In this episode of How About Some Search?, Adam Malamis leads a panel on what changes when SEO has to work across countries, languages, teams, legal requirements, market priorities, and different levels of internal maturity.
Veruska Anconitano, Sarah Fitzpatrick, and Kevin MacKenzie share real client examples, including German buyers who read the entire page before clicking a CTA, Spanish speakers hidden inside US analytics, Quebec as the rare North American market where Pepsi outsells Coca-Cola, and why offline advertising can still drive online brand search.
Brought to you by Gander AI Search Intelligence.
Watch The Recording
Topics Covered
- Small-site SEO versus enterprise SEO: optimizing systems, not pages
- What global brands must account for that single-market brands usually do not
- How to decide which markets need their own strategy
- Global versus local ownership and governance
- Cultural differences that change conversion behavior
- How search behavior differs across Germany, Japan, Northern Europe, Quebec, and other markets
- Whether authority earned in one market can benefit another
- How AI search changes discovery, visibility, and brand fidelity
- How to manage reputation risk when AI systems describe a brand incorrectly
- What single-market SEOs should learn before moving into global enterprise search
Key Takeaways
- Enterprise SEO is about systems. Page-level work still matters, but enterprise SEO depends on scalable frameworks, templates, workflows, and governance.
- Localization is more than translation. Brands need to adapt the whole customer journey, including content depth, messaging, conversion paths, and market expectations.
- Local expertise prevents mistakes. Native speakers and local operators help teams understand cultural nuance before problems are scaled across markets.
- Market expansion should be data-led. Traffic, sales, support readiness, and customer-care capacity matter before a brand decides to enter a market.
- AI search makes brand fidelity harder and more important. Being described incorrectly can be more damaging than not appearing at all.
- Offline still drives online discovery. Sponsorships, stadium ads, and local brand awareness can generate branded search demand and strengthen digital visibility.
- Authority does not automatically transfer. Global brands still need relevance, relationships, and proof inside each market they want to win.
Panelists
Veruska Anconitano
Veruska Anconitano is an international SEO and global growth consultant who helps companies expand into new markets, especially non-English-speaking markets, through organic growth.
Sarah Fitzpatrick
Sarah Fitzpatrick is an SEO consultant based in Ireland, helping brands and agencies across SEO strategy, technical SEO, international content, YouTube, and AI search.
Kevin MacKenzie
Kevin MacKenzie is GEO Strategy Lead at VERB Interactive, with deep experience helping large brands understand AI visibility, brand presence, and how those signals move across international markets.
Connect with the Guests
About Adam Malamis
Adam Malamis is the Founder of Gander AI Search Intelligence, a platform that helps B2B agencies and sophisticated brands understand their reputation and visibility across leading AI search engines including ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and AI Overviews.
With more than two decades of experience making complex digital platforms accessible and easy to use, often in regulated sectors like healthcare and finance, Adam leads a senior team building AI analytics that link every metric back to the original, unmodified AI response.
About How About Some Search?
How About Some Search? is a limited series from How About Some Marketing, where three industry experts unpack organic search every month.
Connect With Us
Full Transcript
[00:00:00] Adam: And it looks like we are live. Welcome to episode two of How About Some Search? Today we're diving into global and enterprise SEO and are joined by three expert panelists.
Veruska Anconitano, international SEO and global growth consultant; Sarah Fitzpatrick, senior SEO and AI search consultant; and Kevin McKenzie, GEO strategy lead at Verb Interactive.
Welcome everyone.
Veruska, would you mind starting with an introduction?
[00:00:28] Veruska: Sure. Hello everyone, and thanks Adam for having me on the panel. I am Veruska, I am an international
SEO and organic growth consultant. My job is help companies expand into new markets and particularly non-English speaking markets through our organic growth.
[00:00:46] Adam: Thank you.
[00:00:46] Kevin: Sure. I'm Kevin McKenzie. I've been doing SEO for the better part of the last 15 years. Currently my focus is really on the LLM search model and working with large brands, helping them understand how visibility works, both at the mechanical level, but the brand presence, and then how that flows out into international markets
[00:01:07] Sarah: Hi, everyone. I'm Sara. I'm an SEO consultant based in Ireland, so I run my own SEO consultancy helping brands and agencies across the whole of SEO, whether it's SEO strategy, technical, international content, YouTube, and nowadays AI search as well. My main kind of mission with all of my clients is to cut through the noise of SEO that comes with a long list of recommendations, and get to the good stuff of what drives performance and hits that bottom line.
[00:01:37] Adam: Okay, thanks everyone. Let's jump right in. When I was doing research for the podcast,
I was thinking about what small site SEO looks like for optimization, and then it's like SEO or smaller site SEO is optimizing pages while it feels like enterprise or global SEO is increasingly about optimizing systems that generate and govern those pages.
Would you say that's a fair distinction? Veruska, let's start with you.
[00:02:04] Veruska: Yeah, it is a pretty fair distinction. I think when you work on a smaller site
you can create impact, sometimes very often by simply optimize one page to page, to pages, so basically optimize individual pages and you see results.
When you work with the enterprise clients and website, the bigger opportunity is in the system.
So how you templatize things, how do you streamline workflows, and how you put governance on top of everything. 'Cause the problem with big website is that if something is wrong at a system level, it multiplies over and over, and imagine if this happens for multiple languages.
It's basically a disaster.
And it's very hard to recover a website, a big website when the underlying system doesn't work. I don't know what you think guys, but
me it is.
