Find a website building company to build an English website, including small language websites, and then let the company help me with SEO optimization and Google promotion ranking. I just need to sit at home and wait for inquiries.
Is it really that simple?
Many foreign trade SOHO and start-up companies may hold onto this dream and purchase packages from many online marketing and promotion companies on the market. I spent tens of thousands of dollars, but after half a year, there was no effect. Why is that?
It has to be said that when it comes to website building, Google promotion, SEO ranking optimization, and so on, the water is too deep. However, in the foreign trade industry, there are too few people who understand online marketing and technology, and too many lazy cancer people who want to spend money and wait for inquiries. Therefore, the result is that it is inevitable to jump from one pit to another.
What is SEO
SEO definition: Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic by increasing the exposure of a website to search engine users. (Reference Wikipedia)
Simply put, it is to improve the ranking of your website on the search results page (SERP) of some keywords in Google through some optimization methods, gain more attention from search users, and thus obtain more clicks and website visits. And traffic can be further converted into inquiries. SEO is also a very important part of online marketing.
The general process of SEO
SEO can basically be divided into two parts: On page SEO and Off page SEO. On site optimization is mainly based on various optimizations of the website itself, such as website directory structure, webpage content, website map, anchor text, keyword distribution, page titles and descriptions, weight allocation, internal links, speed optimization, etc; The optimization outside the site mainly involves the construction of external links.
In terms of the basic process, it is necessary to design a good website style in the early stage, study the target keywords and long tail keywords, and then control the distribution and frequency of keywords when building the website, plan the structure of the website, and strengthen internal links.
Conduct market and industry research as much as possible, collect sufficient content to fill the website. Showcase the company’s strength, credibility, differentiation, and more from multiple perspectives. And you can also explore from the perspective of the value you can provide, what aspects of content should be presented, and the presentation format should be reasonably matched with text, images, and videos.
After building a good website, it is necessary to constantly add fresh and unique content and conduct regular updates.
The subsequent process work is website maintenance. Use Google Analytics access analysis to understand traffic sources, visitor stay time on the website, bounce rate, and page inclusion status, such as which pages have issues with inclusion.
The above is a rough SEO process. SEO is a long-term, systematic and gradual cultivation work, like planting a seedling. Careful care, watering and fertilizing from time to time, observing growth, it can naturally grow slowly and healthily.
On the contrary, if we ignore it and expect it to survive on its own, it is just a fantasy.
So, what are the pitfalls in promoting Google SEO services on foreign trade websites?
Pit 1: Insufficient professionalism
The foreign trade marketing service market is still quite chaotic now. Some internet companies were originally engaged in SEO optimization and promotion of Chinese websites in China, but the competition for Baidu SEO on Chinese websites in China is fierce and the profits are low. Baidu also comes with a family bucket of various products that occupy the ranking position, and the algorithm is constantly changing and the difficulty is not small. I heard that website optimization and Google promotion in the foreign trade industry are easy to do, just deceive some company bosses. Most bosses don’t understand, they only care about what’s the use and ask how much money they need to pay?
So these service companies that originally focused on Chinese SEO optimization transformed into the foreign trade industry. The employees inside are still former employees who used to do Baidu SEO ranking, with some English foundation and a slight understanding of Google SEO. Then the company started recruiting telemarketers, preparing a list of companies to purchase and company registration information, and making sales calls every day. We caught a customer who seemed interested and tried to deceive them with all his might. We have a foreign trade client who purchased our services and now receives over ten inquiries on our website every month..
The problem is that these people are not familiar enough with the English search engine Google, their knowledge updates are not timely enough, and they may even appear outdated. Every day, I create fake original content, post external links, and do all mechanical work.
Doing SEO requires rich technical experience and keeping up with the times. The development and changes of Google SEO are very fast. The featured summaries and Q&A can directly help you rank higher. Have service providers gone deeper to learn and understand?
There are also many service providers in China who do Google SEO, but many so-called professional service providers still follow the old Chinese SEO optimization routine for their clients. The SEO optimization and promotion industry is a mix of good and bad, with exaggerated results, false promises, and filling in the gaps. I believe that a professional SEO service provider should at least have a convincing ability or background in English online marketing, as SEO in the English online world is significantly different from that in Chinese.
Firstly, there is a language difference, which is particularly evident. Sam has been studying English online marketing for so many years and has found that his English reading ability has greatly improved because he unconsciously needs a lot of time to read various professional websites and blogs related to marketing and SEO. At this point, English reading ability and strong learning ability are the primary requirements.
