let's say, you know, you've got a stair handrails that you can ship locally or you can ship them internationally. What are some of the pitfalls and opportunities that you've seen? Let's go opposite let's say, what's the benefit? Why would a company consider it?
My brain jumped there, right there of like only 5% is in the LLM. That's a much smaller pool. I've got a much better chance of showing up in the, that answer pool, which is probably also likely true of search results. But I won't bias your, your, your seed too much, but give us, you know, what's the opportunity, the, the, the opportunity size, opportunity size for going SEO international on your product or service.
[00:09:43] Speaker B: So I'm going to talk about multilingual as well as international because here in the U.S. right, we have Spanish speakers everywhere.
[00:09:52] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:09:53] Speaker B: Between 20 and 30% of the U.S. speaks Spanish as their first language. And there is search volume for Spanish terms in the U.S. so you, if you are a U.S. based company, you can serve local customers in Spanish.
[00:10:07] Speaker A: Good point. Yeah.
[00:10:08] Speaker B: And you can get top level keywords that have a teeny tiny fraction of the cost and a teeny tiny fraction of the competitiveness. Now they're also a little bit lower on volume.
[00:10:19] Speaker A: Right.
[00:10:21] Speaker B: So if you are in one of those incredibly competitive keyword fields, if you are a lawyer, real estate agent, or you represent lawyers and real estate agents and plumbers and you know, these, these other services that are highly competitive from an SEO keyword perspective, you can either spend your SEO dollars chasing after the long tail keywords or you can split your SEO dollars and say, okay, we're going to continue to iterate on English language stuff. We're going to get even deeper in the weeds to give the, the Geminis and the ChatGpts of the world those really niche, super weird use cases.
But maybe we take a part of that money and we target a Spanish speaking customer. Especially if you have a service that doesn't require a lot of explanation.
[00:11:10] Speaker A: Yeah. I was thinking there could be business implications.
[00:11:15] Speaker B: Yeah. So in that case, you can create your Spanish content, focus on a US Spanish speaking customer, so you don't have to worry about currency or tariffs or shipping or any of that. You can target people in your area who are searching for your product or service who just happen to speak another language and you can target top level keywords. So instead of lawyer, you target avocado in Spanish.
[00:11:42] Speaker A: Right.
[00:11:43] Speaker B: And I've looked at this particular one. So I'm in Las Vegas here. We have like 25% Spanish speakers, if not more, but I think we're at 25%.
So this is like a thing. There are Spanish speaking lawyers on tv, there's a Spanish newspaper, all that good stuff.
You See what languages there are around you.
And then you can say, oh, is it going to make sense for me to market it in Spanish or Tagalog or if you're in Chicago, in Polish. Right. So take your local. Local demographics into account. Census is great for this. But also, as you drive around your neighborhood, you're going to see signs of what languages are popping in which neighborhoods. And when you get out in your community, you're going to know if you're observant and we market as our observance.
You'll be like, wait a second, I thought I saw a sign that I couldn't read. I got to figure out what that is.
[00:12:41] Speaker A: Right.
[00:12:42] Speaker B: Okay. Okay. We have an, you know, insert language here kind of compound.
[00:12:49] Speaker A: Yeah.
In our local conclave.
[00:12:54] Speaker B: And then you can research real, super basic.
I'm a lawyer. What is lawyer in target language? You may get two words back. You may get male lawyer and female lawyer. So you can search your keyword volume tools. Hey, male lawyer, female lawyer. Lawyers, plural.
What's my volume for those three?
And then you can get a sense of.
Okay, volume for lawyer.
Is this in. My target language is really close to some of these niche keywords that I'm searching, that I'm creating content for in English. But maybe the competition's way lower. Maybe the volume's a little bit higher.
And all of a sudden that becomes a really interesting potential target target keyword. And then you can start building out all that content.
[00:13:43] Speaker A: So.
[00:13:44] Speaker B: And then you can use Deepwel to translate, have a native person look it over afterwards. Right. Because. But so from the. How much is this going to cost me? Perspective.
[00:13:54] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:13:55] Speaker B: You know, depot is they have a free amount, and then it's incredibly cheap. It's like pennies per word. And then you can ask a proofreader cut to come in. You can pay them either by the hour or by the word.
Proofreading starts, like, around 1 to 2 cents per word.