[00:02:57] Sarah: I agree. I think when you're working on an enterprise level, you're definitely scaling up a lot of the fundamentals that you've built already, and as Veruska just said, you don't wanna scale up your problems, too, because then you've created this whole kind of nightmare of fix after fix.
But you really need to get those good fundamentals that come with a smaller website perfect at that fundamental level before you start to get to the enterprise level, just prevent that. I think as well, it's also fair to like on an enterprise level, and Adam, you're right that it's about processes and systems, but I think it's also about alignment across teams, people as well.
When you're at an enterprise SEO level you need to get buy-in from people who are not SEOs. There's a lot of people who are stakeholders, who are decision makers, who don't necessarily understand SEO, and it's not their job to, but it is kind of your job to speak to them in a way that they can understand SEO from an action and impact kind of
view.
And that's the way I always look at it, like what action do I need from these people to drive that impact? And then that's the best way to communicate with them. You can have the most amazing list of SEO recommendations, but if you don't have the buy-in, that's where they stay in the list and you will not see the impact then if there's no action.
[00:04:17] Adam: Okay. Kevin, anything to add?
[00:04:20] Kevin: Similar line of thought. I think we're all aligned here. I think of it often in terms of
building out a framework, but that framework needs to be scalable and exactly this idea that your stakeholders, they have to be able to work within that framework or the whole thing is going to fail.
If you give them really rigid guidelines and don't incorporate their thoughts, their work processes, and then the ability to localize that page information, it's really not gonna work.
[00:04:46] Adam: What considerations would you say that a global brand has to account for
that local or single market brands typically don't?
And how do you decide which markets require different strategies? Kevin, let's start with you.
[00:05:03] Kevin: Where to begin? Again, I think a lot of this is the kind of bottom-up feeding to the master system. So you really need to understand within a particular market what are the sensitivities and also what are their priorities, what's important to that particular market, because that may not align with the master brand existence.
And often by digging down, you start to discover that there's very unique specific market requirements and sensitivities, and then that flows into language
considerations. And I think we have people here that are real experts in that area, so I'm gonna leave it there.
[00:05:43] Adam: Sarah?
[00:05:44] Sarah: Yeah. I think as well you need to consider your relevance to these markets.
Just because you're relevant in one market doesn't mean you're relevant everywhere, even if you are, a big enterprise kind of a brand. You can't just presume, "Oh, this worked in this market, so now we can just copy and paste across the board." You need to just not presume anything.
You need to do your research. You need to speak to people like Veruska. You need to speak to native speakers. You need to understand the demands and the expectations of whatever market you're about to go into. And then do your research first and then act based off that, which I think Veruska will definitely articulate better than me.
[00:06:23] Veruska: Yeah, I actually agree. On top of this one of the biggest issues that I still see across global companies is not too much expectations with reality, and reality can be formed only if you work with a market research team that can help you understand
the market. And not in terms of just the language that the market speak, but also the issues that they're having.
[00:06:50] Veruska: What is the buying in terms of market share? What are the main players in and outside your niche? So language is a part of this, but there is another layer on top of this
which is understanding the markets before you scale or before you start.
I could go there, I could be present there, I shouldn't. And I don't want to jeopardize this conversation, but there's even another level before you get into this. How ready is your company to go international? Do you have the support to go international? Do you have salespeople?
Do you have customer care? Are you able to answer to someone in Spanish,
if they write in Spanish?
Or do they, do you default to English, or do you default them to a help center that it is in English, or do you default them to an AI-generated answer that doesn't answer to them at all because it doesn't understand them? So it is an SEO organic problem, but it's mainly a market problem. And that's why there's a lot of discrepancies, a lot of
[00:08:05] Speaker 11: issues
[00:08:05] Veruska: for companies that just go global because they see their competitors or they see an opportunity because the market is strong from an economic perspective.
[00:08:14] Adam: So it's really interesting, Veruska. You said that
you didn't wanna jeopardize the conversation, but let's jeopardize it. Let's get down this rabbit hole, 'cause I'm super interested. When you talk about how companies need to determine
[00:08:26] Speaker: the factors that go into them being ready to go to a
[00:08:29] Adam: specific market.
If you're approached, what are the things that you look for that are green flags?
[00:08:35] Veruska: There are two basic things. My very first recommendation is to look at the data. Do you have people coming from non-English speaking countries?
And what's the best approach?
Sometimes I have projects where people think that every person from the US come to the US website in English, but in the US there is a massive amount of Spanish, Mexican Spanish-speaking people, and they are in your data.
So your data are the biggest source to start layering down the other considerations on top. So if you don't have anyone coming from Japan, why you want to go to Japan first? Maybe you have quite a big chunk of people coming from France.
And that could be your market, or at least the market you should consider, assuming that
you will also do market research and everything else Sarah
said. So for me the basic things is the data. Sales call, analytics, anything that you can gather from other stakeholders in the same company that may have much more visibility than you.
[00:09:45] Adam: Kevin, Sarah?
[00:09:47] Sarah: I agree with everything that Veruska said. I think she's spot on in terms of you need to ask yourself first why are we even going there?
Like, where is there demand there? Are we already getting traffic from that market? What is the kind of traffic like? Is it high impressions, low clicks? Are we getting high clicks, low conversion? Are we set up in terms of landing page? And then from even from after they convert or just about to the consideration stage can our team even deal with it?
