Summary

Christina Spaulding, Founder and CEO of Manzanita Marketing, explores international marketing and “organic performance,” focusing on how AI and bots interact with websites and content across different cultures and languages.
She explains practical strategies for research, localisation, and setting targets for organic visibility, along with common pitfalls in global SEO and content translation. She also touches on building an international marketing career, including her own path through internships abroad and work in multiple countries.

 

Keypoints

  • Organic performance now covers both search and social content and must be readable by humans while being legible to bots.
  • International marketing requires adapting your ideal client profile and messaging to each specific culture and legal context, not just translating language.
  • Start with one new language or culture to reduce complexity and make it easier to correct inevitable mistakes in localisation.
  • Use tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console as neutral sources of truth for traffic, conversions, and rankings by country or region.
  • Thorough localisation includes hidden strings, headers, footers, and legal/privacy elements, with consistent translations and final human QA.

 

Transcript

Transcripts are auto-generated.

 

Kiran Kapur, Host (00:01):
Hello and welcome. This week we are in the world of international marketing and organic performance, and I'm delighted to welcome Christina Spaulding, founder of Manzanita Marketing. Christina, welcome. Where are you geographically?

Christina Spaulding, Founder and CEO of Manzanita Marketing (00:16):
I'm in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. I think I have to say contractually fabulous Las Vegas.

Kiran Kapur, Host (00:23):
Brilliant. Manzanita marketing must be one of the prettiest names I've heard for a company. What does it mean?

Christina Spaulding, Founder and CEO of Manzanita Marketing (00:30):
It means little apple in Spanish. Las Vegas is a oasis in the middle of a desert, and I love to go out and hike. In the desert near my house, there is a plant called the Manzanita Plant. It is a bush with round, glossy green leaves, and it bears teeny tiny little fruits like yebig that are shaped like apples. So, as the Spanish came through and saw different plants, they named that one Little Apple. It's one of my favourite plants. And from a business perspective, an oak tree grows up and then out, a manzanita plant grows out and then up. So you can try a whole bunch of different marketing tactics to find success and then see which ones bring you up the most and invest more in those.

Kiran Kapur, Host (01:23):
That is a fabulous analogy. I love that. And so when you talk about international SEO, but you also call it organic performance. So what do you mean by internationally SEO? And then we'll look at what do you mean by organic performance?

Christina Spaulding, Founder and CEO of Manzanita Marketing (01:37):
I think it's easier to flip it and say organic performance. So up until about two years ago or a year ago, you could only really search for information on the internet through a search engine, and search engines understood queries in a certain way. They did not understand them in a natural language way. You gave them a set of words and hoped that the words matched the content on a page. Now with AI and LLMs specifically, you can give bots queries in a more natural sounding way. And that is kind of a major shift. The industry doesn't know what to call it yet. Do we call it SEO? Do we call it AIEO? GEO? Oh, McDonald had a farmio. I don't know. So if we just say organic performance, we avoid the whole thing. We include the fact that social media posts are now being indexed by Google like the whole nine yards.

Kiran Kapur, Host (02:35):
So when we talk about organic performance, what we are talking about is getting our information and our websites, or as you say, social media posts, to be picked up by the bots by search engines.

Christina Spaulding, Founder and CEO of Manzanita Marketing (02:47):
Correct. By bots, whether that's a classic Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Echosia, or if it's a AI bot, Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, all the bots. They function in very similar ways. The content needs to be legible by the bots as well as by the humans because at the end of the day, humans are buying stuff or they're telling bots to buy stuff. So you have to understand your ideal client profile. Who's the person that you want to buy this thing?

Kiran Kapur, Host (03:21):
That is so interesting because I've been attending things talking about AI and whatever you call it. So let's stick with organic performance. I like that. And there is a real sort of suggestion about now we need to write our website for the bots. And I'm thinking, but actually, if you ever read a website that's written for a bot, it's unreadable.

Christina Spaulding, Founder and CEO of Manzanita Marketing (03:39):
So for me, the visible copy I write for humans, the code that presents that copy is where I place little green flags for bots. So the headline is a headline that's going to grab the user's attention, find their pain point and solve their pain point. Then the copy entices and gives them opportunities to do the thing that we both want them to do, that I want them to do, and that they want to do. Whether that's book an appointment or buy a thing or download an item, whatever it is, we want to give people the opportunity to do what they came to do. Now, when I say it that way, it sounds great, but really it's like, how do I sell? I give them opportunities to buy.

Kiran Kapur, Host (04:25):
We're in marketing. I mean, we exist to get people to do things. That's what we for. So meanwhile, in the background, you've got things that you're putting in just for the bots to read so that you come up on searches.