This is not the most important thing, the most important thing is to excavate high-quality English resources on the basis of a certain level of English proficiency and continuous learning ability. This requires practitioners to constantly accumulate and explore, gradually accumulating a way of thinking in English writing. All of these require you to frequently read English websites, wander in the world of English information knowledge, and absorb nutrients.
Service providers with low levels of specialization cannot achieve this level.
Pit 2: Black hat SEO is still in use
In summary, SEO methods can be divided into two categories: white hat and black hat. The optimization content can also be divided into two aspects: on site and off site.
White hat and black hat are two completely different strategies for doing SEO. The purpose is the same, to improve search engine rankings, but the specific methods used are vastly different.
Simply put, white hat SEO is a way to gain more weight and improve search engine rankings through formal and reasonable methods, which is supported and recognized by mainstream search engines. Black hat SEO, in simple terms, is cheating on search engines by optimizing website rankings in ways that search engines do not allow, including but not limited to keyword stuffing, hidden text, link trading, visitor deception, misleading, disguising, traffic hijacking, and other cheating methods to gain more weight.
Black hat SEO does not really consider the reasonable content of the website or the real needs of search users. It only engages in speculative operations, seizes some loopholes in search engine rankings, and wants to directly “take shortcuts” to improve rankings. The most common way is to accumulate a large amount of junk external links in order to improve their weight and rank.
For example, there is a domestic SEO service company that once used a large number of junk external links (adding junk external links to customers’ English websites on some unrelated and messy sites. Even in some Chinese sites, setting up secondary accounts to generate up to thousands of junk external links), which is called external link construction. In fact, in order to pursue short-term results and increase the weight and ranking of customers’ websites, they took the risk of adopting this outdated SEO black hat technique. Take a look at these techniques with Ahrefs and SEMrush, my goodness! What kind of external links are you making!!
The final result was that the website was penalized by Google, its ranking was lost, and the indexed pages were also removed from Google’s indexing.
There is an old saying in the SEO industry: Content is king, external links are king. Content creation is too tiring, and Chinese content can still be pseudo original. English content is not deep enough, and service providers will not help you find ways to do it. Therefore, many still want to quickly improve website weight and ranking by adding various external links. Occasionally, it may bring some junk traffic, but it has little effect on Google ranking and is easily targeted and punished.
Google’s algorithm rules for SERP on search results pages have long been user centric. Google will determine the user’s search intent and display the results that best match the customer’s search intent, rather than relying on a large number of external links to build weighted websites.
For foreign trade industry websites, in order to achieve long-term development, they need to stay away from black hat and adopt safe white hat SEO, which is the right path. And qualified service providers must have a truly profound understanding of Google’s official optimization guidelines. Then unify knowledge and action, and put it into practice!
Pit 3: Ensure ranking, traffic, inquiry quantity, and quick and effective promotion
The reason why Google SEO services are so deep is because there are many tricks in this industry that make outsiders easily deceived.
The most common tactic used by various SEO companies is still to “ensure ranking”. This guarantee can achieve a ranking on the first page of Google, which is indeed very tempting and highly attractive to outsiders. It should be noted that rankings on Google are always dynamic and highly competitive. It’s not that you can get to the first page just by working hard. Often times, the optimization work done by websites ranked on the first page may be several times greater than yours.
Promoting the so-called ‘guaranteed ranking’ is only for better sales, making customers feel that choosing this service provider is safe and that the money is worth it.
There are several tricks to ensure ranking:
Routine 1: Ranking words with low competition (or even no competition) and little significance
Make meaningless words and use their Google rankings to forcefully explain and defend them. As long as these words have rankings, the promise is fulfilled. After all, some words that have no practical meaning are not competitive at all. Adding more pages, adding some content, and assisting with some external links can improve the ranking.
A foreign trade SOHO consulted me before, and he wanted to buy a service package from a marketing and promotion company. He sent me information saying that the company said it does Google promotion. I took a quick look and found that the cost of building a website and Google SEO promotion is not low, with a service fee of nearly 30000 yuan per year.
There is a case in the information that Google ranks on the first page, accompanied by a screenshot. As soon as I looked at that search term, I instantly understood what kind of trick it was, a long tail keyword consisting of 5 English words (with extremely low search volume). Looking at the webpage title of that website again, there happen to be these 5 words inside. A long tail keyword with only 5 words was listed on the first page of Google, and then an advertisement was sent to deceive novices.