Is customer care ready to answer those questions? 'Cause you don't wanna get down the route then where you're marketing everywhere, but then your customer care is terrible in that market because then that brings up a whole other host of issues. So I think you need to prepare big time and research as well.
I don't think you can just wing going into a new market, especially a really big market. I think it's something that you definitely need to speak to market experts and people like Veruska who can tell you what to expect when you do enter a new market.
Because if you're not prepared, it's the classic saying, fail to prepare, prepare to fail. And I think in terms of internationalizing your business that's true.
[00:10:56] Adam: Kevin, you had mentioned earlier that there has to be a flexible sort of system and governance model.
When you're working with multinationals, how do you see typically and what do you vie for in terms of ownership between the global and local marketing?
[00:11:12] Kevin: Yeah, 100%. So the thinking is you want to set the guidelines and build the backend infrastructure, but the actual content population to do this thoughtfully needs to happen at the local level.
And so typically that flows through a brand management process, and this kind of comes back to what we were just
speaking about, that now in this new LLM reality doesn't just live inside of our web content. It extends to PR and media impressions. We need to be thinking about the entire ecosystem.
And so that kind of plays out in when you're designing your content, you have to take those other factors into your consideration. If you're gonna service that market and do the job, to Veruska's point, you've gotta look at the data. How are you sitting within that particular market?
Because you may have very specific geocentric issues that you need to address before you build out this whole web system.
[00:12:14] Adam: So as we get more into the
very specific piece where I think everyone's aligned that if you're going to have a global marketing team, you still need people within that locale to be able to market effectively.
So when we're thinking about that, what kinds of cultural differences do you account for when you start optimizing search experiences
across markets? And how do those differences affect conversion behavior?
Sarah, let's start with you.
[00:12:42] Sarah: Yeah, I think there's multiple things. The obvious one is language. But it's not even just as simple as converting straight from whatever straight translation. It also needs to make sense, the messaging needs to make sense. It needs to land, and what messaging might land on one market might not necessarily stick in the other. I think there's also peak times as well for certain kind of search trends and behavior that you need to take into consideration.
That can also, influence when you're willing to invest or when you're willing to launch or when you're willing to
have certain campaigns. Without that knowledge, you're not gonna get that right. So you need to do your research in terms of there could be quiet times in that market.
There could be very busy competitive times as well. I think as well you need to consider customer expectations. It might be different around delivery, pricing, around payment methods even. So there could be stuff around returns, all that kind of stuff that might be different per market that maybe only catering for one may get you into some sticky situations.
But I think there's a lot to consider, language obviously being the biggest one, and if you are gonna get to the point where... I've worked in businesses before where we've catered for eight-plus languages on a global level. And yeah there's a lot to consider. There's a lot of the tech tools around translations.
They need to be QA'd by human people who've reading it who are native speakers because there's even stuff like what Veruska mentioned there a while ago around the Spanish speakers in the US. There's also stuff like, oh we have Portuguese, but is that the right Portuguese for Brazil? Or is it just Portuguese Portugal? So there's a lot to consider in terms of the culture stuff.
But I think language is obviously the big one, the messaging,
your tone. But you also don't want to deviate away too far from your brand either, so I think that's why your global team is super important to keep those guardrails that you're not having an identity crisis in every market where you're just a different brand.
But then you need your local team so that you don't stay too close to the brand, and then you don't localize at all. So you need that balance between the two, and they really need to work really close together and be giving constant feedback to each other as well.
[00:14:52] Adam: Okay. Veruska, Kevin?
[00:14:55] Veruska: Yeah, I think-
[00:14:56] Kevin: This is a real house call.
[00:14:57] Veruska: Go ahead.
[00:14:58] Kevin: No, please.
[00:14:58] Veruska: Yes, go ahead.
I completely agree with Sarah. On top of this there is also another type of consideration that goes beyond the language.
[00:15:09] Veruska: It's how many languages.
[00:15:11] Speaker 11: So there are hundreds of Spanish variants. Each Spanish variant account for linguistically and culturally differences.
[00:15:22] Veruska: So this is a consideration, but on top of this there's also how people search in different markets
affects how you structure your pages. People from different countries now.
I've been studying this and working on this a lot also as an academic researcher. People from different markets search and expect
something different, one from another.
Take someone from Germany, for example, they expect detailed information. The more detailed you are, the better the page convert.
If you go to Japan ... I do a lot of work with Japan. It's a lot of text. Sometimes you think, are we still in the '90s?
It's as if we're in the '90s? But it is how it works. They really love a lot of text with visuals as well.
In the Northern Europe, simplicity is much valued, than in the Southern part of Europe. So it's language, but it's also search behavior which mirrors cultural habits. And I don't want to go into this because it's really, really, really... It's fascinating, but can really deviate from this.
It's also how- ... societies are built and what expectations one society has
compared to another in terms of human relationship, which then it's shaped by the language. And now I'm stopping because otherwise we go into another direction.
[00:16:52] Sarah: I think as well, that's a really good point because as SEOs, we can get really caught up on keywords and key phrases.
Yes. And we were like, "Well, we're ranking number one in this market for this keyword, so we don't know why it's converting." But you actually need to understand the intent behind the keywords in every market. So you might have a really high intent in your dominant market, but once you move markets, you think, "Oh, it just translates, so it should be the same."
But the behavior or the intent behind that keyword may not be the same. So I think you need to be careful. You need to understand the intents behind your keyword, your main keywords, because otherwise you're just ranking for keywords that are, and I hate using this word, but useless for you.
Really not driving performance. But yeah, that's just to build on that point.