Christina Spaulding, Founder and CEO of Manzanita Marketing (04:38):
So part of it is for the bots. There's still debate in the industry about schema markup. Schema markup is a bit of code that you put in the background of a website. It is exclusively prefer bots to read. What it's trying to do, the aim of schema, is to classify information and interrelate information. This is helpful for bots because if you're working in an agentic world, bots don't got time for that. If you can tell a bot, "Hey, this is the thing, it's related to these other things," then the bot already knows, "Oh, okay. I don't have to guess. Somebody's telling me Voltaire is related to French, is related to 1800s, is related to Playwright.

(05:29):
And specifically how these things are related. Then it makes it so much easier for bots to parse information. Some companies have seen benefits to using schema. Other companies have not. There've been a lot of experiments about it. The world is changing so fast, and this industry is changing so fast. The jury's still out. I say it's worth the work to do it well and incorporate ourselves into the knowledge graph. So the knowledge graph is this attempt by large software developers, especially Google, to create the interrelations of things in the virtual world the way they are in the real world. So it's kind of an ambitious project. It's interesting to be like, okay, my customer is going to be part of this big thing. I'm doing it for them.

Kiran Kapur, Host (06:21):
Your specific element is international SEO as well, or international organic performance. Do I need to think about that differently to the way I think about non-international organic performance?

Christina Spaulding, Founder and CEO of Manzanita Marketing (06:32):
So the approach in general, it's the same but different for each country or culture. If your approach is our business is a values-based business, these are our values, here's how we do business, that should be reflected in every language you choose to do business in. You have to be able to represent your business accurately no matter what the culture, but you want to do your research in the ideal client profile for that particular language and culture. And I say culture rather than language because here in the US, especially here in Las Vegas, we have a large Spanish-speaking population. That's not a different country. It's a different language, but not a different country. So there are certain things you have to look at for minority languages that you don't have to look at, or things that you have to look at for other countries that you don't have to look at for a internal language.

(07:29):
So for the US, you might do your website in English and in Spanish, but you don't have to worry about currency conversions. So taking that over to Europe in Switzerland, you might want to do your website in German, French, and Italian. You still don't have to worry about currency conversions unless you want to market to the rest of the European Union and then you have to put the Euro on as well as the Swiss brick.

Kiran Kapur, Host (07:55):
Yeah. So it's not sufficient just to think of language, you've got to think of the things around it. So I was thinking that through as you were explaining it and thinking, okay, so if I was talking to a US audience in English and Spanish, I don't have to explain the education system, for example, because the education system is the same. But if I was doing something educationally for someone in the UK and someone in Spain, where the education systems may be different, may have different expectations of the children or whatever, I would have to think about that. So am I getting that correctly?

Christina Spaulding, Founder and CEO of Manzanita Marketing (08:29):
100%. So the question is the product that you are marketing, is it received by your target client the same way and is your target client even the same?

Kiran Kapur, Host (08:41):
Okay, can we explore that one a bit more?

Christina Spaulding, Founder and CEO of Manzanita Marketing (08:43):
Yes. I'll give you an easy example first. I think it's Procter & Gamble who owns Swiffer. So Procter & Gamble brought out Swiffer to the European market, which is a mop product. And they marketed it as less time cleaning. And it went great in many countries. Sales went as planned except for Italy. In Italy, they measured the value of cleaning and how clean your house was by how long you spent doing it. So saving time was not an interesting sales proposition. It wasn't a customer pain point. So they had to shift the marketing to talk less about saving time and more about a deeper, cleaner clean. And when they started talking about a cleaner clean because you're not using dirty water from your mop bucket, you're using these little disposable sheets that trap the dirt, blah, blah, blah. All of a sudden the sales started to take off because it was hitting the correct pain point for that culture.

(09:42):
Research is super important when you are looking at what new cultures or languages am I tackling because you want to understand the full picture. A lot of times, and US firms are worse with this than European firms are. European firms are a little bit more aware of their global competition. You want to understand the full market of what you're getting into. Who are the competitors? You may think, "Oh, my competitors are just like these companies that do exactly what I do. " But then you look at the country you're looking at going into and you realise, "Oh, wait a second. They have homegrown manufacturers in this segment that cater exclusively to this country. Now we have to just think about our product. Where do we stand with our value proposition when we have a different tier of competition? It's not a yes, no. It's a, okay, here's another thing to think about.

