Episode 14 - Subdomains, Subfolders, or Seperate Domains for Global Marketing

Watch the YouTube video version above or listen to the podcast below!

Topics Discussed:

• Discuss strategies for international expansion in SEO

• Debate on the use of subdomains, subfolders, and separate websites

• Discuss the implications of these strategies

• Briefly touch on the use of AI in advertising

Episode 14 - Subdomains, Subfolders, or Separate Domains for Global Marketing Video and Podcast Transcript

[Disclaimer: This transcription was written by AI using a tool called Descript, and has not been edited for content.]

Dave Dougherty: All right, everybody smile for the screenshot,

All right. Welcome to the latest episode. Uh, Dave Ruthie, Alex here. Um, we are going to lend our voices to one of the most controversial topics in the SEO world of a certain, you know, company size. Do you a, have one primary domain that uses sub-domains, or b, does sub foldering for, uh, your international expansion and or separate websites that one, or sub domains or separate websites with separate subdomains and subfolders.

Alex Pokorny: Go. And you can do that one too. ,

Ruthi Corcoran: all of the above.

Alex Pokorny: All right. Do you want me to kick off? Yes. Yes.

Ruthi Corcoran: Why can't we subfolder?

Alex Pokorny: you can subfolder that that is an option. Uh, basically it's a branding question. It's a marketing budget question. There's an IT side to it as well, and a domain availability side to it.

So I'll try to get through some of those. So the first one, basically from a branding standpoint, if you had your own separate domain, um, there's a pretty good study for, uh, Canadians as well as, uh, people in the Czech Republic that they will scroll through results until they find a ca or in Czech terms, cz.

Mm-hmm. . And for the Canada reason, uh, there's a little bit more information on that study. And basically the information was, they're tired of going, getting excited about a product, going through the entire process and then saying, we don't ship to Canada. So they'll scroll through the dot coms because they assume that's a US site until they find a ca basically.

Wow. Yeah. So that's the domain standpoint. Um, so depending if you're e-commerce in shipping Yeah. That applies. If you're not e-commerce in shipping, you know, it doesn't apply. Um, you could be using an English language to, you know, site for both, but you'd wanna include French if you really wanted to go with the whole Canadian market or be, you know, legal in Canada and hit that market legally required to.

Yeah, like that. Yeah. If you want to hit that market, like specifically, or if you just wanna try to track that market, you could stick with English, cuz that's the majority of the Canadian market, it's gonna be English speaking. Um, but once you start to market to them again, this is kind of that marketing branding piece kind of kicks in and Dave's absolutely right.

Then you have a legal obligation to have French as well. Right. Um, but just know that it's not that big of an audience. Um, but if you're gonna go French and English, you know, there's a couple other countries as well that you speak French and English, it's gonna be slightly different uses of terms accents, some spelling differences.

Mm-hmm. , but. There's a good chance you'll still rank. So even if your spelling is a little bit different color with an extra U versus not, you know, stuff like that, you'll probably still do fine. Um, so branding budget kind of question basically is, do we wanna have uh, Canadian site and ca and a.com for maybe flagship site?

Because, um, you can also take a look at Google. This is just a quick kind of a aside, but it's a really important aside when we start talking about this stuff. Google has a list of generic ccTLDs. So a Cctl d, the country code top level domain would be like Code uk. So that's a country code or.nz for New Zealand.

Uh, there is a list that Google says these are considered generic. Um, so there's a whole list of those like Co Columbia, which has been used so frequently as company that they don't consider it Columbia anymore. It's just another.com basically. So that's a generic CCC tld. Um, so once you start hitting that list and depends if your market is on that list or your audience is on that list, then you have even more problems trying to basically distinguish yourself away from the generic global ones that might just be in the market versus ones who are actually trying to hit that market specifically.

Um, couple more little fun pieces. Uh, depending from your IT group, if they're savvy enough, they probably could launch the same foldering and all the rest underneath a whole giant list of domains. And it would just be fine. Most agencies, most companies, they'd be setting up basically whole separate website, you know, five times, 10 times, 11 times, something like that.

So if you wanna push an update, five times, 10 times, home error times. Mm-hmm. , you know, you gotta do that. Um, so that's a little painful. Um, there's also, of course do domain availability. I mean, that's a pretty easy one. Um, if you're in an enterprise organization, there's a chance you could go through this couple of different domain companies out there.

So you can do purchasing of domains and they'll basically pitch that owner and try to buy it from them and stuff like that. So you don't have to do that yourself. There are companies that handle that kinda stuff. Um, but that's a pretty big piece because from a branding standpoint, I mean, I can think of a number of big companies who have really weird international domains.

You know, it, I'm gonna just use Coca-Cola just outta this assumption that they don't have all the domains. I'm sure they do, but they might have coca hyphen cola.co uk and then it's k uh, kr, you know, somebody else. I mean, then it's, you know, maybe Coca-Cola is one word for the us. I mean, they're gonna have like a variety there.

And then on top of that, from a cost standpoint, uh, I know one big company who definitely got hit with a lot of costs because. , if you wanna have all the variations of all these different domains that can add up to a lot of money, um mm-hmm. . And then we, I mean, we can talk about Domaining in a bit, but it's also like, think of defensive stuff.

So if you know your company is terrible.com, if you wanna buy up all those and all these different languages and all these different.com, dot org, dot co, do in all the rest of those. Yeah. Um, brand for

Dave Dougherty: an example, Walmart sucks.com

Alex Pokorny: or people Walmart. Yeah, I, yeah. There, there's a bunch of 'em actually that you, you can find that, you know, there's, Microsoft was kind of legendary for having tons of them that were just, you know, Microsoft is terrible and stuff like that.

It would redirect back to Microsoft. We were like, oh my gosh, it's connected and it's like . Yeah, it's defensive, but it's pr um,

Ruthi Corcoran: now, so. We've covered like a lot of ground in a very short amount of time and I need to go back .

Alex Pokorny: Yeah. Big topic. Yeah.

Ruthi Corcoran: Your one defense against not foldering all the languages is that Canada and the Czech Republic

Alex Pokorny: don't like it?