Who gave you the courage to put it on promotional materials?! It’s clear that we’re going to deceive those who don’t understand.
What is the concept of a long tail search term consisting of 5 words? For example, facial mask, big words can not be ranked. Well, let’s use the moisturizing facial mask. It’s still not ranked. So beauty and moisturizing facial mask? There is still no ranking. So beauty, moisturizing and whitening facial mask? Still not ranked.
So ice skin beauty, moisturizing and whitening facial mask? Okay, finally it’s on the first page
Then I asked him to ask the service provider, this kind of long tail word with such low competition is also considered. The other party said that Google’s first page ranking keywords, which have a long tail, are also considered, and the interpretation rights belong to them.
Hehe, I can only say that there are so many wealthy people in our foreign trade~
Routine 2: Specify the ranking of certain words, promise a refund if invalid
Generally speaking, the more difficult the optimized words are, the higher the corresponding fees will be. Some companies or individuals charge based on specific keywords and promise to make their homepage, so it is necessary to have a deep understanding of their strength. We cannot cooperate casually just because of this so-called invalid refund promise. After all, in this industry, there are also companies that play tricks and lack professionalism.
Many SEO service companies do not have a complete, transparent, and trustworthy customer case because they have no strength at all. There are also many service companies that promote themselves as white hat SEO companies, showcasing some so-called customer cases. Some of the content is superficial and not detailed enough, and some specific aspects of how to complete optimization are briefly mentioned.
Those with a little bit of strength will at least list what optimization work has been done, how to find ways to increase some high-quality external links, and finally improve the website’s ranking, achieving relatively ideal results. Some cases have indeed been done so seriously, but only as a visual project to be done well, which is a means to gain trust and accept orders. After taking on many other orders, the quality of service is completely incomparable to the cases presented.
You should know that in the service industry, especially in industries that are highly specialized, competitive, and have a lot of uncertainty, once the number of customers increases, it is inevitable that the original service quality will not be maintained and will eventually be averaged out. Without increasing professional manpower, the orders have doubled and there is no time to digest them.
Friends who have run their own companies know that labor costs are the highest part of management costs. And once personnel are not equipped in a timely manner or the professionalism is not in place, it is impossible to patiently handle so many customer orders one by one. What year and month can we achieve?
Who will honestly do external link construction for you? No, I believe that almost 90% of service providers in the foreign trade SEO service circle would not do this. To understand your industry, you need to research good websites in the industry and find ways to obtain external links from these websites. This requires a lot of effort and time, which cannot be achieved with an average package price. To truly achieve this level, high-end customized services are needed. Fei, that old god, may not necessarily be able to obtain high-quality external links. With inquiries, orders, and profit sharing, is it possible?
Just like a heartless male customer visiting XJ, instructing them to say ‘I love you’ later and not to make false calls. Will XJ be willing? MD has no feelings for you and even asked me to say I love you, so I can’t pretend to call you. How long will that take? Make a few false calls, end quickly, go to bed early and finish work.
Perhaps you may question me for driving, but isn’t that the truth?
Anyway, the cost of using external links is low, and if it’s not successful, there won’t be any losses. If Google hasn’t detected any effect yet, then hurry up and talk to you about upgrading the package plan. Look, it’s working!
Then after you paid the money, Google detected cheating and gave it a heavy beating, causing the ranking to plummet and the number of indexed pages to decrease significantly. Do you want your money back? Is it so easy to get the money back when it’s all in your pocket?
Many Google SEO service providers in the market offer guaranteed or fast ranking services, especially the so-called fast, which basically use black hat SEO techniques or subtly mix some black hat techniques to obtain rankings. Even if temporary effects are achieved, they are difficult to sustain.
In fact, the effectiveness provided by SEO service providers lags behind in terms of time, and it takes at least three to four months after completion to determine the actual results. So promoting speed is inherently deceptive.
And ensuring there is traffic is the simplest. Buying traffic directly from traffic platforms is very cheap. I know a friend who makes money online in English. He mainly does media buying, which means buying paid traffic (such as FB advertising traffic and traffic from various traffic trading platforms) to run offers provided by foreign advertisers and earn US dollars. It’s easy to get foreign IP access for tens of thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars with just a small amount of money.