(10:37):
" And then there's also the legality of the product. I'm in Las Vegas. I've worked in the gambling industry. I worked for a website that was all about gambling, and they wanted to make inroads in China. And I was like, "Okay, we're not going to rank in Chinese ever for China, because gambling is illegal and because China has control over their servers, they won't allow gambling content on Chinese servers, which is something you need to rank in China. So we had this discussion, and they said, "Okay, that's fine. We don't need to rank in China. We need to rank in Chinese for queries outside of China, usually in the US, because Chinese customers are using VPNs to access US content. But you have to go through the conversation of here's our product, here's the market, here's how we sell. Is the way that we sell also possible? The US is very lax about subscriptions and how you get out of them. Other countries, if you sign up for a subscription, you have to have a certain easy process to get out of it. So if you have these American-style, click a button here, we'll email you. Now you have to call us. In certain other countries, that doesn't fly. So you have to make adjustments to your actual product. So the research first is so important because otherwise you enter and then the marketing doesn't work, the product doesn't work, and maybe you get kicked out of the country.

(12:19):
Research first, research first.

Kiran Kapur, Host (12:21):
So how do you start the research? So a company comes to you and says, we want to launch this, let's say it was the mop product that you gave that example in Europe. Do you pick one country and start with that and then do your research there? And how do you even do the research?

Christina Spaulding, Founder and CEO of Manzanita Marketing (12:39):
I speak French and German along with English. I've lived in both France and Germany, so I market myself for French and German content and SEO. So usually people come to me and say, "Hey, we're looking at Germany, Austria, Switzerland, maybe France, maybe Belgium."

(12:57):
Because I've marketed myself as an expert in those countries. So there I already have some of the institutional knowledge and it's just a sanity check of what's the latest rules and regulations versus when I lived there, how has the culture changed? And if you stay on top of that kind of stuff just by consuming media and stuff like that, well, you have an idea, and you double-check. A lot of times the question is actually a little bit more broad and it's how do I pick what country to go into or what language to go into? And there you start with where are my visitors to my website coming from? Am I getting queries from specific languages already? I have a client in the US who's getting Spanish language queries from Spanish speakers in her area. And she's not in an area that you would think is normally Spanish speaking.

(13:49):
So she's not in Miami, she's not in California, she's not here in Las Vegas. She's in Georgia, north of Atlanta. She's already getting Spanish language queries. We're going to have to have a conversation of what do you want to do about that?

(14:03):
So there may already be signs that you're getting some interest internationally, but you might also want to be proactive. And then you can start pulling up country profiles, population, type of government, how the culture treats consumerism in general. Are they socialists, fully capitalist, communist, basic country data that you can find on Encyclopaedia Britannica, for example? That's where you can start and be like, "Well, I think I wanted to go to Japan, pull up a profile on Japan and see if what I think it's about matches what it's actually about. " So you can do a basic check there.

Kiran Kapur, Host (14:48):
Thank you for that. The other thing you said was that you needed a really clear customer profile.

Christina Spaulding, Founder and CEO of Manzanita Marketing (14:53):
Yes.

Kiran Kapur, Host (14:54):
So how many customer profiles am I likely to need? Do I need one for each language, one for each culture? How would you recommend that?

Christina Spaulding, Founder and CEO of Manzanita Marketing (15:06):
So my recommendation is to start with one other language or culture first because you're going to make mistakes. If you make them in one, it's way easier to clean up those mistakes or respond to them more quickly. If you say, "Oh, I'm going to go to Europe and I'm going to start with French, German, Spanish, and Italian." Well, all of a sudden you have four languages that if there is a mistake, you got to fix it four times. You may have to go back to a translator to fix it. So then you have four times talking to translators.

Kiran Kapur, Host (15:38):
So one of the things I was interested in was how you set targets for organic performance, because it's one of the things we always teach. We always say you must have targets, you must have targets. And then we don't always know where to start and how to create them. So what would you recommend people think about?

Christina Spaulding, Founder and CEO of Manzanita Marketing (15:56):
So for organic, there are a few classic KPIs that you can usually get from Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free tool. You do have to have rights to use it. So you have to have permission from the website owner to see those stats, but it will tell you how much traffic you're getting. So how many people are coming to the site, how many people are purchasing or clicking on a specific element. Google Search Console is a second tool for organic folks that shows you where your terms are ranking in Google overall. And you can filter down by country or by region, but instead of saying what happens with us organic folks is you have a client that says, "I'm not ranking number one because I searched for myself.

(16:49):
Where are you right now?" "Well, I'm not at home. I'm on vacation in The Bahamas. ""Okay. And your business is local to Las Vegas?" "Yeah. s"Well, of course you're not showing up because you're in The Bahamas." So having a kind of neutral third party or a reliable source for data of how many people are coming to the site and where you're ranking is really helpful because you can share that with any stakeholders and say, okay, we were ranking number one for best chicken wings in Las Vegas and now we're ranking number three, and here's the things that we're doing to fix it. With AI queries, it's different. There are a crepe tonne of tools out there that claim to measure AI presence, and it's a harder thing to track because AI queries are personalised to the user and traditional search queries are not. If you rank number one chicken wings in Las Vegas, okay, there's personalization, but it's less of a factor than in AI queries.

