• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, March 2, 2011

Google provides a platform for search engine marketing in the United States, but there are other search engines worldwide that offer a local touch. Those who couldn't make it to OMMA Global in San Francisco on Tuesday missed an opportunity to hear from Arkady Borkovsky, CTO at Yandex Labs, the technology arm for the top Russian search engine, and Laetitia Kieffer, who heads up the Dell account for search globally at MediaCom, a media-buying company. Rob Griffin, senior vice president and global director of search and analytics at Havas Digital, moderated the discussion.

Yandex holds about 66% of the search engine market in Russia. The engine, founded in the early 1990s, built a reputation on technology such as a mapping and the ability to meet cultural needs. "It's difficult for Google to get more than 20% in our market because we are very well plugged in to the culture, and pay attention to what people talk about and need," Borkovsky says. "We speak their language. And we do it faster. Google must go through Dublin and then Mountain View before giving you results. It's one reason we have a better Street View product."

The engine takes pride in understanding the local market. One of the most fundamental optimization techniques for international marketing becomes determining the keywords consumers search on to find information, products and services. Borkovsky says most sites in Russia rely on both Russian and English text, know the consumers who are searching on sites, and focus on serving up answers to questions and queries asked.

Russians are closely connected, but Borkovsky says decisions are made with or without influence from friends. Friends are a diverse group of people and they may or may not have the same opinion. It's very different from the U.S. market, he says. Social networks in Russia are known for hosting a lot of pirated content such as video, music and text, he says.

Kieffer says beyond Facebook, user-generated content really doesn't exist in China. In Asia, Google does not dominate in China, Japan and Korea, she says. It's based on cultural differences and what people want to see. Google tried to adapt to the Korean culture, but when you look at native search engines and result pages it's not just paid search. It provides knowledge and what others think about products and services.

The implications vary for companies that are attempting to expand internationally, as marketers attempt to adapt paid-search landing pages to local markets. It's a daily ritual for Kieffer, who tries to optimize pages to local markets for Dell. There are best practices such as call to actions, she says -- but when it comes to keywords, placement, design and content, marketers must pay attention to nuances geared toward specific markets. For instance, people search for "PC" in the United Kingdom much more than "Computer," but it's the opposite in the United States. In Australia it's the same for both.

The varying dialects and languages in Asian countries require specialists to manage decentralized campaigns, but accounts must still have similar structures. Why? In China, in-country teams receive better support from Baidu. A resent campaign geared toward Chinese residents in China, but run from a Singapore office, received poor support. "It took Baidu much longer to approve ads for this client, compared with another client whose campaign ran from a team within China," Kieffer says. "You need that quick turnaround time and local presence."