By Judd Marcello, Smartling

To effectively compete in today’s global market, it’s no longer enough to have a website and SEO strategy targeted only at the English-speaking world. Companies that have customers around the globe — or multilingual customers in the U.S. — need to think about translating and localizing their websites, mobile apps and other digital content, and then optimizing each for relevant organic search ranking, traffic and conversions.

Here are five tips to help you master the global SEO process:

1. Your Customers Should Determine The Most Important International Markets

When kicking off a global SEO strategy, there are two important steps you must do before anything else: analyze your website’s current international organic traffic and search activity, and then identify and prioritize the most important international markets for your business.

When tackling the latter, the most important thing to remember is that the location and spoken languages of your customers and other target audiences matter the most. Global SEO will help you expand into new countries and reach new multilingual customers in the U.S., but you must first make sure you’re delivering high-quality localized content for your current customers.

2. Customize Your Translation And SEO Approach For Each Country And Culture

When it comes to translation and international SEO, there is no “one size fits all” approach. Every country and nationality is different. What works in one country might not work for the rest — even within countries that speak the same language, their behavior and traditions will be different. For example, by some estimates, there are more than 100 languages spoken in India. And English in the U.S. is very different from English in the U.K., just as Spanish spoken in Spain is very different from Spanish spoken in various Latin American countries.

The best global SEO strategies go beyond simply enabling new languages on a current company website. Rather, they involve developing completely new websites that target each individual country that has been identified as a priority. They not only localize content and SEO, but the overall user experience as well.

3. Use A Trusted, Proven Translation Resource

Leveraging the right translation resources — those that you can count on to deliver high-quality multilingual content that truly reflects the way your audiences live, act and speak — is imperative to a successful SEO strategy. Different markets describe points and ideas differently, so content and keyword lists have to be generated and customized by country and language. A trusted translation resource, in combination with a translation management software platform, can help you localize the user experience and implement the right topics, terms and phrases for each specific country and language.

4. Strive For Local Inbound Links

A global SEO strategy should strive for local inbound links, such as those from blogs and social media. If you’ve gone through the trouble of developing a specific country- or language-based site, researching relevant keywords and creating high-quality multilingual content, you don’t want inbound links to fall by the wayside. Off-site SEO, such as inbound links, give sites authority; and authority translates to higher search engine results pages (SERPs). Additionally, links within a native country matter to many global search engines — particularly if the site is also hosted within that country. Building your brand name is important when you are looking to go global, and one major way of achieving this goal is to create authority through linking.

5. Continuously Monitor Your International Search Results

After you’ve launched and optimized your international Web versions, you should continue monitoring your search results for each country and language. Doing so will help you verify how you’re ranking against your competitors in your international markets and identify trends in the results, such as the types of pages that are ranked and how well they are optimized.

Translation + International SEO = Global Awareness

When paired with high-quality multilingual content that’s been translated and localized for each specific country and language, a global SEO strategy can have a tremendous impact on brand awareness, the customer experience and the company's bottom line. In today’s crowded marketplace, translation and global SEO are the keys to differentiating your business, and attracting and retaining customers around the world.

Judd Marcello is the VP of Marketing at Smartling, a New York-based translation management software platform company.

InsideView, a SaaS company that provides business intelligence to marketing and sales teams, announced the integration of its InsideView Target platform with Marketo. The integration positions Marketo users to use insights found within InsideView to build targeted, segmented lists for highly personalized campaigns.

InsideView Target is designed to provide users accurate demographic, firmographic and social insights for a more holistic view of their target audience. Users can then use this data to help build personalized lists, designed to enhance targeting and engagement — while also producing better quality leads.

Salesforce launched two new tools for the Salesforce Pardot platform, both designed to help B2B marketers visualize campaign effectiveness and leverage adaptive lead nurturing tools.

Sales Cloud Engage, a mobile marketing tool intended to accelerate sales teams with marketing-approved messaging, is expected to be available by the end of April. Intelligent Engagement Studio, a tool designed to help marketing and sales teams create adaptive nurture campaigns with testing and reporting capabilities, is expected to be in pilot in the second half of 2015.

ON24 will integrate with Act-On Software, a move designed to combine the webinar marketing platform's analytics into the marketing automation platform to enhance lead qualification and accelerate sales.

The integration is intended to boost lead scoring and nurturing processes and also can be used to build lists, add contacts and insert activity history into Act-On.

By Andy Bear, Quad/Graphics

“Consumers' time and attention around media is in flux…while the risks and rewards are potentially high in this environment, the ability to stake a claim in the expanding industry pie is central to companies’ growth,” according to a Nielson report released in the fourth quarter of 2014 about media and technology user trends.

As technology becomes an increasingly larger part of consumers’ lives, it should be no surprise that it is also becoming more and more critical to marketing strategy. Marketers must think smarter and leverage technology tools to create strategic, targeted messaging in order to reap the benefits.

Phonami Call Data Manager is a tool designed to boost productivity by automating the call logging process.

Marketo unveiled new integrations with Google AdWords and Google Analytics, which position Marketo users to track and measure ad spending and provide more targeted messaging.

The integrations are designed to enable marketers to link Marketo data such as firmographic and customer profile information to their Google Analytics platform to personalize campaigns. Offline activities that are tracked in Marketo — such as when a lead is qualified and a deal is closed — can be exported to AdWords to measure the ROI of digital ad campaigns.