[00:17:40] Kevin: Yeah, I think those cultural touchstones are really important, and then that happens at the local level. And without going deep into this the classic example that I see in the Canadian context is the Quebec market being focused on the French.
You need those cultural references. It's the only market in North America where Pepsi outsells Coca-Cola, and there's a reason for that. They've focused on those particular cultural elements, and it works. And then by extension, its
[00:18:10] Kevin: communications style and the way information's presented. The Quebec market I've seen consistently performs really well with French speaking
African markets.
Given the option, they will go to that information as opposed to a French
translation. So it's understanding the nuances of the different cultures and how that plays out against the whole brand. That needs to inform your strategy, and again, coming back to building out these frameworks, but ensuring that they're flexible enough to accommodate that.
[00:18:38] Adam: I'm really glad you brought up Quebec and Canada as a whole. It's obviously a market that I'm familiar with, and I think based on my experience, having worked with agencies across the country and also with different government organizations, the way they buy and the way they work is vastly different.
If I'm working with a client in Montreal it's a different type of relationship that I have than with someone in Vancouver or with someone in Toronto. And so when I think about that, at least from a B2B perspective the way people buy must be so drastically different. And Sara, Veruska, you guys are in Europe. The cultural differences are pretty stark, I would say, country to country. Yeah. So are you guys noticing especially in the B2B market, is there a totally different approach that you have to have for each and every one of those countries?
[00:19:23] Sarah: I think, there's not just different countries as well, is that Europe has so many different languages .
And then you have even differences, not even just based on language, but even between Ireland and the UK, things can change very quickly as well. In the B2B space I don't know if there's a huge amount of difference in terms of Ireland and UK, but I can't really speak on the EU side.
I haven't done B2B across Europe, but Veruska, I'm sure you have, so I'm gonna hand it over to you.
[00:19:55] Veruska: For my experience, actually that is exactly what you're saying. I come from doing SEO localization, and so I have a background in sociolinguistics. So when I say localization, I don't mean translation.
So localization means translating the entire journey. I've had B2B clients, where we really change the page based on the market not solely on the language. So we changed a landing page for the German market, because the buying journey is so different from a Spanish or an Italian.
You can find similarities like Portugal, Spain, Italy, it's like parallel. Add Greece, it's like a parallel. It's just like another market within the market. So you can find similarities. When you go to France, completely different. Go to Switzerland. Switzerland is a totally different country.
They speak three, four languages that are completely different , they speak German, but it's not the Austrian German. It's not the German German. Italian is not Italian from Italy. So for many of my clients, so we change the landing pages, we change the website, we change the conversion part based on the specific market.
Germany is always the example that I bring because they have a way of buying extremely peculiar. They need many information, and so you need to feed them before they trust you. It's not just I see a CTA buy here, click here to do, and they just click. If you put a heat map on a German website it's easily noticeable that they scan the page, and then they very often, it's one of those markets where they start on top, and if you capture the intent right, they go deep down, deep down, deep down, and then they click the CTA. They never click on top. So that's why there is a lot of differences that goes way beyond just simply the language and just adapting a CTA or a piece of content from a source language to another language.
[00:21:53] Adam: Oh so interesting. Do you guys find that differences within search authority between markets... To what extent can that authority earned in one market benefit another?
[00:22:04] Sarah: I think it gives you a head start, right? If you're coming in, you don't have a one domain authority, of course that's great, and you have some kind of credibility, and you'll get your stuff indexed and ranking. But I think unless you have relevance in a market and build that relevance, no matter what market you go into, you have to build relevance, whether it's local content, local reviews, local endorsements, local partnerships, whatever it may be.
Authority in one market, great for starting to build into another market, but it's not the finished job. It's a head start, but then you need to build that relevance on top of that authority.
[00:22:41] Adam: Okay, so then when we talk about AI search, and Kevin, you alluded to this earlier, that it's multidisciplinary, right?
You've got PR and you've got SEO. You've also have the reputation management side. How do you leverage that authority with your clients to ensure that as they're trying to grow a specific market, they're able to leverage those pieces?
[00:23:02] Kevin: I think this is the Wild West that we're in right now because the best practices really have not established themselves, but the smart people are thinking in these terms that we have to corral all these different practice areas that flow through marketing communications and digital, and figure out how do we build out common stories.
And then coming back to the topic of the day I have seen anecdotal information whereby doing proper localization in the sense that Veruschka's speaking to, where you're building up content that's specific to address that individual market, that does actually improve the retrievability visibility factor in these LLMs.
We're starting to see that data, but I think what's gonna be really interesting, this is my long way back to come back to the question, the domain authority days, we really have to break off from that. That thinking, which comes out of Google, that has to go away. We really need to be thinking about content pieces, I don't wanna say chunks, but I just did.
We need to think about how those get retrieved and show up in this information journey for users and ensure that we're really producing valuable information at the geographic regional level.
[00:24:24] Adam: Okay. And Kevin, if you had mentioned schema, the podcast would've been over.
[00:24:32] Kevin: Duly noted.
[00:24:33] Adam: So, it's super interesting when we look at AI search in particular, 'cause in my belief at least, it's changed the way that organizations approach discovery, and I'm gonna focus on B2B, but I do have a question for everyone who's done multiple markets.
If you have a reputation management issue in one locale, does that bleed over into your LLM results into others? So let's say you're a Canadian company that operates in the US are your US issues coming north of the border as well in terms of AI search?
