Do you sometimes doubt investing in SEO for your webpage? 

Do you feel that you don’t know if it is worth it, so you decide it is better not to take action than to waste money? 

Investing in the SEO market may seem useless for many owners of online businesses, but sometimes doing nothing can cost you more than deciding to do something which seems “unworthy”. 

Maintaining a website is not an easy task, and neither finding the right steps to take to keep it “alive” for the potential customers. The good news is that it’s not impossible, as lots of high-ranked online pages prove.

How are we managing to do this and are there some tips we can learn about Europe in terms of SEO? What are the elements we should take into account while designing our website, to make it “run” in Europe? 

These are the questions we will try to answer in the following article. Are you ready? Ok, let’s start.

Learning About Search Engines in Europe

When we are talking about Europe, we used to think that we are talking only about the countries from the EU, but this is a wrong approach. 

Europe consists of more countries than the EU does and each of them, of course, has its cultural particularities.  Besides the language, needs, and level of development, each folk has its own habits about the search engines use. What am I talking about? Read further.

Russia, for example, compared to Romania and many other European countries, doesn’t consider Google as the main search engine. The number one search engine for Russia is Yandex, and it seems that not only European Russia (Moscow and Saint Petersburg) is using it, but also the other part of the country which is considered as a part of Asia. 

Why Yandex? Because it seems to be more “skillful” when it comes to understanding complex grammatical structures, as the Russian language has.  Plus, Yandex was designed to use the Cyrillic alphabet. So, if you are planning to “travel all around Europe” with your webpage, take this into account, especially if Russia is one of your main targets.

Bing is gaining more and more popularity in the UK and France. Although Google still has the highest use, it seems that Bing now powers one of five search engines from the UK and is dominating as one of the major search engines in France. 

Bing aims to become the most used search engine in the France market. Whether we will manage or not to do this, we don’t know, but we also can’t ignore this reality. 

In Germany and Spain, after Google, Conduit is the second most used search engine. You may see it as an “alternative”, but this “alternative” overcame Bing and Yahoo when it comes to market share. In Spain, researchers show, it is even more used than in Germany.

In other European countries, you can rely on Google, without any concern, but try to always keep up with the news about this subject. 

Is language a big issue when optimizing your website for Europe?

Europe is considered to have over 200 official languages, but taking into account the dialects it counts over 1000. 

So what do we do? Translate and optimize our webpage in all languages. This may be an option, but wait, you don’t need to hurry! I suggest you take a break and think, first of all, about the cultural differences between countries before starting to deal with the languages. 

Austria, for example, speaks the same language as Germany, but does it mean they are the same folk and they have the same habits of using search engines? Does it mean they are interested in the same topics? Of course, no! The language barrier is the smallest thing we can discuss in this case. Why? Simple because if you try to target Germany and Austria at the same time, you will probably fail. 

Austria seems to trust fewer German websites, just because it has a different culture, and undoubtedly Austrians would prefer buying better from their websites than from “outsiders”. 

“Europe is complicated” you may think and you are right, but we are all adults here and we understand that there is nothing easy without learning. We can handle “complicated things” only by studying how to do this.

So how we are dealing with the language when optimising our website?

Well, first of all, to make a first logical step ahead, maybe you need to target the first 5 European countries to focus on the next period. They may be the countries which are speaking all English. Make a list and begin to study each of them, one by one. Learn about:

• Their culture: how do they live, which time they are mostly online, what are they searching for more usually.
• Their history may seem useless, but knowing the history of folk, you are learning a lot about the way people are “shaped”. History says a lot about folk psychology.
• Hiring a native language speaker for writing your content. You may take this into account. Sometimes working alone can cost you more than paying somebody to help. A native speaker will know how to approach the subjects in such a way as to make them attractive to the country he is born and living. 

And of course, if you have the possibility – travel. See with your own eyes how people from the cultures you are targeting are living, and what their daily needs are, talk to them, and try to understand their way of seeing the world. 

“Too complicated, I dropped this idea!”

“Do it”, I would say in other circumstances, but I cannot advise you to do this when it comes to optimizing your website for Europe. And I’ll explain to you why.

Europe is a big market, bigger than you ever imagined! Europeans live in an online world more than other continents, which means they are more active online and more likely to become devoted customers for the products they need. 

The question is what do they need and how are you “reaching their hearts” to make your products attractive for them?

If you still didn’t find an answer and you need help with this, we are here to initialize you on the topic. Sometimes the first steps may be determinants. Make the first steps with us!