Cultural Awareness and SEO
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving in the US and many offices around the country will be closed for a long weekend. We’re definitely looking forward to this mini-break, but before we start stuffing ourselves, here are some reminders about the cultural awareness necessary for international SEO.
• Different holidays and celebrations. You’re French website’s traffic is just zooming along, and then all of a sudden traffic completely drops off during late July and into August. What’s the culprit? Most likely not a significant change to the search engines but just that people in France tend to take August off for vacations. Different countries celebrate different holidays and have different traditional vacation times. You might notice changes in site traffic change during these periods.
• Your Chinese website used to have a red banner ad on it that had a lot of conversions for a product. When you changed the banner, it was changed to a black one, and conversions fell off somewhat. What may have happened? In China, red is considered a lucky color, one of prosperity and happiness; black is unlucky and may sometimes be associated with evil. Many cultures have colors that are still strongly tied to traditions. Colors on your website may influence how people feel when they visit your site.
• Language is an immense part of cultures and some countries have many speakers of different languages. In some cases (like Canada) they get along fairly well. In other cases, like Belgium, language has become a flashpoint in both political and social life. Be aware of the language issues in your market and cater to those audiences as necessary. If a country has relatively sizeable populations of different language speakers, you may need to provide additional translations of the website. Other countries may have one lingua franca that serves as an acceptable middle-ground for the population.
Be sure to do your research on your target markets, and most of these issues will resolve themselves easily. However, if you don’t consider your audience, you may find yourself seeing lower conversions and poor visibility. The most important aspect of any SEO undertaking isn’t the search engine, it’s the end user and how well you can cater to their needs!
