How To Successfully Enter APAC Market Through Keyword Optimization

Why SEO is important in APAC Market

The Asia-Pacific (APAC) area, with its diverse cultures, languages, religions, and social trends, represents a huge potential for the businesses who are searching for unveiled markets. Moreover, the vast range of Internet users from 20+ countries are growing exponentially, dominating large percentage of Internet usage worldwide, accounting for more than half of the 4.6 billion Internet users globally. This huge audience is definitely a huge opportunity for businesses of all industries, remaining yet untapped.

The fact that the APAC area accounts for the largest percentage of Internet users naturally leads to the fact that the level of spending in the area is growing each year. More and more APAC users are being active online to discover, search, and purchase new products and services.

In this diverse realm of the APAC market, keywords are the key factors that would decide your brand’s online presence. By researching and strategically using the brand-relevant keywords, you will be able to gain more traffic, improve your online contents’ rankings, and maximize your online presence.

Difficulty of Optimizing Keywords in APAC Market

One of the key challenges when planning and optimizing keywords targeting the APAC market comes with the linguistic diversity across countries. Countries in APAC market including China, Japan, South Korea, India, and so much more requires you to execute wide and deep keyword research and localizations. English takes less than 10% of APAC population’s language usage. The majority uses their own country’s native language such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Indonesian. In total, there are more than 3,000 languages spoken in the APAC area. Thus, every content should be localized and well translated, from organic contents to metadata, according to each different languages of each area.

Cultural nuances and exquisiteness of localization also matters, adding on the challenges of entering the APAC market. Despite each country’s proximity, these countries show incredible differences from one another. Counting in the subcultures and subregions in each country, the diversity of each country becomes even more complex. The tone or manner that is appropriate in one area might cause terrible offense in another, which is why a strict localization should be done before entering the market.

Wrongful translations can pose negative impacts to your search engine rankings. Mis-translations will not only result in providing different contents from what your potential customers are searching, but also will lead the search engines to rank your contents lower on SERPs. Mistranslations would include all of these following cases:

• Including Wrong Keywords: the usage and meaning of keywords might slightly or totally differ from regions to regions.
• Ignoring Local Nuances: the exact meaning or context of the terms might differ based on local languages, cultures, and dialects.
• Ignoring Local Trends: not taking care of the local trends might cause your contents to be outdated or unappealing.
• Focusing only on Google: you should always consider additional region-specific local search engines other than Google, such as Naver for South Korea or Baidu for China.

How to Plan and Optimize Keywords targeting APAC Market

Identifying Keywords

You should start by understanding the search behavior, intents, and the overall preferences of your target audiences who would be widespread across each country and each local areas. You can utilize keyword tools or SEO tools to identify keywords with high monthly search volumes (MSVs), and also can identify relevant keywords based on search queries, in which all the research would be done on each different languages in local areas. Although you could use keyword tools to identify basic keywords to use generally, your research should reach one step further to discover long-tail keywords that are actually searched by the people in each country and the native-language keywords that are not in English, but much more familiar to the local people. Catching the cultural nuances and trends couldn’t be done simply by using the automized tools, so browsing local search engines, websites, e-commerce sites, or mobile platforms would help.

Clustering Keywords

To more strategically organize your keywords after planning to reflect them into your organic contents, you can try grouping your keywords into several clusters.

To create keyword clusters, you can first identify your core keywords that best represent the brand identity and the overall focus of your contents. Once you identify these core keywords, you will be able to name several clusters around them. Each cluster will be the upper group of all the brand relevant keywords that you will target.

After identifying the clusters, you will be able to prioritize among them according to the importance and relevance, which will be directly reflected to your contents planning. Publishing contents and evaluating the performance on monthly basis will enable the strategical optimization of keywords and contents.

You can use the Keyword Planning Template provided below to easily create clusters and organize your keywords. Using the template below, you can organize and use your keyword on cluster basis, which will help you both plan and analyze the contents and their performances.

As one of the case studies, we have created 51 clusters based on more than 10,000 brand-relevant keywords to plan and publish the organic contents and found out how the conversion rates of all clusters differ based on each stages of customer decision journey.

It was also helpful to analyze the MSV trends of each cluster to reflect the search trend on contents plans.

Download the Keyword Clustering Template and plan your keyword strategy

Keyword Planning in APAC Template

On columns B to H, you can put in all of your clusters and the keywords accordingly. By also identifying the search intent of each keyword and the search volumes, you will also be able to briefly plan the contents’ topic on column H.

On columns I to M, you will record the status of each keyword including whether you are currently targeting the keywords, the rankings, and the execution status of on-page SEO and off-page SEO. By analyzing this status of each keyword, you will be able to identify the importance of each keyword.

After evaluating the importance, you can move on to actual action planning stage on columns N to P, which will be executed based on the importance score, from high to low.

Creating and Publishing Localized Contents

Next step would be to develop localized contents based on the keyword research. The contents should be delicately localized based on the linguistic and cultural differences of each country, with the keywords included in the contents. In most times, contents planned and published targeting one area won’t resonate with another and basic translation usually cannot fix this. You should better start again by transcreation and reproduction. While translation means to replace the language of the content, transcreation tries to reproduce the entire content from the planning stage, considering the overall mood, tone, and cultural regulations. Your brand’s contents should resonate culturally with each area and align with local values.

Keyword Performance Monitoring

After publishing the contents, monitoring the keyword performance is crucial to optimize the keywords. You should monitor the SERP rankings, user engagement metrics such as CTR or CVR, and adjust your keyword strategy accordingly.

Conclusion

Succeeding in the APAC market, especially through keyword optimization, requires you to deeply understand the linguistic diversity, cultural nuances, and search behavior that differ from regions to regions. By conducting keyword researches, clustering them, and utilizing those keywords into your organic contents that resonates with each particular areas, you will be able to successfully reach your target audiences and maximize conversions from them, in this thriving market.