[00:25:03] Kevin: Yeah. I haven't seen that happen yet, but I think the threat is very real. And keep in mind, these platforms are still evolving, right? And we just saw the agreement between probably the most notorious platform, Yelp, is now feeding their data through to OpenAI. So I do suspect that we're going to see impacts like that in ChatGPT, but that's my hypothesis.
I'll turn it over to the experts.
[00:25:29] Sarah: Do we think that... this is a question to Kevin. Do we think that the AI platforms are sophisticated enough to differentiate those kind of problems by market?
[00:25:38] Kevin: Don't think they are yet, but we're seeing them develop a lot of behaviors that would suggest that longer term, that level, that layer of logic, will start to emerge.
They're definitely getting better, per my earlier comments, at identifying really hyper geo-localized content and serving that up in context. So in theory, they should be able to be smart enough to say, "That doesn't apply here." But I don't know that's the case yet.
[00:26:09] Veruska: I can chime in on the more international side. I think the contamination is probably coming, sooner for English-speaking markets. What we are seeing is that AI search not giving the same visibility to non-English sources. Which means that if I search in my language, I get English sources retrieved first. And if these English sources are big dealing now with brand mistakes, or issues, of any kind, myself, a non-English speaker searching in another language, I get the mistakes coming from the English language because the model is trained based basically on that.
So I think over time, on the same language, let's say English-speaking language, the systems will become more smart, intelligent, whatever we want to call them. But we are way, way, way behind when it comes to other language. Way behind. So I think they need to fix the first layer because they have been heavily trained on English content, and so any other language comes after.
So we inherit basically the mistakes from the English, whatever English it is.
[00:27:32] Adam: So has anyone on the panel noticed differences in the way that different markets use AI search for any kind of discovery? And that can be B2C, B2B, D2C, whatever.
[00:27:46] Veruska: One thing that I have noticed heavily is that, and that's part of something that I was actually researching is that there's this belief that we all search in English because it's how AI tools and AI visibility and AI search has been presented to us.
So it is an English tool. When GPT came over, and everyone was like, "Oh, this is a revolution from the US," so it was inherited that non-English speakers would use GPT in English. And what I'm seeing and what I'm talking to people researching with data, with numbers, is actually the opposite.
Local and non-English tend to search in their languages, and that's why the issues are coming and that's why there's a lot of untrustability. And also with the new regulations in the EU, everything it's much more regulated now, and people start feeling, "Is this the right thing to do? Am I using this AI in the right way?"
And I was reading, I think it was something from Sparktoro I think, or something like this, or actually Shopify was, Shopify released their report last week saying that AI is bringing traffic, but traditional search is still winning highly, especially in non-English markets. And I think we underestimated this thing.
Where AI search is on top, but for people Google and being able to find what they are looking throughout their own research rather than just being fed with something preempted for them, it's still big.
[00:29:32] Adam: When you compare AI search results across countries or languages and let's get as specific as you guys feel comfortable, how do the answers actually change, and are there any differences that have surprised you? Sarah, do you wanna start?
[00:29:47] Sarah: Yeah. So in my last full-time role, I noticed that our AI visibility was strong on one specific market and the others not so much.
And but they would change regularly, like the responses. I would do similar prompts every week, every month, and there'd be a couple of big players in there consistently, and then a couple of new players popping in and out depending on what's going on in the industry. But we were particularly strong in one market, and I think it was because they were really relevant there for a long time, and then they just were not popping up at all once I tried to shift the direction towards another market or another product that was relevant for another market.
And I think I probably said this about 60 times in this, relevance. They just probably just weren't seen as being relevant enough to be a solution for someone in that market or for a product for that market. And that just takes time to build up, but it should be taken very much seriously within a multi-market SEO strategy in the new AI era.
[00:30:56] Adam: Kevin?
[00:30:57] Kevin: The one thing that always strikes me is when we're dealing with multi-language, multicultural rollouts, is what is important within individual cultures, and you do see patterns emerge where the types of experiences that they want with the brand, without getting into specifics, you can see very specific differences in cultural values.
What is actually important in the decision to pursue, am I actually gonna transact or engage with this brand? And so that's always the interesting takeaway, is then how do you incorporate that not only into your web content, but across the board into your total communication style, because that's what's going to speak with that audience.
[00:31:41] Adam: Veruska?
[00:31:42] Veruska: Yeah. It's very hard. I've seen pretty much everything. And this is an evolving field, so one thing you see one day, the day after it changes. But what I've noticed, it's like Sarah, If your brand is strong and it's already a leader in one market, it doesn't translate into other markets.
And most of all, you're always there when AI recommend for something specific, a brand for something specific, because your brand is strong, because you have built credibility, but also because you have built an ontology around your own brand that goes beyond what maybe you are doing in another market.
There is a big, big difference, even in how a market, or even how a brand present itself. And as to me, our brand has presented itself over the years, because the biggest issues now is that everyone now wants to be on AI search, on AI systems, but very few brands have worked toward having a strong brand visibility and awareness over time, and you can not count them on your fingers.
But you know who has always been a good brand player besides organic, because organic can bring you up to a certain point, but doesn't build a brand awareness as a whole. So I think that's the biggest thing that I'm seeing, the stronger brand players are there and are market-based.
The new ones are fatiguing, and also the ones that are starting to enter new markets now, even if they have a huge product in another market, they don't see the same results in other markets because the brand is not there.
