Europe consists of nearly 50 nations, 25 nations are members of European Union. Probably I can’t overstress the meaning of this for any online business. In terms of SEO the main impact comes from where you host your server and do you have a national top level domain. The thin red line that runs across all the search engines is simple: sites with local hosting and a national top level domain (preferably with keyword in domain name) get favoured in SERPs.
European population is approx. 710 million people, making Europe the 3rd largest continent in terms of population right after Asia and Africa. There are over 200 European languages (and many more spoken by citizens whose family origin is from other continents) in addition of which several languages contain localized dialects etc. features One of the problems when building online services for European markets is taking the language factor into account – What is the size of audience speaking language X? Where do these people live (for example Dutch, German, French are official / semi-official languages in several countries – this affects where you choose your hosting and domain, and what search engines to target for). Writing page content in English IMHO is suitable option only if the target audience is either worldwide or English speaking.
Europe has traditionally been one of the most influential economical areas globally, and it still is ruling the charts with estimated nominal GDP of 13.4 trillion USD. Of course, there are huge national and local differences in GDP and acknowledging these can be crucial when launching online business. If comparing US and European online markets, there is one very distinct difference - online business has never thrived in Europe similar to US. Yes, Europe has several successful online brands (as well as failures) but in general the European view to online business is much more reserved.
Online payment methods in Europe are highly different than in US. In general, people own and use credit cards much, much less than in US. I would even go to lengths and say that many Europeans dislike the idea of owning and/or using a credit card (and as always, there are large national differences). This has lead to situation where the most important (and above all, most trusted) online payment gateway’s are usually national banks. Making online payments has been made very easy and secure for customer, but be prepared to sign up with 5-10 payment processors for each nation you target.
Tax and custom policies inside Europe are very varying, and there is a lot of confusion about this amongst consumers. Below are rough generalisations when working inside European Union:
- When ordering items inside European Union, the customer does not have to worry about VAT or customs. The VAT rate will be the same as in the country of origin of store and there will be no customs.
Ie. I live in Finland. If I buy stuff from shop that is VAT registered in Germany, the total price of my order will contain a 16% VAT. If I buy a similar items from a shop that is VAT registered in Finland, the price of product will contain 22% VAT.
- When ordering items outside European Union, the customer must pay local VAT, product specific customs (anything between nothing to 50%), and possibly even postal charges by the customs if the value of order (including postal charges) exceeds a limit specified by governing legislation (usually about 50 US$)
Ie. I live in Finland. If I buy CD/DVD’s from US worth 100 Euro’s the customs will charge me for additional 26 Euro’s. If I buy clothes with the same amount, the customs will charge me for additional 35 Euro’s.
And then there is of course the Europe that is not part of the Union. Sounds simple?
General marketing and consumer legislation in Europe is much stricter than in US. In nutshell a majority of European marketing and consumer legislation is heavily based on protecting the consumer or the weaker (purchasing) party. There are lot’s of national level clauses that for example define very precisely the limits of acceptable and not acceptable marketing and whole lot of other do’s and do not’s. Cross the line, and you might end paying considerable penalty or losing your business license.
The above lists just some of the issues any online biz targeting European markets has to deal with. I’m sure I forget lots of things (and there are even issues You might disagree), but feel free to share your opinions and views.
European market is diverse. However UK market is the big player when it comes to online shopping. For example 10 times as much money is spent online in the UK than in Spain or Italy.
In terms of UK legislation online retailer groups like SafeBuy offer a middle ground between Government legislation, meeting reasonable standards of trading online (for the consumer) as well as supporting the ECommerce site owner. As the only Government approved group of its kind in the UK its a good point of call for any UK ECommerce site to make sure they are up to scratch on what they should be doing.
Tax can be a biggy for a price competitive market and avoiding VAT at 17.5% by shipping out of Ireland where the currency is in Euros or via the UK Channel Islands is something that you can see plenty of in the UK related online market
But UK companies don't have all the advantages, because shipping out of central European locations puts a company within both fast delivery reach as well as common language reach of many countries. Companies in mainland Europe can have big combined markets and deliver a product next day to many countries.
I do completely agree with Jane, and is not so only with english, also with spanish, and german, and even in the same country the language and slang is different. For instance Strassbourg is a part of France that was German, and French (back and forth) so they speak both german and french, and of course their accent is completely particular. If you speak spanish from spain, probably you will never understand Argentinian spanish (just to give an example). I had an MBA in international businesses which is a topic very interesting to me, let me invite you to visit my blog at www.damia.com.ar.
great post 2K. Really good timing as well as I am currently doing SEO for a pan-european company that has different versions for their German, French and Dutch market.
I was wondering whether any of you guys have any information on how important the "lang attribute" is. Basically this tag tells the search engines what language the content of a site is, so it would be make sense that this can affect your ranking results if you haven't specified the language right? Basically I'm struggling to get the ranking results in Google .fr .de and .nl The English site is doing brilliantly, so me and my client are thinking that this attribute could make a difference. Any opinions on this?
So far I haven't seen any proof that any of the major search engines would place real value to html/xhtml lang attribute. A sad thing since this could be highly usefull :(
Hopefully search engines start weighting the lang attribute in future (tough it has been there for years, why would they do it now?) or would extend their "precious" sitemaps protocol with languade data.
hi 2K, well I'll let you know whether it makes a difference.