So 2 cents per word for creation and proofreading for translation.
[00:14:18] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:14:20] Speaker B: That starts to make sense if you have enough people speaking the language that you can reach out to.
[00:14:26] Speaker A: Amazing. I have a question. George Carlin's one of my favorite comedians, and he says, you know, there's flammable, there's inflammable, and non inflammable. Why are there three?
And this is my question when it comes to hreflang and href Region settings for SEO.
So what you know about hreflang settings versus setting a page's locality and what you think that people either get right or get always get wrong out of the box when it comes to those directives. If anybody's not familiar with hreflang tags, they're supposed to help guide and trigger. If you have foreign language preferences in your browser, it will try to match that. So if you are English speaking, it will try to match that. If the document is in Italian, it will attempt to auto translate it if you're using Chrome. So what. What has been your experience with those, those complicated things? Because I have run into very, you know, I worked for, I think it was doc.doc.com, which was for international travel doctors and they had regional and language parameter.
So what's been your experience there and recommendations?
[00:15:40] Speaker B: People are very concerned about feature of flying tags. Oh, so scary. So complicated. I. I don't find them complicated. It's in a different language, it should be marked as such.
[00:15:51] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:15:51] Speaker B: So you have to give it the language tag so that like for me, it's my personal preference. If I'm working on a multilingual site, if I'm working with an E commerce site that is shipping to Europe, they're going to have seven languages. You need to be able to delineate what language is which because you want to give your user the right experience that they get all of the things all in the same language. Region tags are different. They are incredibly helpful even if you're working in the same language.
Now you see that in US vs Canada, that's what a region tag is for. So then you would have. So language tags and region tags are both two letters. Usually your language tag is lowercase comes first. Your region tag is uppercase usually comes second.
[00:16:44] Speaker A: Right?
[00:16:45] Speaker B: Yeah, I have to think about it for a second. So yeah, your, your country usually comes second. So you would have en for English and then US for the United States. But if you're also selling into Canada, then you have en dash.
[00:16:57] Speaker A: Right.
[00:16:57] Speaker B: And that will help you. If you set things up right in the back end, usually you're using a multilingual plugin. If you're on WordPress, you're probably using a multilingual plugin.
Shopify, probably. It has some kind of multilingual functionality in there. So you tell it what languages and what areas you're shipping to or selling to or marketing too.
So in the back end you set up your countries, your languages and that way when you have currency switchers.
So I want to sell tires to Canada, I need to sell it in Canadian dollars, not just US Dollars. Yeah, that's what your country code helps with.
So regardless of language. If you're selling to Canada, if you're selling to the uk, if you're selling to Australia, if you're selling to Europe but not choosing to translate, assume everybody speaks English over there anyway.
[00:17:54] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:55] Speaker B: Because they kind of do. All right, if, if you're getting international traffic just because your SEO is strong or you have a really unique product, then having a country switcher that supports multiple currencies is really helpful regardless of whether you translate your content. Now here's the thing. People are. People prefer by 85% to purchase in their first language. So if you are a retailer here in Las Vegas and you want to tap into that 30% of the market that speaks Spanish, you might want to have your flyers detail your deals in English and in Spanish because then people are more likely to buy. And that's not from, that's a study from Wegalot.
They did a study on, you know, because Weglot is a, a translation plugin for WordPress and they, they did this study because they have all of this data on regions and languages and purchasing.
So they're like, hey, by the way, 85% more likely to buy in their native language versus a secondary language.
[00:19:08] Speaker A: That's a pretty convincing number.
[00:19:10] Speaker B: It's one of those things like you don't think about it. We are in the US so steeped in English that if we're not paying attention we can get by without thinking about any other language. But when you look and you think about it for just a little bit, you're like opportunities, opportunities everywhere.
[00:19:34] Speaker A: I love that. That's. Tell me about the experience of Google and ranking in Google in different languages are fact. Additional factors like having country specific hosting, important minor signals, major signals because those are, those are different plays. Right. Like having a US based company and you're also targeting Spanish is a different play than I want to in the middle of Germany and I'm competing with other German companies in Google. Is server location a known factor? A small factor? Are there other things like geo geospecific links, getting links internationally or getting links in German language versus getting links to a German page from a English page. What's been your experience in that Gordian knot?