[00:33:28] Adam: Okay. So we've talked a lot about visibility, and when I think about AI search, I think about it in a variety of different pieces. So reputation, sentiment, and then I also think of it in terms of brand fidelity. So how accurately AI systems represent a brand, a product, its positioning, the language that it uses to describe all of the above.
When you're working in multiple markets, how do you measure and manage that perception, that brand fidelity especially in different locales? Kevin, let's start with you.
[00:34:00] Kevin: It's a super tough one because again, the cultural element comes into play here. And to be successful as a brand, you've got to respect that within the framework of the broader brand, right?
You can't change the core value add, if you will, of the brand. So what you can do is change your talking points and the way you position the product, the service, and the experience for your user. That's where it comes into play. So your measurement then gets benchmarks against those elements in market, if that makes sense.
[00:34:35] Adam: Actually, could you unpack that just a little further?
[00:34:38] Kevin: Yeah, sure. So if we think about... let's take the classic SEO model, 'cause I think most people will be comfortable with that, where you're building out topics and building out your clusters. Those should reflect what your success points are within that market or within that particular culture.
And using that model tied back to the master brand framework, that will allow you to actually identify where you're being successful within that market. I hope that is a little more clear.
[00:35:10] Adam: It is. It is. Sarah?
[00:35:13] Sarah: I think we don't need to overthink it, right? AI is going to change constantly. Your responses are gonna change day by day, even hour by hour sometimes. But I think it's important if you have multi-market to regularly just check in on the prompts and just see what are you being associated with. Are you appearing? If you are appearing, okay, how are you being described?
What's your pros and cons in terms of your appearance in AI visibility? But then to measure it, just look at your own data, as Verushka said before. Are you converting via AI via that market? Because if you are, then great, it's working. Now go back through what you're doing for that market and be consistent about it and watch it grow.
And if you're not converting, then obviously you need to go back and check how are we doing in terms of content, in terms of offsite around that market, because clearly something's not clicking. And it could be that you're not appearing, but it also could be that you are appearing, but it's not positive or it's not accurate, and what people then see when they click through is not what they expect and that can be put off. And that's something that I've noticed in AI search, even through a shopping funnel via AI search. I've clicked on loads of websites where the price is wrong or the product is sold out or it's just not accurate. So it's really, really hard to manage, I think, multi-market across AI search right now, but hopefully it will get better and easier, but I think it's also very volatile right now and it's not as accurate or as reliable, in my opinion, as your good old Google search. So, it's definitely a learning process, I think, for anyone in SEO right now.
[00:36:56] Adam: Definitely. Verushka?
[00:36:59] Veruska: Yeah. It's tough. Extremely, extremely tough. I usually tend to work from a different starting point, which is how as a brand I am representing myself outside. So what am I doing in terms of community work, PR, whatever. Am I on the platforms that this specific market use?
Because this is the first thing today for AI search. It's not your website that is a part of it, but a lot happens outside of your website. And one of the biggest mistakes , it is completely go, I have the prompts and I want to see how I'm performing without actually doing anything to make sure you perform for those prompts.
And sometimes I personally find prompts super, super unreliable because we don't search in the same way. Even ... within the same country, we search in different ways. Trust me in Italy, people search differently, whether they are in the northern part of Italy or in the southern part.
It's just endemic, it's cultural. So prompts are just a way to show leadership that we are doing something. But if you start from the foundation, which is brand, which is I want to assess what I'm doing and actually what the brand team is doing with the help of the SEO team, and that's where you start seeing growth.
And you don't have to measure 100 prompts or be obsessed with prompts because even a simple search will show you if you are there or if you are not, and who is there and why you are not. It's somehow trivial at the moment. My approach is super trivial at the moment. It's just assess the brand, assess if everyone on the company is sending out the same message, if you're using the same term, if you're speaking the same language in that specific market, if you're associated, if you are there, there, there, there.
And then just empirically test, I see basically, because I don't know, we are still at the very beginning of this, it's actually everything is speculation.
[00:39:10] Adam: I appreciate that everyone's aligned with this. It is speculation and to say that AI search is volatile, is so accurate.
What I'm hearing, from everyone, is that the answers that we're getting so far, it feels like the vast majority of these brands would either have a presence a major presence within the markets they're operating. But what happens if they're just trying to get started? So for instance, let's say you have an English company that wants to go into Spain.
They've done their market research, they've got premises in Spain, or let's say even a target market like Madrid or Barcelona. How do they get started on that optimization journey, both across SEO and GEO? Sarah?
[00:39:47] Sarah: I think you need to go back to your fundamentals. You need to get the foundations right.
Is your competitor research, who are you going up against? Both in AI search and traditional search? But I think you need to be obviously technically well set up there. You need to get your content right. You need to understand how people are searching there. I think that's easier to do, as Veruska said, in traditional search than AI search.
And then AI search long term and just because of how differently we search on Google and, say ChatGPT becomes much more conversational on ChatGPT. But there is a kind of a way to reverse engineer if you start getting traffic into certain pages in GA4 or however you're tracking your data.
Okay, so this drove traffic, so obviously I'm doing something correct on this page. Okay, what are the topics around this page? What are the main queries? What are the main questions? What kind of solutions do we need? And build it up that way. But I think to start, no matter what type of SEO, whether it's traditional or whether it's AI, your fundamentals go back to the good old foundations of SEO.
Really strong technically, really great UX, really useful content and optimize on page, but also get that relevance and that authority offsite as well for that market.
[00:41:04] Adam: Okay. Going straight back to basics. Veruska.
