SEJ x Searchmetrics Interview Series: Eli Schwartz of SurveyMonkey
Search Engine Journal has partnered with Searchmetrics to host a one-day, invite-only executive marketing event in San Francisco: SEO, Content Marketing, & Analytics: The Three Pillars of Online Marketing Success in 2014. One of our speakers is Eli Schwartz, the Online Marketing Manager for SurveyMonkey. His session: International SEO: Youre missing out if youre not doing it and its not as hard as you think.
I had the opportunity to interview Eli about all things marketing and SurveyMonkey, below.
My primary responsibility is to oversee our global SEO efforts and ensure that were always following SEO best practices. Our site is fully translated into 16 languages, which allows us to target customers in over 50 countries worldwide.
To achieve my organic traffic goals, I not only have to develop solutions and processes which help our search traffic grow, I also need to evangelize SEO internally so search engine best practices are incorporated across the entire company. I collaborate on a daily basis with our content and social teams and I feel extremely lucky that I work every day with really amazing people that get SEO. I also work very closely with our engineering teams who really deserve most of the credit for our organic traffic growth. Theyre the ones responsible for the heavy lifting when it comes to implementing solutions to some very complicated SEO issues.
In addition to SEO, I also work with our paid marketing team on our global advertising initiatives. My work on our paid campaigns means that Im in contact with employees from international search engines. This gives me access into some great insights on how to grow our international organic traffic.
International SEO is essentially domestic SEO with the added challenges of new languages and search quality thats a few years behind English search. However, there are many ways that international is different than English SEO.
Here are three top tips to know before you jump in to the world of international SEO:
Weve all seen hilarious translation fails on Facebookso you need to be sure that youre relying on the right experts when translating your content. Otherwise, get ready to be the next fail on Facebook! Its not just text that should be localized; colors and objects mean different things to various cultures.Youd never put a black cat on a US targeted landing pagesuperstition, witches and all but in Japan you might because theyre considered a good luck symbol.
Photo taken by Eli: At a Japanese Starbucks they called compost combustibles. I was a little confused when I saw it, but then I realized it was just a translation fail.
SurveyMonkey is in the fortunate position of being a highly recognized and popular brand. There are very few people in the US that havent engaged or at least heard of our product since it started back in 1999. When users look for a survey product, many of them will just come directly to us without the need of a search engine. Even when they do conduct a search engine query, we can rely on our brand recognition to help drive more traffic even on non-brand terms. However, internationally, we dont have the advantage of a well-known brand to deliver traffic directly to us. SEO is far more important because it helps people to discover us right when theyre on the hunt for the type of solution that we offerdesigning and launching online surveys!
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SEJ x Searchmetrics Interview Series: Eli Schwartz of SurveyMonkey