i-Lines marketing goes to Athens, the capital city of Greece, on Monday, to do some search engine optimisation (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) consultancy work.

The business in question that we’re going to see has a proper web 1.0 site and there’s plenty of scope to improve the business’s ROI through search engines.

We’ll be looking at improving their meta tags, getting their copy optimised, and looking to build their web presence through pay-per-click advertising (PPC), RSS feeds and getting involved in the country’s social media network.

The challenge in international search marketing
International SEO is a new avenue for i-Lines. Although the rules should be the same as in the UK (and the US), the language will be the biggest barrier to effective copywriting for search.

Greek words take a different ending, depending on the context used. So if I were to try to tailor the website’s copy to a phrase like “tractor repair in Athens”, the translation could use several different forms of the word “tractor”.

Then there’s the fact that some Greeks use the Greek alphabet for search, while others use the Latin alphabet (this alphabet, in other words). Some search in English.

I’ll be sitting down with the in-house copywriters to discuss the best way to solve this SEO problem.