[00:41:07] Sarah: Okay.
[00:41:08] Veruska: Yeah, going back to basics, but also I'll add something more, and go offline.
Because we underestimate this so much, but in certain markets, offline is much more valuable than starting online. And if you start in parallel offline and online, I always bring Italy and Spain or Portugal. Imagine you are entering these three markets and, you guys know how important for us football is.
Imagine that you advertise- ... in a football stadium. This is massive. So there should be the investment. Years ago it was very easy. Go out, go online, build up everything. Today you need to be present offline and online, and offline in certain markets still values more than online.
Offline attracts online so much because it drives brand visibility and it drives brand search and brand search influence, all the funnel in search. So I wouldn't never estimate... I'm actually working with a company where I advise them, we need to go offline, offline, offline, and it's paying off so well because we matched the offline activities with the online activities, and they are actually combining the effort of multiple teams.
So I think there's the foundation, but that there's that extra layer today that is all building a brand, a strong brand.
[00:42:36] Kevin: Okay. Kevin?
Know your customer. Who is your actual customer? Know what motivates them, understand what their sensitivities, what their desires, what their needs are, and then scale that and measure the impact.
Use that data to then feed all of your communications and content, because that design will build out your long-term customer.
[00:43:02] Adam: All right, so we're getting pretty close to the end here. What should any search professional with primarily local or single market experience learn before they move into a global enterprise search role?
Veruska, let's start with you.
[00:43:18] Veruska: Good question. I think you need to come with an open mind and knowing that especially if you are monolingual, you know nothing about other markets, so you need to build a strong supporting system. You need to find advocates. You need to be humble enough to say, "I don't know anything about this market."
I can help you build the infrastructure, but then you need to be able to handle the actual job to local people, to people that speak the language and know the market. So for me it's a big shift, but it's the same shift if you work in a monolingual non-English market and you want to move into an English market.
It's exactly the same thing. You need to be ready to challenge yourself because it's not as linear and straightforward as just working with one market. You need to be able to articulate why something works in one market and it doesn't work in another market. And perhaps you also need to make sure that you justify why you decided to do something in one market and not in another, or you made a mistake and treat every market the same and the results are not there.
So I think I'm super biased, but I think working in an international environment and managing international markets requires so much strength and resilience that actually it's a good career pattern for everyone because it actually builds on your criticalities as well. So you need to really start thinking not as a sole owner, but as a big part of a big system.
[00:45:05] Adam: Hey. Kevin?
[00:45:23] Kevin: Move with intent. Be ok- it's okay to make mistakes. Fix them quickly. And really, really think about the impact of what you're doing. So move slowly with intent. And be okay with not having that attribution layer. You may not get all of the data you need upfront, but look for what is working and build on that.
Be thoughtful about how you scale within new markets. And then just educate yourself. Educate, educate, challenge yourself. There's all kinds of new localization, internationalization tactics that are out there. There's tons of resources. Become familiar with how other people have addressed these challenges from a technical standpoint, 'cause there's no shortage of information out there.
[00:46:04] Adam: All right. Sarah?
[00:46:06] Sarah: I actually have two. So I think the first one I touched on earlier, and I think it's learning how to communicate about SEO to people who are not SEOs. If you go into... If you go from single market, a small website, you can manage most of the actions you need very easily. When you move into enterprise, there's so many different departments, so many different considerations, so many different teams and stakeholders and decision-makers.
And if you go into a meeting and you start talk about href langs and people start to switch off. It's like when you start explaining the rules to a card game, the elevator music comes on, and you're just like, "I've lost them." You need to really communicate it in the way, going, "I need this, but it will also benefit you. And if we get this, it would move the needle here," and be able to talk about SEO in a very accessible way and learn to do that and try and make it come to life for the main stakeholders. And the second one is part of that, that there's so much going on in an enterprise level that you're not gonna get everything you want, and it's not possible to do everything you'd love to do.
So learn to prioritize. Learn to put your P1s as your first recommendations to go out the door and push them the hardest, and kinda learn that there's stuff that are nice to have, but you may never get them, but make sure they're the stuff that wouldn't have moved the needle as much as your P1s. So just communicate to non-SEOs and learn to prioritize.
[00:47:29] Adam: All right. All right, well, let's go right into our lightning round. We've got about five minutes left, and it's something that I've done in the first episode. I'd like to continue it forward. So lightning round, don't overthink it. First answer that comes to mind. I'm gonna go in order of the people that I see in front of me.
So Veruska, Kevin, Sarah, let's get going.
Which market consistently surprises you the most? Veruska.
[00:47:55] Veruska: Germany.
[00:47:57] Adam: Germany.
[00:47:57] Veruska: Germany.
[00:47:58] Adam: All right.
[00:47:58] Veruska: 100%, yes.
[00:48:02] Adam: Kevin?
[00:48:03] Kevin: The United States.
[00:48:04] Adam: Interesting. Okay. Sarah?
[00:48:06] Kevin: Not as much as you might think.
[00:48:09] Sarah: I'm gonna say the UK.
[00:48:10] Adam: Any specific part of the UK?
[00:48:13] Sarah: Just the UK in general. I think I had one particular experience with an e-commerce brand where we launched in the US and the UK and I expected the UK to perform very well 'cause it was an Irish brand.
I thought there was a lot of... And it was just a real struggle. The US then performed exceptionally well, but the UK was a bit slower, and I don't know if that's a brand thing. Do they have more of an affinity to brands and stuff? I'm not so sure, but yeah, I did find the UK to be a bit of a struggle.