Ensuring inquiries is actually simple. Directly simulate sending group disks using software. There are a large number of free email addresses available abroad, as well as enterprise email accounts with various domain names sold in bulk, at a relatively low cost. With so many backup email addresses, even if you have doubts, there is no substantial evidence to prove that the service company is falsifying. Anyway, the quantity of inquiries is guaranteed for you. If you haven’t received the order, it’s your own fault..
Pit 4: Not getting to know your product and industry
There are many SEO service companies that optimize from a purely technical perspective and are increasingly working on assembly line operations. Lack of sufficient understanding and communication with you, resulting in a lack of knowledge about your product, industry, specific application areas, and even the competitors you face when ranking.
Of course, we need to choose those who are technically proficient, but the most important thing is to truly immerse ourselves in understanding your industry, researching your products, keywords, and providing detailed suggestions for keyword layout and optimization on the website. We even need to understand the research on some competitor websites that you want to rank against.
That is to say, work must be meticulously executed. We need to consider both on-site SEO optimization and the effectiveness, level of competition, opportunities, and other factors of different keywords.
Pit 5: AI Marketing and AI Development Customers
This year, a large number of gimmicks promoting artificial intelligence have suddenly erupted in the circle of foreign trade services. Many people, at best, only implement some automated functions and dare to promote the use of AI technology. It’s really thick skinned to blow it up~
If this is the case, then countless well-known foreign marketing tool companies can say that they have used AI, such as Buffer or HootSuite. Simply put, many products or services are just wearing a vest and labeling them as hot and intimidating.
The main elements that AI needs to possess are massive amounts of data, constantly optimizing and advancing algorithms, powerful computing power, machine self-learning ability, and so on. What AI needs to accomplish is to collect various types of data from a large number of different users, continuously perform machine learning and self correction, and deeply mine and analyze customer behavior (what they are looking for), scenarios (in what specific application scenarios), and needs (what they need), etc. By conducting extensive calculations and algorithm optimization, a large amount of data rich user profiles are established, and clear individual differentiated information and suggestions are provided.
The so-called AI marketing hyped up in the foreign trade circle is essentially a pre written fixed modular program, which has made some progress in these functional modules and achieved automation, and then service providers confuse the concept of artificial intelligence.
In fact, there is still a long way to go before artificial intelligence. The leading application system service providers in foreign industries have not yet promoted the application of AI technology, and you are still catching up with the pace of foreign countries. Just after realizing some automation functions, you are excited and ahead of domestic peers in software systems.
Isn’t it just about creating a visually appealing user interface, adding some automation modules, and using AI concepts to promote and attract business?
Has it disrupted the industry? did not. As for AI development clients, there is one truth.
Pit 6: Bundle sales of small language websites
The service company says they will provide you with a promotion plan and create a multilingual website for you, but in fact, for most foreign trade customers, it is also a waste of money. For service providers, it’s just a way to overcharge you.
The service provider told me to include 5 small language websites for me. Adding Google’s indexing will cost an additional 8000 yuan.
I often encounter students inquiring about whether it is necessary to choose packages with minority languages.
In fact, I believe that for most foreign trade users, whether it is a small language website with 3 languages, a small language website with 5 languages, or a small language website with 10 different languages, it is of no use at all.
Let me give you an analogy. It’s like you just installed WordPress, created over a dozen simple pages, translated them into multiple languages, copied the content, and added some web pages. What’s the usage? Do you want to increase the indexing of English web pages? No,
You may say that at least there are web pages in Japanese, German, Spanish, and Portuguese.. Hey, if you don’t keep updating and increasing the number of pages indexed in these minor languages, most of the time you won’t rank at all. Because it’s too weak!
For example, if you can’t even beat others in the ranking of English websites, don’t expect to have any ranking in the ranking of minority language websites. There are so many Spanish websites in the world, but you only have so few pages. How can you compare with others?
In addition to high-quality backlinks, SEO also places great emphasis on content. Creating a certain amount of high-quality content is very helpful for ranking. Google’s development direction is to have a clearer understanding of searchers’ search intentions, analyze what searchers are looking for, and provide the highest quality information.
If you only have a website with few pages of content, it will not attract traffic in highly competitive fields, even in areas with low competition. (Ranking may only exist in keyword domains without competition)
The content volume of websites in other people’s native language is like a thick book, while your website in a minority language is like two sheets of paper, drifting away in the wind.
So when the website building company says to create small languages for you, it’s purely for the purpose of combining and packaging packages, and raising prices.
