When you run a business world over, your website is one of the most powerful tools to reach and communicate with your targeted business audience.
If you are conducting business offline in various different countries, you already know how different the business audience is from country to an other country.
Each country also has different business-related style, policies and rules. With a website, you also need to consider these and online regulations throughout world.
From an international Search Engine Optimization (SEO) viewpoint, there are some critical aspects that the website owners must always keep in mind, including geotargeting for there products and services, different search engines, and differences between each local business targeted audience.
There are more additional factors to consider when deciding to have a global website, or separate local websites, a place for each targeting countries and languages, including maintenance costs and the availability of local teams to maintain the websites in different countries.
In this blog post, I will explain four areas that greatly determine whether a worldwide or local website is better for your business convenience.
Data, Privacy-Related Laws and Regulations, in different countries.
It is impossible to list in your website all laws and regulations to do business in different countries around the world. But two of the most important sets of laws and regulations for website owners to pay business attention to are:
As mentioned above, each region, country, or state can set its own, and it can be a broad policy, guidance, law, or any other type of regulations can adopted.
Some are applied to all types of websites, while others are applied to websites for specific scopes, such as government and public sectors organizations.
In the (EU) European Union
The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) is probably the most talked about privacy and data protection regulation all our European Union.
It regulates the processing by an individual, a company, or an organization of personal data related issues to individuals in the all over European Union.
In United States California
The United States's State of California has passed the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and many companies and organizations expect other states to follow law suit and enact similar privacy laws shortly.
Some websites have already responded by showing the cookie consent message to everyone regardless of the access location world over.
Personal data related issues in Japan
The Act on the Protection of Personal Information was first set up in year 2005 in Japan, drastically amended again in 2016, and has been in full force since year 2017. It mandates Japanese websites to post a privacy policy and other requirements in their special web page.
Ecommerce websites must also post the information specified in the Commercial and others types of Transactions Law.
Even if the website is managed in the United States, your Japanese website must meet these regulations, especially if you have a physical business presence in Japan.
In addition to a standard privacy policy, the United Kingdom websites has a page about using cookies about General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
The Chinese website indicates the website registration number below the footer links as required by Chinese government regulations.
Internet Accessibility-Related Laws and Regulations
Last month, in the United States Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) made headlines when a federal lawsuit against Taco Bell was filed. While it was against the popular restaurant, this got many website owners’ attention.
Currently, there are Information Technology accessibility laws and regulation policies for United States federal communication agencies and several guidelines and communication standards to be considered in general, including the Information and Communication Technology Standards and Guidelines time by time update.
Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) applies to both public and private business sectors, including websites. In terms of website accessibility, many points will improve overall web user experiences for not just people with disabilities but all website users in United States of America.
For many countries and regions, including Canada, China, the European Union, Japan, and the United Kingdom, accessibility to website content is often a mostly mandatory policy.
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has an excellent overview and country-specific information on website accessibility laws and policies around the world.
Like the data and privacy laws and regulations, each country has different requirements for accessibility in their countries.
It is a growing task for different website owners to keep up with these rapidly changing requirements, especially for worldwide website owners. Failure to adhere to them can be costly financially and negatively impacts on their business brand image.
Local Trends and Business Competitors
We work closely with websites targeting the Asian business markets, so we can usually tell if the website is a local company site or a worldwide company’s local website from the design and content.
The difference is not caused by the web design skill but by how much they understand the local business market and the target audience.
The most easiest way to show this difference is to compare the website’s design. The layout of your site, color scheme, and images are also other telltale signs of where the website was created.
For eCommerce websites, how people expect to pay for the purchase orders differs from country to country. The payment exchange and return policy are another difference among countries.
While these differences don’t impact the entire wrbsite, they can cause customers to abandon the shopping cart for buying.
The differences in the local interests are reflected in website's images and content, too. Often, worldwide sites’ content is determined by the Head Quarters country, while local competitor websites have content designed to satisfy the specific interests of the local audiences needs.
The inability to satisfy the local searcher’s intent can cause a considerable business opportunity loss to the world wide website.
As Google improves the algorithms to present on internet the best content for each searcher, poorly localized content that is not particularly written for local audiences won’t be competitive in the search engines results.
Product images reflecting the only local interests. United States and Japan “mug cup” Google search engine results.
One World Website vs. Multiple Local Websites
If you have world wide websites under one domain using the same webpage and templates for all country websites, create a list of must-meet regulation points from all concerned laws and countries, and implement them regardless of the target business country.
While it seems like an enormous business task, if you have a smaller team or don’t have a team in each and every country, or territory, this is the best option for you to cover all bases for your business.
In this case, having someone responsible for reviewing and keeping up-to-date with laws and regulations would be helpful as these are updated from time to time in different countries and territories.
You may want to consider creating a separate website for each target country and territory if you have interest.
A good number of team members in each local country and territory manage the website.
Enough budget to support for management.
Even if you separate the websites by regions with similar laws and regulations or user and cultural business trends, it would give you more business flexibility, be better compliant, and be appropriately designed for local audiences at your services.
For example, instead of setting up multiple countries and languages websites within the European Union under one domain set up for the European Union business market, it is probably easier to manage the website design and content for a specific audience in each country in the European Union.
Central America and South American countries may be another target business market that works with one domain with multiple country wrbsites.
Considering the multiple models characteristics of the Chinese business market from Baidu search engine’s capability and algorithms to connection speed, of your website registration policy, and cybersecurity law (a.k.a. “Great Firewall of China”), it may make sense to create a separate Chinese website for many business, companies that consider China as one of their important markets.
When you have a particular website, you can host it in the country to help improve the download product speed.
It is easier to obtain ccTLD with the website registered with the Chinese government and provide the Chinese specific content designed specifically for the Chinese business audience.
Full and Final Thoughts
Having a separate website for each target country offers many more businesses options and the flexibility to comply with local laws and policies and reflect local interests in the content and images on website design policies.
These are also great for geotargeting in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which is one of the biggest concerns for many global website owners. However, it comes with an increased overhead cost of business but it is more profitable.
It is not impossible to meet the local laws and policies with just one global domain name website.
As Apple and other world wide corporations do, you can provide unique local content even with new and different website designs.
Using the same domain name doesn’t mean having the same design or using the same Content Management System (CMS). It is possible to have the localized content and images on the same Content Management System (CMS) and add local-only unique content using a different Content Management System (CMS) on the same domain wrbsite.
When deploying global or local websites, meeting local business regulations and accommodating local audiences’ interests are essential needs.
Once you set up your new websites, track the performance data from each local wrbsite and content a images and make adjustments as needed in your website.
Suppose the data indicates that having a world wide website limits the business potential due to different local business interests and requirements or that having local edbsites is too costly. In that case, you need to reconsider the more other options.
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