Um, no. No. So that, that's, that's a good part with e-commerce and shipping basically when you kind of get into that concept. Yeah, and those are the only two studies I know of and sure. That's a really pretty niche topic, so I can't imagine there's gonna be a whole lot more, but it's still gonna apply.

Dave Dougherty: Um, I do think it helps to narrow it a little bit, you know, to, let's just pick e-commerce for this conversation's sake.

Sure. And if anybody wants a conversation on a specific other go-to-market model, let us know. We'll do another episode. Um, but I think the shipping piece, , you know, you brought that in. That is huge because then that impacts the whole rest of your organization in terms of calculating taxes and doing, you know, everything on the up and up with, with legal and, you know, going into those different markets.

Um, but then,

Ruthi Corcoran: yeah, so here maybe if I could Yeah. Here's where my, my thoughts are, right? So if you're, if you're a large global enterprise company Yeah. And you have a presence in a wide variety of countries, you have a couple of different approaches. Um, and it's gonna depend greatly on whether or not you sell directly to people or you have more of an a b m model, company marketing model, where you wanna get folks to talk to people in your organization.

if you're shipping, it's really important that you have a separate site, be that a sub-domain, a specific domain, or a folder that is dedicated per country. Because if somebody is in Algeria, right, they're gonna need their language in probably French, but they also need to know that your products are gonna ship to Algeria.

On the other hand, if you're more of an ABM type company or you know, your main goal of your website is information and to get somebody to contact your sales rep mm-hmm. , it might be more cost effective for you to just have a French version of your site. Mm-hmm. that has the right information and then allows you to, to contact, at which point a folder learning structure might make more sense to you.

Dave Dougherty: And I do think this is where, you know, again, if you're an SEO in these kind of big enterprise things, you don't get to make the decision of what the strategy should be. , right? You're gonna be Jerry rigging whatever the other one was, , if there was one to begin with, right? Um, and that's where I think the, the sub-domain piece of it for, uh, the transactions makes a lot of sense because then you can have that informational piece, um, be standardized, you know, to your point Ruthie, where, um, you really only need one language version of, you know, these are the things that, that we're good at and this is why you should trust us and here's our solutions and, you know, all that marketing speak.

Um, but then if you find yourself having different products in different countries, right? Maybe your portfolio's not the same in each country. Um, there are some advantages of having that, that second sub domain. Now, in terms of ranking factors, , that's where it gets, um, that's where I wanna kick it off to Alex, cuz I see him smirking.

Alex Pokorny: Yeah. So it's kinda interesting. We've got folders, got sub-domains that we're talking, you know, I'm talking about separate domains. Mm-hmm. and I, I have to say, just to be frank, all of those different techniques can work. Mm-hmm. , they all take different amounts of effort. Um, and they also take a different business strategy behind each one of 'em.

Mm-hmm. , because it's a question of how far are you going with each one of those? Are you gonna have an e just in general English folder? Mm-hmm. general fr French folder. Are you gonna try to go after each one of these countries? No. Yeah. Dave, my smirk is because we're, we're talking a lot about the enterprise factors, but we're kind of glossing over one of the major ones, which is really a SEO factor.

So yeah, what are we building up and what is basically gonna have a good chance of ranking and that's mm-hmm. . Really, I think where the rubber hits the road in terms of are we going to really put money and effort behind unique copy between French France and French Algeria, or are we just gonna have the exact same copy in both?

Are we going to really go after that market and build up an FR domain and do we really want that one to rank, you know, next to our global domain if we have a global domain or next to our headquarter domain, whatever the other one is. Sure. Or we just really wanna build up the single domain and have it kind of ranked for all these different areas as well.

Um, that's where I think a lot of the, the ranking discussion kind of, uh, kicks in because we're talking about, in some cases, like a backlink profile. Um, you're gonna build up a whole profile with a brand new site, but if you have a folder and then eventually buy a brand new domain, you know, brand new, brand new domain, and then just redirect everything under that thing.

it doesn't have that link kind of background to it. Mm-hmm. . So the odds of it ranking against its local market is lower. If you had spent 10 years, you know, building up or you know, some decent capital bu you know, marketing budget, PR budget behind some domain mm-hmm. it probably do just, you know, that one would do really well.

So there, there is that kind of big piece of what are you willing to kind of put effort behind and how far, how far ahead do you want to think in terms of the, uh, company's expansion? Um, knowing that you're basically setting yourself up for a heck of a lot more effort and you're just building for the long term.

Um, so in repeat, which

Ruthi Corcoran: one are you? Which one are you putting more effort

Alex Pokorny: around? Uh, Uh, which one? It would be domains. If you had separate domains you'd be putting more effort in as well as like maintaining a site, but also building up that site and really doing unique things with that site versus that.

That's the whole fr ffr. So French Canada versus France, French, you have two different ca and a fr They got two. Two domains. Yep. You're gonna put effort behind building up unique copy on both. Yep. So because they're gonna naturally compete with each other, you're gonna be building up PR for both. Trying to get the local, uh, French news and French organizations to link just to that French one and the local Canadian ones to link to that Canadian ones to build up that profile again, so that they have better competition locally in our local markets.

I mean, , that's the, the personalization of Google and personalization of search engines. It's no longer like this global landscape where you're kind of competing against everybody. You're really competing against what Google believes is your kind of, your set and where you are. So your location, you know, your history of your IP address.

A lot of thing kind of factors play into that. So now you're really looking at kind of a local market thing of where, where do we want to have a presence and what are we really wor uh, willing to put the effort behind? Cause having just a blank folder that's gonna contain everything fr and we're gonna hit basically any country that happens to speak French all at once.

That might work if you're in a ni niche market. If you're in a market where there's not a whole lot of big co competitors out there, if you are the only copy, yes, you'll do just. . Um, I would really wanna make from a user standpoint at least clear on the page of, you know, this is for all these different countries and yes, we do, you know, service these different companies, countries or something like that, and have some kind of page at least, or contact us that, you know, speaks to that.

Mm-hmm. . Um, yeah, that's, that's kind of, that's where I see the difficulty of, I, I finally pitched the, the separate domain piece because I'm trying to basically push the company to make that decision of where do we really wanna put money, right? And what are we willing to put money behind? Because it's okay to have a folder and a separate domain structure too.

