This week we speak to Lidia Infante, Senior International Strategist at Rise At Seven, about how to succeed when working in SEO markets where you don't speak the language.

Where to find Lidia:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/LidiaInfanteM

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lidiainfante/

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Episode Sponsor

Massive shout out to NOVOS for sponsoring the full second season of WTSPodcast.

NOVOS, the London-based eCommerce SEO agency, has won multiple awards for their SEO campaigns including Best Global SEO Agency of The Year 2 years running. Trusted by over 150 global eCommerce brands including the likes of Bloom & Wild, Patch and Thread, NOVOS provides technical eCommerce SEO expertise with a creative edge by specialising across platforms like Shopify & Magento. They have been named as one of 2021's best workplaces in the UK and with a diverse, gender-balanced team are a culture-first agency.

Where to find Novos:

Website - https://thisisnovos.com/

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/thisisnovos

Twitter - https://twitter.com/thisisnovos

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/thisisnovos/

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Episode Transcript:

Sarah: Hello, and welcome to the Women in Tech SEO podcast, where your hosts are myself, Sarah McDowell, and the wonderful Areej AbuAli. Today, we have a wonderful guest lined up for you. And that is Lidia Infante who has been in SEO for seven years working in-house for media outlets, B2B and e-commerce sites. She moved from Barcelona to Sheffield to join the agency world at Rise at Seven.

This season is sponsored by NOVOS. NOVOS, the London-based eCommerce SEO agency, has won multiple awards for their SEO campaigns including Best Global SEO Agency of The Year 2 years running. Trusted by over 150 global eCommerce brands including the likes of Bloom & Wild, Patch and Thread, 

NOVOS provides technical eCommerce SEO expertise with a creative edge by specialising across platforms like Shopify & Magento. They have been named as one of 2021's best workplaces in the UK and with a diverse, gender-balanced team are a culture-first agency. Check them out on thisisnovos.com or follow on Linkedin @thisisnovos

Sarah: Now I imagine that Sheffield is very different to Barcelona.

Lidia: It's very, very different. It's not as rainy as I was expecting to be fair, but it's still not warm and sunny.

Sarah: Ah, so you were, you warned about the British UK weather before moving over?

Lidia: I was told it was going to be miserable. We kind of just feel like Brits enjoy complaining about the weather rather than the weather being awful.

Sarah: Would you be able to give our listeners a brief overview of yourself and what you do and sort of like how you got into this world of SEO?

Lidia: So I work as senior international strategies that writes a seven, which means that I work with a digital strategy for global brands and I'm also running our European expansion, which means that I'm sort of managing the Germans strategies, the strategies we're currently hiring for Spanish strategies as well.

And this involves a lot of analyzing the claim performance reporting, communicating, checking that everything's on track. And then we're actually impacting the business bottom line, not just like. Building links for the sake of building links or building content for the sake of building content.

And I came into SEO in a bit of a weird, funny way. I was working in PPC as many of us do, but we never really talked about it. I was working in PPC for an international e-commerce site, where, when I decided to found my own women's rights magazine, I wanted to do something really light, really funny that wasn't very brainy and difficult.

Just something that was really approachable like, Everybody to get what women's rights are about and what feminism is about. And that was at the time where Facebook was sending traffic cutting traffic to publishers. So I realized that SEO was, it had a lot of potential. I already had fewer research skills and some information on how SEO worked from my work in the e-commerce site.

So I just went for it. And I realized that it was a really good channel to meet people where they are in need. Where, so in that micro moment where they were looking for the answer to a question or a resource, being able to be there and meet their needs was like something really meaningful, something really key.

And it meant a lot to me as an activist at the time, to be able to support those women who were looking for answers or help or whatever, and have the resources to be there ranking and helping them. So that's really what got me into SEO.

Sarah: Wonderful. And I love the fact that’s how you got into SEO because that's a very interesting story.

[Quick Fire Questions]

I'm going to move on to sort of, because obviously this is the women in tech SEO podcast. So we're just going to ask you a few questions around that sort of subject with my first one being what empowers you to be the brilliant woman you are today?

Lidia: Am I a brilliant woman? I try to be. I wouldn't know what to answer to be honest. I think what empowers me to be like the SEO that I am today, the brilliant woman that I am today. Isn't part of the support of the community. Like the women in the tech community that we initially built and we've all been building together really.

Give us a very powerful sense of belonging and with all of the networking that we can do with each other, we can really level the playing field a little bit because it's a very active kind of. Networking, a very active kind of help that we're doing for each other, which really can bring us back to the level of men who have been in the industry for a really, really long time.

So yet we're basically skipping all of the gatekeepers and making our own little corner in the industry.

Sarah: Yes, we are. Indeed. And if you could give one quick bit of advice to women starting out in the industry, what would that be?