[00:20:32] Speaker B: There are some things that are very similar all across the world. It is almost always better to have links coming from your target language. It is even better if they are coming from pages that end in a country specific top level domain.
So if you are getting German language links from a.de or a at or a ch domain, that's better than Getting German language links from a dot com.
[00:21:02] Speaker A: Okay, okay, Right.
[00:21:04] Speaker B: Because dot coms often are English coded. Right. Either you're from the US or you are like an international conglomerate that's kind of doing that kind of strategy. It's rare that you have an international or a non. Not rare. But local businesses are more likely to claim a country specific top level domain.
So if you can get from those country specific top level domains, that is, it's like a bonus. The link is just more powerful. Not only because language matches, top level domain matches, user intent usually matches better and it's a better experience for the user. They're going from a German page to another German page. They're going from a Chinese page to another Chinese page. You are being promised something, you are taken there, you have a good experience there. It is rough when you're going from English page to a German page and you're like, what? I wasn't expecting that.
[00:22:07] Speaker A: Right. Yes, that's.
[00:22:09] Speaker B: Or like you have to tag the link and say, hey, this study is only in English or this study is only in German or this study is only in whatever. But it's a really cool study and you should look at it anyway. As to server location, server location can be critical in certain countries. I did a project for a company that we shifted from 10 languages down to three and those languages were German, Chinese and Japanese.
The product was online gambling.
So China has a very restrictive Internet policy and environment.
[00:22:46] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:22:48] Speaker B: They also have an anti gambling law. So if you really want to rank in China, you don't care about Google, you care about Baidu and you kind of to rank in China itself, you have to have a Chinese server and you have to have Chinese content and you have to be doing things for Baidu, not for Google.
[00:23:09] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:23:10] Speaker B: Or also for Google, but Baidu first. But as a gambling company or a company promoting gambling, no Chinese server is going to take us. So we had to build a strategy knowing that we were targeting VPN traffic or expats from China who had moved out of China and were living in Canada or the U.S. so the entire strategy had to be different and our expectations had to be different because, okay, your search estimates say X, but we can't tap in to actual Chinese traffic. So let's set our expectations a little bit lower and capture other traffic that's still really targeted at, you know, the mainland Chinese mindset, but the mainland Chinese mindset of somebody who is willing to go and gamble and to maybe skirt a rule or two to go and gamble. So it was all about understanding our customer, understanding the, the basics of the target market. You're approaching very, very, very basic. Is it legal? Can we promote that here?
And you'd be surprised that some services that we think are absolutely normal, some sales processes that we think are absolutely normal may or may not be normal. In the target country that you're targeting subscription services, you gotta be a little bit careful in how you offer opt outs. Some countries require you to have an opt out in a certain way because the way that a lot of companies here in the US do it like your opt out is hidden. You have to call, you have to jump through three hoops before they say, okay, we're going to release you from your obligation.
And not all countries, some countries have a little bit more consumer protections than we do and that kind of stuff doesn't fly. So it is always worth it. If you are looking at going into another country just to do a quick, real super basic.
Is my business model, is it going to work where I'm going?
[00:25:06] Speaker A: That's very smart.
It also makes me think about an interview I did of a very, very British woman living in Spain in a holiday. I think it was Mallorca. I think she said, what's your advice about considering expat communities?
[00:25:24] Speaker B: Expat communities are a so English speaking. Expat communities are interesting, but I'm not sure if the juice is worth the squeeze. It would have to be specific to the industry and the product that you're selling.
[00:25:42] Speaker A: What about foreign?
[00:25:43] Speaker B: Do I want to do a business of shipping Oreos to Spain for British expats, For American expats, maybe? I think that's more of a business specific to your business, what you actually do. I think the greater opportunity is to look at additional populations for your business or service that you haven't looked at before instead of looking at an English speaking diaspora. Would my product be a good fit for Suriname? Would my product be a good fit for Taiwan? Would my product be a good fit for Portugal? You may already have clients or you may see some traffic coming from specific countries, you can explore that. And if you have like one client who's abroad and you can ask them, hey, how'd you find me? What can we do to get more of you? And having conversations with your customers like that can really be helpful for both of you. It binds the customer to you more closely because you're asking their input and you're realizing that, hey, you're a little bit different. Let's talk about how cool you are and what makes you great. And how we can find other people like you.