You could mix, you could mix and match this stuff too. And

Dave Dougherty: this is, this is why this is, this topic is absolutely fascinating to me because it's a perfect example of where. What most in the business will just assume as a throwaway seo. We'll just go do your, you know, SEO fairy dust stuff. , um, . Exactly. , yeah.

SEO it and be done with it so we can check the box. Um, no, you can't. This is a legitimate business strategy decision where if you are going to have a separate domain now, do we start having conversations about hiring, um, someone locally? Right? And do you build out an office or do you, do you know, what's your work from home policy so that we can attract talent in these local things to be able to do the web strategy that we're, we're going for.

It's not just about launch the website, you know, you also have to maintain it. You also have to have the infrastructure behind it in order for it to be successful. Um, now if I can be the, the pain in the ass and, um, you know, quote, most senior leaders. . Why would I do that when everybody just goes to Amazon for products

Alex Pokorny: anyway?

I have a, I have a website, man. What's the point? , you sell

Ruthi Corcoran: on Amazon. Like , there's different business models and with our huge enterprise companies, right? We might have multiple business models within one enterprise. Yeah. So, sure. A portion of your products go to Amazon and make sure you're, you're optimized for search on Amazon.

That's important. But on the flip side, right? Contact customer support or contact our sales rep that's, that's not living on

Alex Pokorny: Amazon. And I always remember, you know, have the most friends on Friendster in MySpace, cuz that's a long-term, you know, method , whenever we tie ourselves the third party site and pitch our, you know, hit our way into that thing and when it goes down in flames, oh wait, we should have been a little bit more broad and maybe also from a first party data standpoint.

Mm-hmm. , figure out who our customers are instead of telling Amazon, go ahead know the data, just send me the check. Yep. It's a

Ruthi Corcoran: huge prompt. We come back to this a lot and we'll continue to coming back to this a lot because, What you do with a lot of your SEO strategy comes back to your business strategy and what you're trying to achieve.

Absolutely. Yeah. And honestly, having an individualized country site for, for all the countries you're in is just not feasible a lot of the time. You might have six where that's possible, and the rest of 'em, it's like, well, make sure you've got the information because you might not have the boots on the ground to be able to answer the support questions, let alone create that customized content.

And I, that's where I get, you know, a little bit nervous about saying, let's have a domain for every single country, because now all of a sudden the amount of things that you have to maintain is massive, especially if you have to maintain them individually, versus a site that you can push updates to can be a lot more scalable.

Alex Pokorny: Mm-hmm.

Dave Dougherty: one of the more interesting case studies in global expansion, and I'll see if I can find it, uh, for the show notes, but, um, What, you know, Coca-Cola during World War ii. So if you guys aren't familiar with that, um, no, please, please, no. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna get the details wrong cuz it's been a, a while since, uh, since I've read it.

But the, the gist of it essentially was, you know, in order to support the American troops, they had built out these, um, logistical pipelines, right? So that, uh, the troops could enjoy a Coke in Italy when while we're, you know, taking it back. Um, but then post-war, now all of a sudden you have this infrastructure

So you're in all these markets and, you know, what do the soldiers do when they, they come across, you know, the, the locals who are having a hard time, you give them a Hershey bar, you give them a, a Coke, right? So then you develop the product, you know, um, Knowledge and, and taste and whatever else, um, in an awful environment, but it establishes a foothold in, in the countries.

And then you have the infrastructure and you have the support and whatever else.

Ruthi Corcoran: So, so Dave's view of the world infrastructure first then,

Dave Dougherty: well, I bring that up because you need to support what you're going to do, right? Like I think it's one of those things where, yeah, we like to kid ourselves with digital that you can just do everything and you don't have to have boots on the ground and you don't have to go do the FaceTime and you don't have to have the connections, right?

You can just launch a website and sit back and collect seven, eight figures a year. No, no. You, you have to do business, right? You have to have the relationships, you have to have the support there. Um, you have to be willing to. , if something goes wrong, are you willing to jump on a plane to troubleshoot it the next day?

Right? Like that's , those are considerations if you're looking to expand globally, right? I mean, that's just, that's just part of the

Alex Pokorny: game. You know, there's one other element too of if you're in an organization that has a giant brand, um, I'm thinking for instance, I think Nike does Polding, if I remember correctly.

Um, and quite frankly, Nike can do probably whatever they want to do, right? There's some element there too, of if you're with a really, really, you know, well known heavy brand and a large organization like Coca-Cola or Hershey, or you know, Nike, you could probably get away with just about any. , right? And you'll still get the links cuz you'll still get the local news and you'll still get the local business.

You know, that's, that's still already in place. So supporting an infrastructure that exists is a heck of a lot easier than trying to build it out for the first time. Right.

Dave Dougherty: And I think I said this in one of the previous episodes too, but like, you know, one of the things that I was shocked about when I took my first enterprise role coming from the agency side was just how much being in a known brand allowed you to have a whole bunch of bad, you know, it covered up for a lot of sins, basically, you know, you could do some really awful things in terms of like SEO best practices and still.

in the top 10 without really trying, just because of, you know, everybody knows, likes and trusts you, you're already established your authority in the space. You've already, you know, been a known entity to a lot of these, um, you know, people and, and robots. So, um, it just makes it a lot, a lot, a lot easier. Um, so

Alex Pokorny: to emphasize one other point, we brought it up kind of briefly, but um, there's a couple other sides to it as well, just about the, the legal side of things.

Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. . So we talked a little bit about, uh, first party data. So gdpr, um, there's some new laws coming in the US and of course may affect anybody who's digital because it's being done at the state level. You know, you're pretty impossible to kind of say that you're not there. So California's passing one.

New Jersey has one. There's a couple other ones that are kind of GDPR ish clones. Um, so your cookie policy, your data retention policy, um, your data deletion and user deletion kind of policies, those have to change. We mentioned about the language requirements, potentially depending on what country you're in of.

Do you need to support a language that even if it's not as popular, or one that you don't, you know, want to spend the time and money translating, you still have to, cuz you're hitting that market and what level are you hitting that market where you legally have to do that? You know, can you just have a.com and just happen to get Canadian traffic?