[00:48:44] Adam: Okay. What's the one tactic that most global teams consistently miss or underestimate? Veruska?
[00:48:52] Veruska: Adding local people. I know that ... Someone doesn't see it as a tactic, but it is. Because local people can prevent mistakes and not correct them. So it is a tactic, and it's something that, especially now with AI, everything is delegated to AI. But then you miss that cultural relevance, that local eye.
So I consider it one of the biggest tactics for global enterprises.
[00:49:20] Adam: Okay. Kevin?
[00:49:21] Kevin: I'm gonna go with mobile, right? We're supposed to be in a mobile first world, and I see it missed all the time. That is how the majority of the world accesses their information on the web, and I see so many global sites that fail that test.
[00:49:37] Adam: Okay. Wow. And you know what? I'm gonna butcher Luke's last name, but Luke Wroblewski, who wrote, was it like 2009?
[00:49:44] Kevin: Yeah.
[00:49:44] Adam: It's been a long time. All right. Sara?
[00:49:48] Sarah: I think just don't presume because one thing worked in one market and you think the market is similar to another market, that it's gonna be, "Oh, that will be the same thing."
I think every market deserves care and time and preparation. And the research really will save you a lot of bother in the long run.
[00:50:07] Adam: Okay. What's harder to manage: people, platforms, or processes? Veruska?
[00:50:14] Veruska: Good question. I would say processes because they involve the people talking with a system that someone else has built.
So this comes back to what Kevin was saying, is the process is not built with people in mind. The process becomes very hard to manage because there are people involved. So you end up becoming the project manager of a process that should help you manage projects. So I think process because... Yeah, whatever. You got it.
[00:50:49] Adam: Kevin?
[00:50:50] Kevin: Yeah. I'm going with process as well. It's a systemic thing, right? And so having to change the whole system is really challenging.
[00:50:58] Adam: Okay. Sarah?
[00:51:00] Sarah: I'm gonna go people. I think it's easier to change a process than to change a person's mind. When someone's really stuck on something, it can be more difficult to try and change someone's mind to change direction, strategy. You really need to put a good business case forward a lot of times. Whereas a process, you can change that easier than a person's mind, I think.
[00:51:19] Adam: Okay. What's the best signal that a market or a locale needs its own strategy?
Veruska?
[00:51:26] Veruska: Data. If you have even a little bit of data that proves that you could actually build something or get something out of that market, and you have the infrastructure, meaning people, processes, everything, then can start not strategizing, but researching at least.
[00:51:47] Adam: Kevin?
[00:51:49] Kevin: Data as well, but I'm gonna further filter that down to engagement.
I always find it interesting when individual markets really engage, there's an itch they need to scratch. They're trying to get answers. They're trying to get information, and so there's a need there, and that's always an opportunity in my books.
[00:52:07] Adam: Okay. Sarah?
[00:52:09] Sarah: Yeah, data as well, but I'm gonna go more towards your conversion data. So you're getting people in the door to shop, but they're not getting to the till. I think that's a clear sign that there's something not quite right there. It could be a pricing. It could be your content isn't quite translating well or isn't getting the message across or isn't what they expect.
But I think if you're not converting and you are getting quite a good amount of traffic, there is definitely a need for a relook at the strategy there.
[00:52:40] Adam: All right. Last question. What worries you more, being absent from an AI answer or being described incorrectly?
Veruska?
[00:52:49] Veruska: For me it's being described incorrectly.
Because it's harder to fix something like this than to start building and doing things that leads to AI visibility. Fixing is always an issue on everything. So for me, definitely being described in the way I don't want.
[00:53:09] Adam: Kevin?
[00:53:11] Kevin: Incorrect information. That's the killer because you've got to track down the source of this and understand where's the misalignment, because that's what needs to be fixed, and that takes a lot of good detective work.
[00:53:24] Adam: Okay.
Sara?
[00:53:26] Sarah: I think incorrectly as well. I think that can cause massive conversion issues. It might not be a huge issue for customers you've already acquired, but if that's the first impression you're giving to new customers who've just discovered you, it's definitely gonna get in your way in terms of what they expect.
But also they might be getting the wrong impression of you, really poor reviews or certain pros and cons that may come up about your business that are wildly incorrect, or it could even be outdated information that leads them the wrong way, that's definitely more damaging than not appearing.
In that case, you would definitely love to rather not appear and appear for them next time accurately.
[00:54:08] Adam: I once heard a story, since we're all aligned on this, where a brand had 90% visibility, but the AI engine specifically was telling people not to buy them.
[00:54:17] Sarah: Oh.
[00:54:18] Adam: I mean, that's kind of a problem, right?
[00:54:20] Sarah: Yeah.
[00:54:22] Adam: Yeah. Okay. Thank you guys so much for your time today and for sharing all of that knowledge. Veruska, Kevin, Sara, thanks again. To our audience, you can find their contact information on our registration page. I'd also like to thank Emanuel Petrescu and How About Some Marketing and to our sponsor Gander AI Search Intelligence.
Agencies use Gander to find new client opportunities, strengthen retainers, benchmark competitors, monitor reputation, measure brand fidelity, and show clients what AI systems are actually saying about them. AI search intelligence for agencies that need to turn data into decisions and decisions into revenue.
Thank you, everyone. Take care.
[00:55:01] Sarah: Thanks, everyone.
[00:55:02] Kevin: Bye.
[00:55:03] Veruska: Bye.