[00:26:48] Speaker A: So it makes me think of possibly the tourism industry. Maybe it's a check for you to, if you are operating SEO for a tourism business, you know, maybe having service pages with information for a particular nationality that keeps showing up and taking tours. I know strangely, when I was working at a California apple farm tourist trap called Oak Glen, we had a lot of Japanese tourists and you know, they, it would have been very useful if they had a website page that it could send them to with information about what's going to happen on the farm and removing those barriers. But also, you know, potentially, you know, now with the ubiquity of, I think it's, it's either 70 or 80% of business done locally is searched locally first.
So if you are a tourist, I know what if I'm a tourist in another country? I'm googling the heck out of things to try to find information and guidance on things. So I can, I can put myself into somebody else's shoes. Coming to America and flipping around saying, hey, somebody's going to be, you know, google.de a lot to find local information.
And it could be quite helpful. If I am expecting tourists of a certain nationality, then that could be an opportunity as well.
[00:28:15] Speaker B: One of the things that I pitch sometimes is, you know what, why don't we do a landing page and an email chain, right? So they land on the land page, they fill out the form, they get the pre translated emails directly. So all of that work is done in advance and you don't have to worry about it happening. And you can give a disclaimer in those communications that hey, we're trying to provide this information for you, but our tourists, our guides, for example, only speak English. Please be ready like to prepare for your visit.
[00:28:49] Speaker A: Here's some terms of Remember that your,
[00:28:50] Speaker B: that your guide is English only. We'll do our best to find somebody for you. But like all of our signage is in English only. Our menus are in English only. But we'd really love to have you. Still, if you do have somebody who speaks the language, then that makes everything easier. Sometimes you don't know the assets that you have in your own company. I was talking to a bank, national bank, and they're like, yeah, we've been thinking about Spanish. And I was like, yes, yes, you should, you have locations here in Las Vegas. You should be thinking about Spanish. You have locations all through California. You should be thinking about Spanish. And they're like, well, we don't have anybody who speaks Spanish. And I was like, I don't believe that.
I don't believe that.
But I'm not going to say I don't believe that. It's. Why don't we do a language audit for your business and just a quick survey of your employees.
Do you speak a second language? Would you be comfortable speaking that in front of clients? And are you open to adding or receiving clients in that language?
[00:29:53] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:29:54] Speaker B: And then you can have people self identify.
If you have mortgage agents for a bank, if you have mortgage agents and loan agents that identify. Oh, yeah, I speak Spanish, I speak Tagalog, I speak Korean. Then you.
Okay, guess what? You're getting all the Spanish leads, you're getting all the Tagalog leads, you're getting all the Korean leads. And if you have a few people who do that, okay, you can rotate through, but you've got one person who already can access that community and provide them the support they need. Heck, let's do it. Excuse me one second. Okay. Sorry.
[00:30:31] Speaker A: Fancy.
[00:30:31] Speaker B: My phone pings 10 minutes before my next appointment. I'm sorry.
[00:30:35] Speaker A: Well, let. Let's kind of wrap it up here. Give me some information about how people can connect with you.
Find more about what you're doing.
If you're on a particular social media platform, you have a book that you've published or any material that you'd like to send people to, I'm happy to link those in the show notes. So give kind of a shout out for yourself and, you know, some of the work you've been doing.
[00:30:59] Speaker B: Sure. So I'm Christina Spalding with Manzanita Marketing. My website is manzanitamktg.com that's manzanita as in marketing ktg.com. and you can find me on instagram, facebook and
[email protected]. and if you're ever in Las Vegas, give me a shout out and we'll go do something cool.
[00:31:24] Speaker A: Sounds good. Well, thank you so much for your time.
Dasa Zergut. Danke.
It's a pleasure having somebody who's well versed in a more niche focus of SEO. And I hope others were interested. I'll keep an eye on the comments and direct any specific questions.
And I think I'm going to get over a recap blog for you as well. So if anybody wants to dig in more to your content, I'll make sure that that's all linked up.
[00:31:57] Speaker B: Excellent. Jeremy, thank you so much. Your questions were fun, engaging. Some of them I was not expecting at all. So as long as you got something out of our discussion today, then I'm a happy person, thanks.