Let me give you an analogy: the tactics used by website marketing and promotion service companies are like finding a wife for a man with renal insufficiency (English website), and then recommending various exotic beauties (small language website). Wives make do with life, while all kinds of beautiful women bought back are just idle, looking comfortable to oneself, but actually useless.
Small language website, does it look high-end? You made a request, I can’t do without it. For example, if you want foreign girls, there are also Russian, Spanish, Japanese, and Korean ones, but I don’t care if you can handle them yourself. Anyway, if you want them, I’ll give them to you. If you don’t have the energy yourself, just take a look every day.
Perhaps you may question me for driving, but isn’t that the truth?
In fact, in addition to intentional promotion and guidance by service providers, sometimes the demand for minority languages is also raised by many customers who have not taken it seriously. The service provider said: It’s not that I intentionally want to increase this to make money, but that the customer just wants this. If you don’t have it, they still think your skills are not good.
I’m not saying that the small language websites in the website building package will definitely have no effect, this is not a generalization. A small number of foreign trade industries, due to their unpopular or highly specialized products, have indeed made small language programs effective; Another situation is that after the service company builds a small language website, the customer understands SEO and can optimize, update, and maintain the content of the small language website themselves or have a dedicated person in the company. This is another matter.
Besides these situations, I don’t think it’s necessary to pursue a multilingual website. What do many foreign trade SOHOs who don’t even understand SEO need so many small language versions of websites for? Many people think that building a website can generate as many inquiries as possible per month, but are they daydreaming? Expecting an inquiry? What about building ten small language versions of websites for you? Did the inquiry explode tenfold? ha-ha.
The key is to do a good job in SEO for English websites first, and then gradually add them later, or try learning to use a WordPress multilingual plugin.
Pit 7: You do not own the content copyright
Before signing a contract with a service provider, be sure to carefully read the terms and conditions to ensure that you own the copyright of the website and SEO content, not the service provider.
This is similar to the pitfall of building a website that only gives you a backend login account and password, but not an FTP account. You can only use it, but I won’t provide you with the source code file for downloading the entire website. You can’t access or modify the program. So that’s holding you back, you can only renew and pay maintenance fees at the website building company every year. After all, you can only use it without actually having complete control over your website.
Pit 8: Impressive technology, possessing unique Google SEO skills
If the service company tells you that, there is basically a 90% chance that they are deceiving you. Even the most skilled Google SEO professionals need to constantly adjust and improve their strategies and techniques to adapt to the constantly evolving Google algorithms.
Moreover, there is basically no such thing as a secret technique in this circle. The amazing strategies and techniques have long been shared by foreign SEO experts. However, in China, there are a few individuals who have published English articles on professional SEO websites abroad, and no new and unique optimization strategies have been created.
Due to the lack of differentiation, SEO service providers or operators may try certain “tricks” to try to make the website rank better. Some of these techniques and skills may be effective for a period of time, but SEO is actually like an arms race. You rank better than others, and they will study you carefully and quickly surpass you again.
So, honestly read through and understand Google’s official optimization guidelines, and do a good job in on-site and off-site SEO, is the right path.
Pit 9: Using domestic domain name providers and hosting providers for you
I have actually received so many inquiries from foreign trade professionals and answered hundreds of questions about website optimization and promotion. But what still makes me unbelievable is that many foreign trade websites still register and purchase domain names and hosts in China. This is obviously very inappropriate, as it will directly affect the speed at which visitors open your website. In terms of DNS resolution speed, line access bandwidth, and stability, it is clearly far behind foreign countries.
Enabling foreign visitors to quickly access your website is a crucial aspect of SEO. Even if your website is well-designed and attractive, if it doesn’t load within 8 seconds, visitors may lose patience. Moreover, Google also places great emphasis on website speed in its ranking factors. Fast websites can provide visitors with a better experience and have an advantage in ranking.
Pit 10: Service providers have no copyright awareness
Regarding copyright awareness, this is a special reminder.
Previously, a foreign trade student sought out a website optimization service provider who had a completely imitative website thinking approach. What kind of website do you like? Provide a reference website to help you replicate the same style. As a result, the service provider not only copied the page design, layout, and other elements from the reference website, but also copied the banner images and some text from the other party’s website. Maybe I’ve gotten used to building Chinese websites before, and I often dig up styles to imitate websites,
Foreigners will have a strong sense of copyright. If you copy wantonly, intentionally infringe or arbitrarily encroach on the interests of other people’s brand trademarks, the other party will complain to your host company, and will complain to Google, and you will be warned or punished to a certain extent. In serious cases, Google will not include your website, and the host service provider will shut down your host.