Well then you don't have to abide by that. But if you're trying to hit the market directly, you know, there's a line there. So I don't know that line and where that line is. Yeah. Consultant,

Ruthi Corcoran: lawyer, another, that's a huge call out because, right. Yeah. If, if you're working in a regulat regulated industry, Let's say a medical, you know, you're working in healthcare, for example.

Yeah. Medical. It's huge. Yeah. I mean, you cannot say some things in one country and then you can, in another country, in another country, the rules are totally different and the images you display are completely different. So, yep. It

Alex Pokorny: depends. Claims. Yeah, claims, uh, even certain topics are taboo in certain countries, which are like, you would think of common topics that you don't think are actually taboo.

Like, and there's laws against even mentioning it on your website or advertising, right? Using those terms. Um, we mentioned briefly some of the staffing, but there's even staffing implications too. For instance, if you want to be in China, you need a Chinese domain that is tied to basically local, uh, address.

And you need employees and staff there who are gonna be maintaining the website. So you might have to end up with a whole subsidiary or new organization or, Some sort of relationship. I'm not sure if you can do an agency relationship, but some sort of relationship there where you actually have staff there.

That's a massive country. I mean, yeah, you could do, there's Mandarin and then there's other languages as well, and that's the other oversimplification that happens pretty frequently. Like India's soon gonna be the most populated country. There's a lot of languages in India. Yes. Which markets are you trying to hit?

Which markets are, you know, one, have access to, for instance, you know, uh, high speed internet connection. Mm-hmm. , those are available markets. I mean, there's, there's a lot of qualifications there. Well, an interesting thing is another move for you

Dave Dougherty: is that to your point, there are enough people in India that it skews the global top searches on.

You know, Google's report out every year, gosh, every year. , because Yeah. It's like, oh, this cricket match happened in August and. Everybody, India was searching for it. So those are the top five terms. And then, then there's, then there's everyone else. . Yeah, there's EERs, you know. Good on ya. Good on ya. Yeah. But you know, eMarketers averages

Yeah.

Alex Pokorny: Some fantastic analysts at e-Marketer and they had brought that up once and they were so shocked cuz they were asking quizzing their guests of, you know, what do you think was the top thing searched? And you know, there was covid years. So there's some terms related to that and mm-hmm a lot of like, you know, local news to that particular country, UK, us, that kind of stuff.

And No, no, no, no, no. It's cricket matches

Indian market loves cricket. I mean, I mean it's a

Ruthi Corcoran: good reality check, right? This, it's this the world we're searching for.

Alex Pokorny: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the, that's the other thing, I mean like, data gets skewed so quickly that, um, just a small tangent on that, but just one that always kind of frustrates me is whenever we look at, uh, US based reporting, and it was like, oh my gosh, you know, California and New York, Texas, they really love us.

And it's like, name the three most populated states. Right, right. Yeah. Okay. You just did like that doesn't work. Well, I remember having,

Dave Dougherty: I remember having a conversation one time where they're like, okay, give us the top 15 economies and that that'll be our target. And I said, okay, so what's your California and Texas strategy as opposed to these other countries?

Right. Like what do you mean? Well, they're huge . So if you are , if you want the top 15 global economies, then Texas and California need to have their own strategies, especially if you're talking about, you know, your average Californian and your average Texan. You talk to them very differently. Um, yeah, those are totally different

Alex Pokorny: audiences, you know, very different.

Yeah, that's a really good point too about how finite those languages can get too. Mm-hmm. especially, I mean yeah, bring it specifically to an SEO standpoint. Um, healthcare is one really unique one where common diseases have different names in Florida, Minnesota versus California. Um, whether or not they use a particular acronym or not, or a slightly different acronym mm-hmm.

For some of the longer name diseases types, that's the same thing. That's a regional thing. There's a lot of regional like lines there that don't seem like there will be, but once you get into it, yeah, there definitely are. There's those lines. Well, do you know time

Dave Dougherty: machines exist?

That is the regionally specific name in southeastern Wisconsin for, uh, an at tm. That's amazing. Time was a particular brand of atm. for, uh, a certain period, uh, so that people just started calling 'em time machines. So I'm gonna go go to the time machine and get some cash. Like oh yeah, you do that, you do that.

Come back to

Ruthi Corcoran: me. Lemme know. The search trends are on time machines in Wisconsin, right? Because that's if, if your, if your US bank, that's part of your local banking strategy, you need to make sure when somebody in Wisconsin is searching time machine, they find your

Alex Pokorny: at t m

Dave Dougherty: potentially. Yeah. I mean it's the same thing.

Those kind of regional things I find fascinating. Like as somebody who studied writing and has an interest in, in language, um, you know, bubbler is another one, you know for sure. Uh, drinking fountain, water fountain. Um, . So, yeah, I mean there's all those kind of nuances, but again, I'm sure there's some, somebody listening to this going, yeah, but with the nat, the natural language stuff, it just gets rolled up into the blah, blah, blah, and you're like, yeah, you're probably right.

But it's important to know these nuances if you're gonna address the audience properly. Right? Yeah. Right, right. Especially if you're gonna kick 'em off to a salesperson, you know? Right. Um, you need to come off as genuine. You e that trust, like, yeah. Yeah. So I

Ruthi Corcoran: thinking about your comment, Alex, about healthcare, and another one that popped to mind, um, was the difference in gaining restrictions.

So let's say you have an English site, well, well, that works for some of the English speaking world, but if you're in Australia, a lot of your medical content has to be gated you because you can't talk to the general public. You have to be talking to healthcare professionals in

Alex Pokorny: particular. No. Yeah, there, there's lines all over there.

Plus to, to the language point, uh, Dave too about, uh, entities basically that you would have the idea that all those different terms would wrap up in one entity. And if Google just figure it out. That's not the case currently. 2023. Um, there's a study recently that was done. It was a UK clothing company, uh, who basically took a copy of their UK site and basically got a.com domain, threw it in there and wasn't doing great, but they decided to do a test on at train and they changed trainers to tennis shoes and trousers to pants, stuff like that, and their traffic shot up, so, wow.