Lidia: I would use the piece of advice that has helped me the most in my job, which is that I received an email from Carrie Rose just like a company wide email, but it's really, really stuck with me.

And it's if you're 70% sure of something go and do it, if you're less than 70% sure of that ask your peers and I think this is a confidence builder for sure. 

Sarah: I've not heard that advice before. And I love when I ask that question and something completely new comes out and I'm going to start using that myself.

Lidia: It's really good. It changed my life

Sarah: So we got you on today to talk about working in SEO markets where you don't speak the language. So. To sort of kick things off. I guess one of the biggest barriers is understanding the context of the language in order for them to work with the data, because obviously SEO is very data led. So what I mean, what can you do about this?

Lidia: So what I like doing is up-skilling my team into not having to understand. The words in order to work with the data. If you have a very solid process of keyword research and reporting, you should not need the words to understand the numbers. But that's when it comes to reporting and keyword research.

For other things you absolutely do need the input of a native speaker. If a company is trying to expand into a market, they probably will have someone who speaks a language, at least somewhere in the business. Otherwise it's going to be very difficult to fulfill those needs. So what I like to do is I get just the approval of someone that's in there.

So campaign ideas always bring in a native into the Ideation and the brainstorming always gets sign-off from them for the angles and stuff that you're going to put out in front of the media. Obviously get creative translation for the work that you're doing. And other than that, you just need like, Some help with the keyword research when it comes to like finalizing it and saying, this is the keywords that we are going to tackle, just to make sure that you're not missing some big contextual thing around one keyword or the other, but yeah, mostly is have a solid process that you trust and have a native speaker to verify that you've done a good job.

Sarah: And I suppose, with having a process like once you've got like a solid tool, you've got something to work with, but as you're sort of working with this process and you're working with this choice that you've put in place that can be flexible, I'm guessing. And you can change. As you're working in different markets you're sort of like learning more as you go along. So I suppose It's like really good to have a process, but would you say it needs to be flexible as well?

Lidia: Yeah, definitely. It needs to be flexible when working with clients. I'm an alloy that our agents, society, it's all about the clients and it's to be flexible when communicating with your own team because everybody's going to have different needs.

And also I like to keep track of the effectiveness of the process keeping track of my approval rate. So for example, when I'm doing keyword research, every time that I go check with The native speaker of the market, whether my keywords are right or wrong. I get to write down the percentage of keywords that have been approved.

Same for campaign ideas. I like to keep approval rates. Kind of going so I can see if there's a drop somewhere. It means that there might have been a change in the market and it's time to update the processes. So it's good to also keep a poll on the health of your own processes. Are there's

Sarah: Are there sort of some common reasons why keywords will get sort of not approved. Or does it really depend on the market that you're working with and at the time, I suppose as well.

Lidia: Yeah. So it will mostly be because something is like some of the keywords that you have are also a synonym of something else, which is what's driving the volume, for example, or so in the, if you were.

Researching in the Spanish market. And you were to use the word spring, which is Primavera. You might find a really, really high, high volume, and that could be due to the Primavera festival that happens in Barcelona. So it can be both like that's a synonym of a word that you should not be using, or it has some type of cultural relevance, a brand or a name or an event.

Sarah: Another thing that I suppose we have to think about when working in different markets across the globe is the SEO maturity of the place that you're working with. And I suppose we're not just talking about SEO maturity on Google's side, but also about the market and customers. So what sort of advice would you have here to give, to give our listeners.

Lidia: Right. This one's a really, really tricky one. Recently we were having a Twitter conversation and I asked John Mueller from Google to have some input on what it takes to succeed in international SEO. The way that I was talking about international SEO and the. Way that the industry usually talks about international SEO is quite different.

I'm not usually talking about technical factors. I'm more talking about human factors. Those human factors can be the people that are writing or coding, the CMS, the people that are building Google, the people that are in the industry doing SEO. Right? So for example, in the Spanish market, there is a lot of link buying, which affects the way that.

Customers see link building the way that SEO is approaching building and the way that media outlets are used to working with PR agencies, right. They're they're used to getting paid to publish those links unless they're actively looking for a story. So that's one of the things that. We need to take into account where the ecosystem looks like.

We also need to take into account the level of understanding that Google is going to have of the language. And there really is no easy way to go about it. A lot of the new, new ways and the evolving ways in which SEO tactics succeed is due to how Google is getting better at processing natural language.

But it's not getting better at the same pace for every language. So it's very, very safe to assume that the first language that it's going to be good at is English. I would kind of hope that the second one will be Spanish, but we really have not a great way of knowing that. So it's mostly about talking to SEOs in the industry and having direct experience within those markets.