The quality of service providers is very important. Although this may seem like a small matter, mature and responsible service providers will not expose you to potential risks.
The above explains why there are too many pitfalls when it comes to foreign trade website building, website Google promotion, SEO ranking optimization, and so on. In fact, there are many aspects that may not be fully thought out at the moment. Just write whatever comes to mind.
After reading this article, please don’t make me recommend a reliable service provider or anything. I’m sorry, I really can’t recommend it! I can only tell you the aspects to pay attention to, how to choose, it’s all up to you.
Next, let’s talk about the misunderstandings of foreign trade professionals.
Just spend money to find someone to do it, and become a hands off shopkeeper yourself
Many people’s thoughts are that I have entrusted this task to you. You are a professional, I don’t understand, I am only responsible for paying. Help me solve this problem and complete this project well. I don’t have time to deal with other things, nor do I want to.
A very important aspect of doing SEO is that you must personally participate and fully communicate with the service provider in many aspects. If there is not enough communication and no dedicated person responsible for tracking and confirming the progress of the entire project, it will definitely be difficult for the project to be effective in the future.
You don’t care, can I still score you 90 points? A passing score of 60 is enough, no more, there are other clients to serve.
Urgent to see the effect
Many people feel that if they spend money, they must see results quickly. In fact, some SEO tasks can be quite complicated. It’s possible that the website you previously built on someone else had an unreasonable structure or various issues, and the service provider needs to help you gradually modify and optimize it. Usually, the first page on Google is rarely a newly established indexed website unless the competition is really low.
There are also some foreign trade professionals who understand that white hat SEO takes time, but they are impatient, so they can’t help but urge service providers for results, which also puts a lot of operational pressure on service providers.
Why hasn’t the ranking come up yet? I’ve been waiting for half a month
Sorry, it takes time for the new website to be indexed by Google, and doing white hat SEO for ranking also takes time. It’s not that fast
Can you give me an exact time frame when I can see the ranking
– “…”
It is recommended to lower expectations for timeliness and not solely rely on website SEO, dreaming of receiving inquiries every day.
Your website is your virtual asset and requires careful management. Anything that can quickly increase asset value with money does not last long. So understand one thing: haste makes waste.
Content marketing is suitable for any industry
I previously wrote an article stating that Industrial Use products are easier to do Google SEO and content marketing.
In most cases, Residential use products for civilian use (daily necessities, household items, fast-moving consumer goods, etc.) face greater competition in ranking on Google, as the first page is almost entirely composed of e-commerce platforms.
The latter industrial use products have much lower competition difficulty in ranking, making it easier to compete for product keywords or product category keywords for ranking than daily necessities. And some products are very specialized and have specific application areas, so those who are not familiar with this industry will not understand it at all, so it is more like a small niche field.
It can be said that Industrial use products are relatively more suitable for optimization and content marketing, in order to obtain better quality traffic and convert it into effective inquiries.
Not all Residential use products are difficult to convert natural traffic into inquiries through SEO content marketing. I think there are some products that are like this. For example, most daily necessities have low value and no user experience, social media enterprise account products have slow spread and increase followers, and end users are not very keen on searching for these products. These SEO methods that rely on content marketing to attract traffic and convert inquiries are not very effective.
Of course, there are still many types of products suitable for Residential use. For example, digital products, smart homes, electronic products, which have a high level of user experience and are easy to spread on social media platforms, can be used to build websites, attract traffic, convert inquiries, and so on. There are many good examples, so I won’t list them.
However, content marketing is not easy to do. Because:
You cannot write more than 10 high-quality English articles on your own without sufficient skills and time.
Secondly, if you hire writers on outsourcing platforms to write, it will take a lot of time and effort just to test and screen them. The quality of the writing may completely disappoint you, and the content quality may not be as good as the articles on websites that rank well on Google now.
In addition, the direction of the content written is also important, requiring keyword research and analysis of search needs, and then considering what content can generate search traffic. Writing a bunch of articles that nobody is interested in or searching for is also a waste of effort.
Basically, the content marketing on the English B2B websites I know is done well, mostly by myself, and many of them are in the mechanical industry. Most of the articles are written by oneself, with a small portion outsourced. The article I wrote was edited and polished by foreigners, and I spent a lot of energy on content creation. I have persisted in doing it for at least one or two years, gradually seeing a stable increase in website traffic and an increase in inquiries generated naturally every month.