Mm-hmm. , you think it would all be tied together and it should be all tied together, but if you're the US and you're searching for tennis shoes, you're not looking for a personal trainer. Right. , I mean, the, then there's lines right there on the local level too, where the same term gets. Changed. If someone says, I'm gonna go get a trainer, it's like, okay.

It's like, what gym do you go to? Mm-hmm.

Ruthi Corcoran: E Exactly. Or a jumper. Right. If you're in the uk, that's another word for a sweater. Right. .

Alex Pokorny: Yeah. Interesting little lines there too. And uh, they've just kind of throwing it back to you too about, um, speaking to that local market and then how closely do you need your language really get those people to think that yes, this content is meant for me, this is a company who understands my needs and my pain points.

And you know, how, how much can you basically kind of push up against that? And it probably depends on your, your market too. If you're the only player in the market, they're probably more willing to go out on limb and, you know, work with you. Um, well, what's your advice in terms of the UK English spellings, American English spellings?

If you're just talking English market only, um, what would be your, your idea on that one?

Dave Dougherty: Um, well, again, ever classic marketing professional, it depends. Um, the that's any professional, I think it , um, the companies where it would really matter, I think go to your brand, right? Like if you are selling some high-end luxury good, the perception of, um, the British as higher class in certain segments, right?

Um, that is a shortcut you can play to, right? It's a mental shortcut you can play to, uh, that people will latch onto. Um, they will als There will also be a certain segment that will absolutely push back against that. Um, yeah, but that's, that's part of your marketing, right? You, you, that's what we do. We segment the audience

Um, . I think if you are looking at like food, then it does matter, right? So the difference between chips and crisps, um, there's just a little bit more friction mentally if you are doing that kind of terminology between the country. So it would make sense to, you know, change that. But if you're speaking the same things and you have a couple, you know, OERs or, or res instead of, you know, the American spelling, that's fine.

Um, if you're in that, probably that luxury market, um, again, I think it, it does depend. I personally, I tend to go off of, uh, empathy for the customer and try to make it as simple as possible so, you know, at any point. , um, for, you know, user experience or whatever else. If we can reduce the amount of friction or, um, pain that somebody feels in, in their process, you know, towards converting, I absolutely wanna smooth that out just because it's gonna make it easier to, to upsell to, um, you know, embed yourself in, in their mind as, as a company you want to do business with, uh, or product you wanna try.

Um, you know, and that's, that's where you differentiate yourself, right? If you do the hard work for your customer, you're just gonna have an easier time getting more customers. I

Ruthi Corcoran: put my finance hat on for a minute too. Dave, you've made the point a number of times in the past. There's essentially one country that speaks American English.

Mm. , maybe parts of Canada. Right. But there's a lot more countries, Toronto, , that lean towards, right. British English. Mm-hmm. . And so you might have some fantastic budget considerations by not starting with American English. Mm-hmm. ,

Dave Dougherty: I've, I've, yes, I've been part of those discussions. And, uh, if you wanna, if you wanna see something fun, lob lob the thought to a group of Americans that you should, uh, have British English as the English master and, and watch their reactions.

Personally, I think it's fun, but, uh, yeah.

Alex Pokorny: well, to take a little twist, um mm-hmm. and considering how many minutes we're in and it hasn't been mentioned. Atrial Lang. So just throwing a little talk about Atrial Lane, cuz somehow in enterprise seo, global discussion, we just got to it, but wanna make sure we don't gloss over.

Dave Dougherty: Well, I think, I think that's fair because the first question I think whenever anybody brings up atrial lang is, did you get it to work

Alex Pokorny: Yeah. John Mueller has stated, uh, I think on more than one occasion that Aling is the most complex and also most commonly done incorrectly, you know, method of seo. So, right. Um, by no means am I an expert in it. So first off, I would say a latest sous, uh, , A L E D Y A, uh, s o l i s sos. She is a fantastic global s e o expert and she has some really good guides on it, as well as some cool tools that allow you to put in a couple different URLs, say what you're trying to target, and I'll basically mm-hmm.

rewrite the atrial link copy for you, so code for you. So definitely worth looking into it. There's also options with Ari Lang, including like, do you wanna do an XML segment Variation, which can method, can work. It's difficult, but it can be a little bit easier to implement because you don't have to have page level access.

It can be more scalable, uh, page level, you know, that's totally possible too, if you don't have access to edit all the files, you know, that's a, a method as well. Their CMS also, of course might have, you know, some tool or plug-in or something like that as well. . And then a quick shout out to HTML Lang. So that's just straight html hyphen, l a N g.

Bing uses that. A couple others use that. So you put that at the top of the page and say basically which one you're going after. Um, but the other last piece, just to wrap this up with h uh, atrial, that's just a common issue that a lot of people run into is, are you targeting languages? Are you talking language in country?

Because HTML language really kind of built for both as H M L for language and country. You're trying to make those variations and it can help when you're doing that multi-domain strategy and you don't, you haven't really built up those other domains. You kind get at least almost a kind of canonical linking method towards each other.

So then there's still still some something. Basically connecting those pages together as well as reducing that cross competition. Because if you're in, for instance, searching in French, you end up with the French site where really you're a Canadian, you wanted the Canadian site to show up first. H M O Lang helps fix that.

So, just a, a long little piece on that, but just keep that in mind. That's a difficult strategy. And, uh, the search Off the record podcast from Google, from those, uh, kind of mm-hmm. SEO spokespeople of John Mueller and the team, they have asked for the community's opinions and advice on a replacement method that everyone knows it's not good.

So this may change in the future.

Ruthi Corcoran: Well, and part of it goes back too, it's messy because it depends on what your strategy is, right? If you're going for a country-based strategy, then yeah, you've gotta implement it. But if you've decided you just want a French version, and that's a different story, and if you've got the mix, then all of a sudden it becomes much more complicated.

Alex Pokorny: Yep. Mm-hmm. and taking every page is difficult cuz you want to. . It's not a domain wide tag either. It's page level tag. So this particular product, if it's available in this country, this country, and this country, okay, we need a tag for those. And then this one doesn't have it. Well, now the tag isn't gonna be all for five countries.

