Expanding Your Web Business Overseas Pt1

Today I would like give you an introduction into how you can begin to expand your web business overseas.

Now, why would you want to expand your web business overseas? Well there could be any number of reasons for this such as, to expand your reach, to find a stronger market, to increase your profits or whatever other reason you may have.

Just to mention quickly, eventually you may want to rank well worldwide, however by targeting each country specifically you can more gradually grow your business and take advantage of less competition.

Determining Which Country To Conquer Next

So you have your reasons why you want to expand your web business, but what country should you go for? Determining this could be simply a personal choice or on the other hand it can be a choice based on a few factors like market potential and feasibility. There are few tools available which you can utilise to determine which countries have a strong market potential, personally I like to do a 3 step process.

Firstly, I use Google Trends and Google Insights to determine which countries are currently trending and which has the current highest search volumes for my relevant keywords.

Next I then go ahead and double check search volumes using Google Keyword Tool for my relevant keywords and see if there is in fact enough interest.

Lastly I check the competition using a simple Google country specific search and decide whether or not it really is worth pursuing.

Let’s look at an example – Let’s say you have an Australian based office stationery company and you are looking to expand your web business overseas. So we do our initial research in Google Trends and insight using the keywords ‘office stationery’ & ‘office stationary’ to cover common misspellings and as you can see below New Zealand is a clear stand out. However, this is based on the country specific trends and volumes, so as you could probably understand considering the population of New Zealand to the other countries listed the market may not be that big.

Let’s have a look at New Zealand anyway plus United Kingdom and the United States to stick with mainly English speaking countries.

Taking the countries we have decided on from the previous we will look at each of the countries search volumes using Google’s Keyword Tool, we just need to select each specific country each time we do a search by clicking the ‘edit’ link next to the default country above the search box.

After finding each of the traffic volumes, we can then search for the competition in each of the countries search engines (i.e google.co.uk for United Kingdom) using “” on either side of the keyword. So for our keywords ‘office stationery’ & ‘office stationary’ in the UK our search will look like the following:

As you can see the search was done from google.co.uk, “office stationary” was the search term, only pages from UK was selected and this resulted in a competition of 485,000 pages.

By doing the above for each of the chosen countries for the keyword ‘office stationery’ & ‘office stationary’ added together we get the following results:

As you may be able to see New Zealand would be a reasonably easy market although volume isn’t as too great, still may be worth the effort though. Ideally you would most likely want to gain a share of the UK market place although it would require a lot more effort as the competition is reasonably high.

In Part 2 of this post I go through some strategies to gain better rankings overseas.