Determine demand and selling strategies

To help ensure global customers can find your products, take steps to learn more about international SEO for your target markets. Google is the world’s most popular search engine, but there are some notable locale-specific search engines to consider as well:

• Baidu for China and Korea (www.baidu.com)
• Yahoo! for Japan (www.yahoo.jp)
• Yandex for Russia (www.yandex.com)

Each search engine has its own set of ranking factors and best practices, so make sure to do your homework to find out how to optimize your search engine rankings.

The language your website uses has a significant impact on your SEO success as well, especially internationally. It’s best to translate your website into the local language for each of your target markets, create a local website. By doing so, you could target the most relevant local words and phrases, thereby improve your search engine visibility.

1. 1Fast and easy to start: Established online marketplaces like eBay and Etsy can often give you better reach for lower cost. You could test demand for your products before committing a large sum to re-developing your existing site. Some of the advantages eBay offers include:
   • Eligible listings are automatically made available to millions of eBay buyers in more than 54 countries.
   • Powerful marketing tools to help you generate demand for your products.
   Also consider other online marketplaces that may be popular in your target market.
2. 2Optimize your current website, step-by-step: A slightly more advanced option is to optimize your current website for international customers. You can start small by simply highlighting your ability to accept international orders, providing information on which countries you serve, and detailing the shipping costs for each.
   
   Once you have more experience selling into a few markets, you can look into displaying your product prices in local currency, and eventually installing a multi-language toggle for your website.
3. 3Expand further with a custom website for specific markets: Setting up a local website normally takes significant investment in time and resource. There are though a number of partners who can help shortcut this process. PayPal has partnered with WebInterpret to offer an all in one localisation solution (demand generation, translation, payments, shipping & returns) to enable you to export to up to 56 markets with a simple plug in installation. Learn more

One way to improve international demand for your products is to identify and take advantage of local customs, trends, holidays, and even business practices in your target markets. Understanding country-specific traditions can be critical to selling the right products to the right customers at the right times, and to positioning those products in the right way.