Now it's only gonna be for three or four. And then you do have to reference that own page in the tag. I mean it, it's complex. It gets really complex, really fast. My

Dave Dougherty: first thought, whenever anybody brings up HF, is how often are you changing your pages? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because if you are gonna be changing 'em and updating 'em with any kind of frequency, I, I would hesitate to recommend doing

Alex Pokorny: it.

Yeah. Depending on if you're changing the kind of the intention of the page and the purpose of the page, or if you're doing constant product releases, I mean, there's an overhead standpoint to it as well, which holy cow, that would be a painful, painful company to work for. , um, you, you'd definitely have to have like some c m s level kind of connection points.

You could say like, this catalog is, this product is similar to these other products and we need to put the tag in it implemented based on that or something. Well,

Dave Dougherty: God forbid, your co your company doesn't do, you know, an agile, you know, thing so that you Oh yeah. Speed of that. Don't even have the, the checklist of, okay, this is considered done because we've, you know, updated the 40 pages that this, you know, HF points to , you know, I mean, if you had to update that every single time, forget it.

No,

Alex Pokorny: thank you. Yeah. Just, and it can be, can be worthwhile also to do partial implementations. So if you had the homepages all tag to each other, the about us. Mm-hmm. , something like that. Some top level pages that are basically pretty static. At least that

Ruthi Corcoran: adds so, Even just the catalog, right? A lot of catalog.

Oh, the catalog oftentimes automated and it's, you've got the exact same pages across. That can be a much easier implementation than when you have a lot of different blog and sort of more informative content type pages, which they're a little bit more mixed and probably very more by country.

Dave Dougherty: Okay, so under the guise that SEO is business strategy, if you had, let's just say you found $50,000 in the couch cushion and you could spend that either link building in a particular locale or implementing h ATR flying, where would you put your money?

Oof.

Ruthi Corcoran: Depends. Yeah. I mean, I'm, you know, lean towards link building off the bat, but at the same time, I can see instances where if you've got a presence across all of Europe, there, the boundaries aren't so thick. Right. And so that's a place where atrial flying can make a huge difference. Where mm. Maybe in some of your, you know, your US, your Canada, less of a less of an issue.

Alex Pokorny: Mm-hmm. , I'm in a similar boat. Um, especially if, I mean, we'll, we should talk about link building at some episode, but , if you're starting link building, that's a waste of 50 grand. . So there's so many, you know, rules that you need to put in place if you're using external vendors, however you're doing that. Um, no, I mean, I, it, it'd be tough to do that.

Atrial lane can be really useful. Mm-hmm. . But again, we're just talking about basically helping that kind of cross co competition against our own sites that we own. Right. , it's not necessarily a, a big, you know, competitive advantage to basically doing this. It can be maybe in a local market that's, you know, not very competitive and you're able to basically dominate it by basically having that tag.

Mm-hmm. , that's, that's possible.

Ruthi Corcoran: Well, hang on. There's some cost savings, right? If you've got a lot of German, German speaking or, uh, German citizens, I suppose, contacting your Swiss help desk, yeah. There's costs they can't help, right? Mm-hmm. , that's expensive to be, to get those folks to the right place, and so there's, there's use cases

Alex Pokorny: for it.

Yeah. It can be the cost of, I mean, hours that you're saving from cost center, how many calls you're saving, but yeah, even if you have like a subsidiary set up, they might not even be transferring each other, you know, those customers to each other, so that could be lost of profit, no necessarily a cost thing about a profit equation there too.

Mm-hmm. , so, mm-hmm. . That's a tough one. Dave, what about you? What's your, what's your take?

Dave Dougherty: Well, I hear what you guys are saying and then I thought of a third option, so I'm gonna call in the wild card. , ,

Alex Pokorny: break the rules.

Dave Dougherty: Go for it. Yep. Well, it's my own question. I get to do what I want. Um,

uh, well, I guess I'll, I'll pitch it back out to you. So, um, if you're trying to get into a local market or, you know, establish a, a better foothold in a market, I guess in my mind the link building shorthand is always just like right next door to, um, pr. Oh yeah. Mm-hmm. . So for 50,000, I think you would get more return on your investment to higher a publicist than you would any of the digital things.

to the point earlier of boots on the ground shaking hands, establishing a presence. Um, cuz people already, people will trust, uh, what they've already been exposed to, right? Yep. So,

yeah. Okay. Uh, they'll be my one wild card for, you know, a couple weeks maybe. Got

Alex Pokorny: it. . Yeah,

Dave Dougherty: I mean, alright.

Alex Pokorny: No, go ahead. I was just saying there's so many options. I mean, if you had that amount of capital, it'd be also really tempting to just get outside of that and just say, you know, we could do a paid search campaign for aisle or targeted, no, we're gonna go just around this particular market or particular product set, maybe, right.

You could make 50 grand last a little while. Um, depending on those, those factors. . That would be almost tempting to do too because now you're just exposing local market that you, you know, you've targeted to your product set directly to it. If you had decent landing pages or decent CRO going on, I mean that can be worth it.

Mm-hmm. and a little boost can be a little boost, but word of mouth is also a valuable too. So getting the the product into the hands of the local market, that's useful.

Ruthi Corcoran: Mm-hmm. right there. And I know we have some listeners who are going, 50 grand man, if only I had 50 grand . I

Alex Pokorny: know amazing. If you're finding

Dave Dougherty: that in your couch, lemme know what couch you bought.

Yeah.

Alex Pokorny: See what you really need to do. What 50 grand is. You find some podcasts that uh, have something to do with your market and you reach out to those podcasts. Yeah, exactly. You get sponsored the micro influencers. That's where it's at, man. That's forget the macro. Go for the micro. Exactly. And if you found a, you know, an enterprise SEO podcast, then you know you really helped.

You could buy them a coffee. You are. Jaguar, I mean, whatever, or either option, you know, you could do those

Dave Dougherty: Well, that's actually a, a perfect teaser for, uh, an episode idea that, you know, Alex had offline, which is, uh, you know, SEO is lonely. So maybe that'll be our, our Valentine's Day, uh, episode and, uh, ,

Alex Pokorny: that's a good idea. I like it.