I am lucky to have experienced that. Italian French, German, British Australian Spanish, and New Zealand market personally. But if I were to go on another market, I would probably try and have some conversations with people who are already working on those,

Sarah: I suppose. I don't work in multi-lingual SEO, so I didn't appreciate the fact that yeah, like predominantly.

Google understands like English, doesn't it? And it's got a long way to go to understand other languages and stuff. And I suppose, I mean, will they ever get to a point where they can understand languages as well as English? I don't know.

Lidia: Probably. I guess it's worth it for them to invest in it. So my guess is that yes.

Sarah: Definitely. Definitely. Awesome. Okay. So earlier on you, so you sort of scratch the surface about digital PR because obviously if we think about link-building tactics in different markets, I suppose that there are some key challenges that you'll face when working in a market that you're not familiar with.

So things that I'm thinking here are like sensitive subject areas, time differences identify what's trending. Are there any other challenges and how, how can you go about sort of dealing with these.

Lidia: Oh yeah. So when it comes to sensitive subject areas, for example again, and this is becoming a theme tech with a local we're one of our clients.

We were working with one of our financial clients across multiple territories. We work with them in the UK and we also work with them in Spain in the UK. Stories about the Royal family are really good. They work really well all of the time. If we were to use those stories in the Spanish media, we would probably like to get the police knocking on our door at some point.

So it is that type of local knowledge. That's going to help you understand where you shouldn't be. Talking about right. For example the very same client we're working with in Germany as well. We know not to go close to the pension subject. So we wouldn't be talking about pensions.

I don't exactly understand why Samira, our German PR, would know for sure. But that's, you kind of need to be having those conversations with your clients and with your team, for sure. Like actively having them.

Sarah: It sounds like a running theme throughout what we were talking about is having someone native that can act as like an advisor, I suppose, and making sure that you are successful and you don't end up in prison because you thought about the Spanish. Do you know that that's not an idea? What is it?

Lidia: It's not, no. Yeah, it sounds like it can be like a bit of a trick to talk about doing multilingual SEO, but talk about also having a person that speaks the language and knows the culture, but that doesn't mean that that's your SEO. It can be anyone within your business and you need to be able to implement processes with your design team, with your data team with everybody around the business on how to tackle international and multilingual challenges.

Sarah: Yes. And I'm guessing as well that like there's different rules and stuff to follow as well. Cause obviously in the UK. And I'm, I'm going a bit off piece here. But there's certain cookie rules isn't that things. And I know that. Some are European standards, but some are specific to the country and stuff.

So I'm guessing there's a lot to get your head around. Isn't there. There's not just the sort of knowing the language and understanding the context and understanding the culture and all that trend in, and what's doing what not to do, but there must also be sort of rules and regulations as well.

Lidia: Yeah. It comes back to something that I mentioned earlier on that if you are opening a business somewhere else, somewhere in the world where you're not actually bays or where you're not from you need to. Either have a good infrastructure for it, or just don't do that. I don't, I don't mean to discourage anyone from liking internationalization, quite the contrary. But you definitely will have, will need at some point legal structure and legal advisors that are going to help you with that.

Sarah: What do you say that a global campaign compared with a specific. A campaign specific to a country, are they the same or are they different?

Lidia: Right. So when you're doing a campaign for one country like a country, that's not English, non-English speaking, you are unlikely to get international pickup, right?

If you're doing it in Spanish, you are likely to get a pickup in Latin America. But if you want to do something global and big you could. Start out in English. If you're doing a campaign in the U S or in the UK, approach the media within your country and then start outreaching internationally, this also helps you build a proof of concept.

So you can learn from this, whether or not your campaign is working in Germany or the Netherlands or Italy, any videos working in these countries, it is worth involving your a PR strategist. And translating the campaign into those countries, especially for global brands.

Sarah: Are there any tools, so obviously I'm guessing the sort of like standard SEO tools that like we use, but are there any like specific to like languages?

Lidia: To be fair or not really. Anyone who's worked in SEO in another language can tell you for sure that search volumes are not as accurate in other languages. All the information that you're getting from tools is just. Less reliable everywhere, which is why I think some countries have really, really amazing SEOs that have to build their own tools or work a lot more with, with your eyes and your hands.

Then you're then the tool, which is I think a very common sin within the SEO industry. Sometimes you even forget to look at the SERPs yourself because you're seeing them through SEMrush or through age rubs or whatever. So I would say. You end up using your brain, your hands and your eyes a lot more in international SEO and multilingual SEO than you do tools in comparison to an English speaking market.

Yeah, that is a big challenge.

Sarah: Yeah. And I have an issue anyway with keyword research because you know that like the data is like a hundred percent accurate anyway, because when I'm doing keyword research and stuff, I'm like people will spout things in different ways. They'll spell things wrong.

Like it's an average at the end of the day, isn't it? And yeah, I suppose. I can see how that's even more of a challenge when you're...