Why haven’t I put in too much effort into content marketing?
Firstly, in my industry, foreign companies provide more detailed information than I do. Secondly, I rely entirely on quantity for my low value consumables. Inquiries usually ask for quantities of 5 boxes and 10 boxes, but the problem is that I usually use sea freight containers to load thousands of boxes. I really can’t make such inquiries. I have also investigated the reasons and optimized them. For large-scale wholesale or imported products, I have switched to using wholesale and import terms. However, the result is that there are almost no inquiries, which I cannot do.
One reason is that there are indeed not enough keyword orders of magnitude and a sufficient number of high-quality pages, making it difficult to achieve rankings; Secondly, my energy is mainly focused on actively developing clients.
Moreover, for the large-scale import of these fast-moving consumer goods, professional buyers mainly search for suppliers through exhibitions, B2B platforms, social media platforms, etc. It is relatively rare to directly search for a certain product or product category and find a website to send an inquiry.
However, machinery or electromechanical products or other industrial products with specific purposes, due to their scarcity and freshness of content, if you can persist in producing high-quality content, gradually become authoritative stations in segmented fields, and the situation is much better than fast-moving consumer goods.
Not actively attracting traffic on their own
There are many social platforms nowadays, such as Facebook groups, Instagram, Quora, and many others that can attract traffic. If you don’t learn about them yourself, do you expect service providers to help you publish content to attract traffic? Although there may be a few private or small-scale studio service providers who may help you with such specific services, 99% of service providers will not help you.
You need to pay attention to the traffic on social media platforms by using copy, images, and entrepreneurial videos, and actively directing traffic to your website through content marketing.
Although external traffic attraction and content marketing are both difficult, if you have the determination, you can still gradually do them, which requires continuous effort to learn and persist.
Of course, there are opportunity costs involved. The same amount of time and energy can also be used to expand business and increase sales personnel. So, if you are determined to focus on marketing, it’s better to hire someone specifically to do promotion optimization.
Although high-quality external links are difficult to obtain, they are not necessarily unavailable
Enterprise websites have too few pages, including product pages, totaling only a few dozen pages. The order of magnitude of page indexing is too low, and the page quality is relatively low. Because many page structures are similar, such as product pages.
So we can only find ways to do more content marketing, writing articles with length and depth around our products, industries, services, technical points, and other aspects. All articles should be written around your product, industry, or service content.
Then the external part of the website is to constantly explore valuable external links. Of course, this is a very difficult step. High quality websites generally cannot be linked to by you, and may not even pay attention to you. This social value needs to be exchanged, and development also requires a win-win situation. What value have you added to the other party? Why does the other party give you external links? So these aspects are worth considering.
You can’t stand out among the many competitors in Google rankings just by keywords. It can only ensure that your optimization direction is correct, relying solely on on-site SEO is not enough, because many competitors in the same industry do better in on-site SEO, so it is difficult for you to directly widen the gap in these aspects. If you have a few high-quality external links, it’s like applying for a job. With a few influential letters of recommendation from industry celebrities in hand, you may easily surpass other competitors.
But of course, the difficulty is great, but if you can write high-quality and well written Killer Posts and submit them to websites with high authority in the industry, obtaining external links to the inner pages of the articles is also a way. In addition, it is recommended to use content marketing and forwarding on social media to attract traffic and obtain evaluations.
Not valuing the output of video resources
Video has become a very important aspect of SEO optimization for foreign trade websites in recent years. 1.3 billion people worldwide use YouTube, and the statistics of video views on YouTube and Facebook have grown rapidly in the past two years.
Google also pays more attention to videos and places them on search result pages (SERPs). If you are already planning to do some online marketing promotion, then don’t ignore YouTube videos.
You can try recording some short videos, such as company introduction, product demonstration, production process, quality control, product selection suggestions, and even a collection of clips of customers visiting the company. Then share videos on other social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to gain traffic and links to the company’s website.
Comparing prices, I want a cheaper service provider
The Chinese have to say that they really believe in the word “cost performance”.
You should know that companies that provide truly beneficial SEO services can never do it for just a few thousand yuan. Because this is a highly labor-intensive process that requires continuous management, labor costs will not be low.