Dave Dougherty: Um, so with the, uh, short amount of time, we did have a second topic we wanted to talk about and actually considering, uh, at the time of this recording, the landscape of, you know, marketing news, I'm really proud of us for getting 47 minutes into recording and not bringing up, uh,

Ruthi Corcoran: Somebody brought up natural ing processing earlier.

I did, but

Alex Pokorny: yes. Um, SEO lady. Yeah.

Ruthi Corcoran: Wasn't gonna call names, but yeah. Right.

Dave Dougherty: That's, we, we tell the truth on this show, Ruthie. So don't, don't hedge

Um, no, but so who had the idea? It was AI and advertising, I believe was the topic. So should we Yeah. Wax poetically for the next like 10 minutes or so on that.

Ruthi Corcoran: Sure. I mean, hot take, right? Mm-hmm. , we've already got, uh, we've already got Google optimizing a lot of our advertising experience, you know? Yeah.

Why shouldn't we just pay Google to create our ads and outsource the whole process entirely? I mean, why do you need the middle man of somebody creating the ads just to enter them into Google when you can just have Google do it? Money

Alex Pokorny: maker.

Dave Dougherty: One, antitrust, two, uh, crap experiences in the past. Um, you know, Google, I'm sure you, you you're trying to turn things around, but, um, you know, no offense to people who are just outta college, but there are some activities you probably shouldn't be doing.

Um, and, you know, massive ad accounts that need fine tuning is probably one of them. Like, you know, build into that. At least get some time under your belt before you get in there. And that's, uh, I was always the person that was really annoyed whenever people would say that to me, but now I, I mean, I get it now.

Alex Pokorny: Yeah. Um, I guess a couple of different points. One, there's more bots on the internet than humans, so mm-hmm. . There's always, or at least for a very long time, there's always been a credit system that basically Google would always do that if they basically notice bot traffic, they would credit your account some amount.

And there's always been a lot of questions of, is this actually all of the bots? Because sometimes the numbers are, you're looking at your server logs and you're like, we're getting hit hard and we are not seeing the credits come in. Um, and it's astounding because it's like every single month there's more credits, so that, that's really frequent.

Doesn't seem to matter what market you're in, so mm-hmm. , that's a dangerous thing. I mean, once we basically get to that level, because we're losing more transparency, uh, around Yeah. Creation, they had running, you know, who's basically who's in charge of things and who can we basically kind of, who has an ability to affect things and.

what you're suggesting, I think is what Google's been moving towards anyways. I mean, you can put in a land, uh, new URL of your landing page and it can come, come up with ads for you, like from the design standpoint, you know, if you wanna get into display and, uh, banner advertising, basically that side of it.

Google is, you know, uh, display network. You, you can really easily, now the ads aren't great and to Dave's point, like a lot of the, the automated stuff, like the automated recommendations I've seen out of Google ads have been awful. Like, just really bad ideas. Like, yeah, we would get more clicks from our really bad market.

That doesn't make any sense for this particular company to play. And I think that's the, the, the human element that has to always come in, and maybe we can get to a point with AI and speak of natural language processing, but basically those pieces tied together that it can get a good understanding of what your company does and maybe ask you some questions of what markets you're going after because it really does have to get down to that level that then, , you know, target correctly online and really be running the ads correctly and saying like, yeah, this was a ad that really mattered.

Or Yeah, we got a lot of conversions cuz we did optimize for conversions, but holy cow, the leads were crap. Like yeah, they're not gonna have that, that next stage of information. So that's, yeah,

Dave Dougherty: and this is an interesting thing for me looking at the conversations around, uh, chat e p T and that explosion and like, it's really cool to see what people are doing with it.

You know, just testing out and experimenting and I'm all for that. However, you get some people who are putting these examples out where it's like, look what I created. Nah dude, you didn't create that. You came up with the idea, you know, but. That you didn't create, that you can't have ownership of that. And this is definitely a, a separate, uh, episode.

Um, oh

Alex Pokorny: yeah. .

Ruthi Corcoran: Dave's watching my reaction going. I'm poking some buttons.

Alex Pokorny: Hold, hold on here. Yeah, no, hold on.

Ruthi Corcoran: Because I, I think that's what's amazing about some of this new technology is it says, all right, we're gonna automate a lot of the, the generation part of your idea, right? Mm-hmm. , you can start with an idea and then use these different tools to make it a reality, and, right.

And the ownership there is squishy. It's unclear, right? It was, if I, I worked with the ai, I was the initiator. Maybe I do own it. Maybe I am the creator in a sense. Did I have a creative partner? Yes.

Alex Pokorny: Mm-hmm. .

Dave Dougherty: So the, okay. Not getting caught up on the one red herring.

Alex Pokorny: Um, you just threw it

Ruthi Corcoran: at her

Dave Dougherty: face though. No, I know.

And, you know, en enjoy that, that wet, slippery feeling. Um, , um, the, the thing about it though is a lot of the stuff that I'm seeing, one, you can create stuff with a huge amount of volume, which is cool. Yeah. Right? Yeah. However, to Alex's point, without the knowledge of the audience that you're targeting with their needs and wants and the, the regional, you know, dialect things, all of the stuff that we've talked about before, you are going to have to ab test the crap outta everything that you launch.

And that's gonna be such a long process to get to where you could, if you had already known those things. , right? Mm.

Ruthi Corcoran: I don't know. I've seen a lot of crappy ad copy. I think you have to do that anyways. So the difference is just whether or not you're paying an agency to make a bunch of crappy ad copy or you're just having chat, g p t do it for you either way, right?

Dave Dougherty: There is a lot of crap marketing out there, and I will readily agree with you on that. However, again, I think I've said this, but every time we bring up AI or whatever else, I am a thousand percent against lazy marketing because, you know, it is a craft and I've put in time for that craft, and I enjoy the craft and I hate to see other people, um, just not, you know?

Um, and that's probably my own thing to, to go over, but that's, that's a different podcast. So we won't get into that therapy. But the, um, . I honestly think that in order to automate the, the ads, right, go ahead and use chat. G p t. Cool. You saved a bunch of money on, on the, the front end, right? In terms of the creative and the whatever else, but how much money are you gonna be spending afterwards to fine tune it?