(17:54):
But if you rank for chicken wings in Las Vegas organically in traditional search, it is likely to be that way for the majority of users. But if you ask AI, "Hey, what are the best chicken wings in Las Vegas?" You might get different answers depending on who's asking what you've previously asked AI. If you've asked AI about spicy food, you might get a slightly different answer of not just who's got the best, but who's got the hottest. So using Google Search Console helps you with your traditional search results and is that kind of one source of truth. There are a variety of AI tools that claim to show where you are and how visible you are for certain query clusters. And it's kind of pick whatever tool you have the most confidence in right now. Industry leaders like SEM Rush and AHRFs are developing tools.

(18:45):
Those tools are paid products and they're not cheap. But if you're using them on a daily basis for keyword research, and brand tracking and content creation and, then them having an AI evaluation tool is just one more benefit you get out of the tool.

Kiran Kapur, Host (19:05):
Actually, I was going to ask you what sort of key mistakes you see people make, but you've given me quite a few. So what are the elements that you should really worry about to get right if you've decided you're going for an organic performance?

Christina Spaulding, Founder and CEO of Manzanita Marketing (19:20):
So do your research, make sure you've got your ideal client profile adjusted for the culture that you're entering. When it comes down to the nitty-gritty of the translation of the website or the transcreation of the website, localisation of the website, localisation is the best term. Take care to do Q&A. Depending on how the site is built, there may be certain bits that you need to figure out how to translate them. Forms, tickers, pieces of content that come up on the corner of products like on sale, bestseller, little banner type things, pieces of content, those strings of words might be housed somewhere else in your site. And it's really kind of embarrassing when you've taken all the effort to localise your site in Spanish or French or Japanese. And then you have this banner up on top that says sale now, sale now, sale now in English.

(20:22):
So that's one bugaboo where I'm like, find those hidden strings. Make sure you translate that. Translate your footers, your headers. Usually, the header gets translated because it's your main navigation menu, but don't forget your footer.

Kiran Kapur, Host (20:37):
Yeah.

Christina Spaulding, Founder and CEO of Manzanita Marketing (20:39):
Make sure that your privacy policy is adapted to the culture that you're going into. Germans, for example, have a very specific impressum that has to cover certain information. It's different than a privacy policy. So it's more like a terms of service, but it's a very specific thing. Other countries may have similar kind of terms of service in presum's privacy policy requirements. Follow all local laws, GDPR type stuff, follow that. The other thing is make sure that your translations are consistent throughout and that you don't cross-seed your translations. A French client does not want to see a German buy now button. A German client does not want to see a French by now button. So when you're putting together your translation database, be clear about what goes where. Double check, ask a human, a translator if you need to, to proofread your stuff and do a final Q&A before you fully launch.

Kiran Kapur, Host (21:42):
That sounds an amazing selection of advice. That's brilliant. And my final question was a little bit about working internationally in marketing because it's obviously something that you've done. You said you've worked in France, you worked for Germany, you're now in Los Angeles, and I'm still very jealous. And I know it's something that lots of marketers would like to do to have more sort of international experience. Where would you suggest again, where would you suggest people started?

Christina Spaulding, Founder and CEO of Manzanita Marketing (22:07):
So if you are a student, there's an organisation called AISEC, A- I-E-S-E-C. It's a student run organisation that recruits internships for international students and then places students. So students go to businesses and say, "Hey, do you need international interns? Because we can get them for you. " And then they go to their fellow students and say, "Hey, you want an international internship? Because we can find them for you. " So they create the internships, they find the students. There is a matching software that suggests matches to the potential employers, potential employers picks from a shortlist, and then off you go. I got my career start through an AIESEC internship.

Kiran Kapur, Host (22:51):
Wow.

Christina Spaulding, Founder and CEO of Manzanita Marketing (22:52):
So two weeks after graduating, I was in Germany working at a cigar factory.

Kiran Kapur, Host (22:56):
Okay. Possibly not the career route you originally thought or where you thought your career might start, but yes.

Christina Spaulding, Founder and CEO of Manzanita Marketing (23:03):
I actually had no expectations on where to start. So this was as good as any, but I learned a lot about cigars and tobacco that I never would have known otherwise. But I also learned a lot about German culture and high German versus everything else, what's actually spoken. It was definitely an eye-opening experience.

Kiran Kapur, Host (23:21):
Fantastic. Christina Spaulding, founder of Manzanita Marketing. Still think that's a lovely name. Thank you so much for coming on. That was a huge amount of expertise that you've just given us on organic performance and working internationally. Thank you so much.

Christina Spaulding, Founder and CEO of Manzanita Marketing (23:36):
Thank you for having me.