So, if you are confident that the service provider you have found has good technology, sufficient English optimization background, excellent customer cases, and you have also learned about customers who have purchased services and received genuine reviews. If the price is really much higher than other service providers, I can only say that it makes sense to be expensive. If you choose a service provider that is more expensive or cheaper than ordinary products, you may end up suffering the most losses in the end. Because you paid a lot of money, there was nothing valuable in the end.
Another common question is, should we outsource SEO to foreigners? For example, Indians.
Outsourcing SEO to Indians
I often receive development letters from Indians in my email, most of which are to help you improve your SEO ranking.
Indians are indeed globally renowned in the software outsourcing industry because their costs are low, only one-third of the labor costs in Europe and America, and they generally speak English well for communication. There are good SEO teams in India, with good skills and not very cheap prices.
But most of what you can find are cheap, with average service and quality, and they tend to procrastinate and are not very meticulous when doing things. You should know that there is no such thing as cheap or affordable professional services.
However, in terms of pricing, Indians are still much more conscientious than those in China. At least what kind of Chinese enterprise power in China, building an ordinary enterprise website and quoting tens of thousands of yuan, is really drunk.
Once the ranking goes up, it becomes comfortable
Believe what has been said above, you shouldn’t have such a once and for all idea, right? Ranking is dynamic, and being on the first page recently does not necessarily mean being consistently on the first page. It is possible that with an update to Google’s algorithm, your ranking has significantly declined, or that other websites have done a lot of optimization work and have surpassed your ranking.
So, doing Google SEO requires persistence and long-term effort. Only with the correct optimization thinking, a certain technical foundation, and sufficient effort can there be rewards. Instead of putting in a little effort and feeling that there should be a reward.
Okay, what was mentioned above is a common misunderstanding. Let’s talk about some more important aspects below.
What other things should you pay for besides SEO services?
Specialized SEO books and training
I have already recommended basic introductory books. Of course, sometimes you lack initiative in learning, so you may need to enroll in some high-quality training. There are many types of Google SEO training, and the level of training varies depending on the level of the speakers and whether they are truly practical. If you’re not sure, take a look at a book for now. If your English foundation is good, there are also many texts and videos on Google and Youtube that you can learn on your own.
By understanding some basic SEO skills, one can at least communicate more efficiently with service providers and make basic judgments about the quality of their services.
SEO analysis tools
You may need to use professional SEO tools to check various indicators of the website, such as inclusion volume, external links, ranking, difficulty of competition, and so on. So you need to have a general understanding of the following professional analysis tools.
Ahrefs
SEMrush
Majestic
SimilarWeb
KWfinder
LinkMiner
SERPChecker
SERPWatcher
The specific usage is believed to be introduced on both Google and Baidu. There are not many tools, just two or three that are useful.
Professional WordPress SEO plugin
Yoast SEO plugin is the most popular SEO professional plugin in the WordPress world. Of course, you can use it for free for six months to a year. After becoming proficient, you can consider upgrading to the paid version. The paid enhanced version has added many very useful additional features.
Part time or full-time personnel in online marketing
If you plan to do some SEO work for your company, such as hiring writers to write content for you. So searching for writers, selecting writers, trying out services, outsourcing platform task management, communicating with writers about tasks, confirming details, managing multiple writers, and so on, all require a great deal of time and effort.
If there is a dedicated person to help you with these tasks, although it incurs some additional labor costs, it is still very worthwhile.
What other options are there besides SEO to get inquiries?
Google Adwords keyword bidding ads and Facebook ads. These advertisements can be delivered with precision, and you can control the budget yourself.
Google Adwords directly obtains traffic through keyword advertising exposure, which is a more direct way. Of course, the effect cannot be the same for different products and industries. The key to doing this is to study what keywords to advertise. If the keywords are selected correctly, it’s okay. If they are not selected correctly, it will feel like burning money.
So it’s still possible to invest a small budget, such as a few thousand yuan, to try a few times at the beginning. However, I still want to emphasize that it is important to choose which keywords to advertise in which market. You need to conduct your own research or have a professional service company provide you with advice or operations.
Another one is Facebook advertising. It can be said that currently, after Google, Facebook is the second largest advertiser for paid advertising, but it mainly focuses on C-end products.
If you want to learn about Facebook ads, you can first search for some information on Google to determine if it is suitable for you to advertise.
okay. That’s all for this article. I’m just trying my best to tell you what I know, hoping that you won’t take any detours or pitfalls on this path.