Whereas you know, if you already knew that audience, if you're doing something hyper-local, right? You need to know that audience already and then you can target it and go,

Ruthi Corcoran: right hot. Take the way that these natural language processing AI are evolving. I. I think in a not too distant future, they're gonna be able to give me a much better version of mm-hmm.

of a local language ad than I will. Right. They're gonna be able to say, this is how people in Australia seem to talk on the internet, so I'm gonna mimic that with my ad in a much better way than myself or my agency based here in the United States is gonna be able to do it. Mm-hmm. . And that, that to me might be an advantage that that picks up.

Is those little nuances in language, the jumper versus the sweater?

Dave Dougherty: Yes and no. You know, I think we're six months away from, you know, the first really huge, you know, mess up with the AI stuff. Right. Um, and it'll, it'll be fun to watch that, that

Alex Pokorny: plane. It's already been too Alex. Yeah. It's been too . What you got?

well, there was a CNET basically. Um, they had a bunch of articles. I think it was mostly like financial quarterly data, right? Which again, this isn't chat G P T, but it would be, it's structured data. So it's pretty easy to create analysis kind of based off of that saying this quarter is better than the last quarter.

Stuff like that. So they had a disclaimer on their pages saying that it was written, uh, by ai, but it was human edited, something to that state. Right? They recently mentioned that they're gonna pause that, um, and review it because they've got some, they got a lot of attention and they're kind of concerned about basically if that's gonna tank those pages or not.

And then bank rank dot, um, bank rate.com would be a worth one to look into after the podcast and kind of look at what they were doing. They were basically very, very public about AI created content. And then basically take a look at what kind of Google's response has been to it. Right. Um, , it's still allotted in the stage in the early stages where Google's trying to figure out what's going on.

I mean, there was the, the new New York Times article recently talking about the founders of Google being brought back in basically to say, how do we deal with ai? Mm-hmm. , the company really is a little bit at a loss of what to do. So I mean, there's, this is kind of the early stages, but you're gonna quickly see, you know, some, probably some pretty big, there's Google Slaps and Google bands.

I mean, you think about like, uh, BMW and I can't remember if it's Kohls or JC Petty. Big brands, they got hit with some pretty significant Google, you know, dot, you know, Google finds, which basically was just the, they got dinex or they got really pushed really far down in index. So even before it kind of hits a legal standpoint, which I'm sure it will soon, that's gonna happen too.

Back to the question though, last minute or two, I still am gonna bring up the phrase of, it depends, cuz I think we've all said it now. , um, bingo problem. Cause I think if you had, if you had um, like a straight e-commerce shop and you were just saying optimize for purchases, , you probably could, you probably could run it pretty darn programmatically, and it would, it would work out just fine.

If you had a really complex sale, a really complex product, or you know, something that was kind of touchy subject or something like that, yeah, you'd, you'd have to have a lot more hands on time. But if you just had a simple e-commerce store, you probably could just throw money at Google. The thing is, they'll probably broadband the heck out of it, and you'd still like waste a bunch of money that if you had a human, you could already do it better.

Mm-hmm. .

Dave Dougherty: So, and that's where the, the AI stuff around culturally sensitive topics. I mean, that's where I guess I'm, um, more concerned, right? Because we know the internet is a dumpster fire when it comes to, you know, that kind of stuff. Um, so if a bot is being trained off of, you know, what it finds off of that, then, then I get more worried.

Um, and when something blows up because of. A culturally insensitive robot. Uh, I think it should. And, you know, , they should get their McMuffins, you know, um, cuz that, that's that kind of lazy marketing piece where it's like, ooh, you needed to think about if I launched this, the next steps could be blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Now this is also coming from me having, you know, crisis management experience, um, and always pitching clients. Like really, honestly, you could have saved yourself $300,000 if you took five minutes just to think. Um, but instead, let me help you, right?

Ruthi Corcoran: sound bite. Take exactly five minutes just to think.

Mm-hmm. .

Alex Pokorny: Mm-hmm. . All right,

Dave Dougherty: so in the last segment, I like this, you know, as we're playing around with the, um, the, the show format, uh, recommendations. We'll do a lightning round cuz we went a little long. So, um, what, what caught your eye in the last week? Ruthy. You go,

Ruthi Corcoran: oh man, check out sap dot com's foldering structure for their different countries.

It's

Alex Pokorny: beautiful. I would check out, uh, Nike's EXL site map cuz it's fun. There's an KY little logo there, there's a couple other ones. The co, couple other companies have done something like that. So do something fun as well as you're doing your global strategy. You throwing something fun in your EXL site map that only other SEOs will care about.

Mm-hmm. .

Dave Dougherty: So I'm gonna do none of those. Uh, my um, Myself is completely non-work related. Um, uh, one of my favorite bands is Machine Head and three years ago they basically live streamed, uh, their European tour. So I've been watching like each concert as they, you know, went through, um, uh, yeah, their European tour in, you know, 20 whatever.

Ruthi Corcoran: It is both amazing and I need the time to be able to do something like

Alex Pokorny: this.

Dave Dougherty: Well, it's in the background while I'm doing other stuff, right? . So it's just, if you need a pick me up, put on a metal show and uh, and you just get that energy that, you know, helps you get through the 20000th line of Excel,

Alex Pokorny: European Tour

Dave Dougherty: Exactly. And it's really interesting to see the difference in how the crowds respond. You know, certain, certain audiences definitely bring it more than, uh, than others. So, um, . Yeah. Yeah. That's fun. So check out, uh, livestream concerts from your favorite bands. It's a YouTube rabbit hole that's totally worth going down.

Um, yeah.

Alex Pokorny: So anyway, music.

Dave Dougherty: All right. Thank you for hanging around. Um, I know we didn't come to a definitive, uh, conclusion on the sub foldering things, but we'll, uh, we'll come back to it cuz it's a debate that will forever rage on. So, uh, it's fun to have, uh, take care, like, subscribe, share, uh, follow, submit any questions, uh, in the comments or, um, on the, on the socials and let us know.

We'll, uh, we'll see you next week. Take care.

Alex Pokorny: All right, bye. Cheers.