Basically on the dutch site we have targetted a few english words (as the dutch quiet often search in english) although most of the content is in dutch. The company is ranking well for the english words but not at all for the dutch keywords. And the site was set to "lang=en", if changing this lang attribute suddenly makes changes to our rankings I'm pretty sure we can assume this attribute is important for ranking. This is what I found on W3 about the lang attribute
I was just hunting through Google Analytics help to answer a question and came across https://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/a...- What information do the filter fields represent? All the mentions of 'geo location' say that the location data is determined from 'information registered with the IP address' So, assuming that Google's FAQ is complete (a bit of an ask) then they are telling us that the location is only taken from that one piece of data. A shame....
I think the key difference between the USA and Europe is one word - progressiveness.
The US is totally progressive when it comes to commerce, and this is especially when it comes to the internet.
In the UK we're catching up - but a key problem is taxes and costs. Simply put, services are less accessible because they cost more.
Competition eventually drives down the costs, but it's a long and arduous process and the US simply does it better.
Frankly, it's frustrating as hell sometimes working in the UK market. UK business still doesn't really "get" the internet - especially as to why the internet is important.
I think most of "western" Europe is riddled with same/similar issue. Below are some interesting stats/links:
* Europeans pay approx. 2 more taxes than in US. A small comparison here... Business and people have less money to be spend with online services.
* Labour costs in Europe are in general higher than in US. For example in Finland the avg. hourly labour cost is roughly 30USD, in US only 22USD.
* In US people simply work more. I think this graph says a whole lot.
Language wise, the subject of marketing to international audiences fascinates me. Even when I came to the U.S., I found that I speak a different form of English that Americans do... or, at least, I did four years ago!
Small linguistic idiosyncrasies vary between nations and I really believe that British English, American English, Australian English, etc, should be treated as different languages to a certain extent. International and Euro Optimization was a WebmasterWorld session in Vegas this year where panelists dealt with some tricky (and hilarious) foreign language issues and gaffs.
It is interesting because on the one hand there is a ton of slang and abbreviation that creeps into our online dialogue. This actually tends to move the Western online world towards a more universal online version of 'English' as a result (IMHO) even though it sits against a backdrop of so many different countries and cultures and this got me thinking about slang.
There are a few ways you can go. There is the 'proper way' to speak or "Queens" English in the UK.
I'm sure in every country there is seen as a "proper way" to talk and write that people are taught to aspire to. This still has a big place in the business setting for sure as well as finding key phrases. However the "posh voice" as a style is less attractive in written copy, as it can sound a little cold, stuffy and out-moded wouldn't you say?
Alongside all this is street slang. The rebellion of the 'proper' English - which is always evolving. So it has made me think. If we do keyword research or even copywriting for a client online and we know the market is likely to use slang we should make a point of getting out the 'Oxford Dictionary of Slang' and making sure we cover all bases - or at least make sure abbreviations and slang versions are cited in page copy appropriately if the market would appreciate it. Then on top of this would be allowing for regional variations. So its not easy by any means - something might be "Kewl" on the web. "Sick" on the street in London and "Ace" in Liverpool. But that same thing may be just "Simply delightful" at the Henley Regatta :-)
The slang and common usage issue is a tricky one. I also found small differences when I came here that should be taken into consideration. For example, in NZ we have "heaps" of sheep, in the UK I believe you have "loads" of them and in America there are "tons" or just "lots." There are a million more examples like this.
Last weekend, a friend of mine told me the view from my living room was "nasty" and he meant it was great. Slight confusion. He's from Virginia...
Thanks for the link Jane. Missed it first time, but definetely worth a read.
My favourite is the Coke ad that encourages customers to "bite the wax tadpole."
Interesting Post 2K.
Another thing in Europe that's different are the Spam laws. I had the fortunate task of writing our company's Privacy Policy, and saw that European spam laws are more strict than US laws.
CAN-SPAM doesn't even demand an opt-in, while the most recent European directives (mainly 2000/31/CE )demand the opt-in. And directives apply directly to european states. In the US the Federal Laws have a broader scope, being sometimes better defined by state laws.
Ok... now everyone is asleep.
Spam laws are really strict. In German speaking countries we are talking about the double-opt-in principle. B2C and also B2B have strict laws, and there is also the robinson list... but don't hesitate. I get hundreds of spam mails everyday, but 99,9% are coming from N/S-America or from Eastern Europe.
Nice stuff 2k.
It's indeed very important to think about your domainnames here in Europe, especially if you want to show up in local results for specific countries. For anyone interested i'd suggest checking out the Fresh Egg post about it.
Do consider that the percentages of people who search for "from <country>" will vary per country...
I definately think it will vary by country due to the cross over of languages between countries. Someone from Italy can search for something in Italian by using Google.it and can be reasonably confident they will find what they are looking for.
If someone in Switzerland is searching for something in French, are they more likely to find what they are looking for in Google.fr than google.ch - even if their search is something specific to Switzerland?
I guess this comes down to how educated searchers of such countries are, and how good the country specific search engines are at dealing with language / country crossovers. Unfortunately I know the answer to neither of these questions!
Laws can be a big problem and a big difference. For example in Germany you can get in trouble for using brand names in your Metatags. There are now a few court decisions about this. What of course is very funny when you think about the importance of the Keyword-Metatag for seo.
Make sure to target each coutry individually. For instance the Polish market is completely different than the neighbouring German market. Do not target "Europe" as a whole. Even large companies made that mistake in the past. For instance ebay entered the Polish market and failed miserably against the smaller Polish competition they were so fond of themselves they didn't even manage to translate their servicfe correctly.
Thanks for comments carfeu. You are correct about the spam (and entire email marketing) legislation in EU area. And the way things are moving forwards, it's highly expected that upcoming regulations will be even stricter than the existing ones.