A Country Page Is Not a Local Site

Going global looks like the hard part of building a comparison platform. It is not. Once the platform works in one market, the template copies. In early 2009 topseos had versions running for the UK, India, Canada and Australia; the India site had launched the week before I mentioned it to a prospective client. By late 2010 there were more, and I was writing a 24-point specification to make each one read as if it belonged in its country.

Becoming useful in a country is a different job. The template can say “Best SEO Companies in [Country].” It cannot tell you who will read that page, what they want from it, or which providers deserve to be on it.

The page served a different buyer than expected

The India rankings are the clearest example. A domestic reading says an India list exists to help Indian businesses find Indian agencies. Many of its most valuable readers were not Indian businesses. As I explained to an agency in New Delhi in 2009, many of the firms on that list served clients in the US, UK, Australia and Canada, because buyers in those countries were reading the Indian list to find a firm to outsource to. I have written about that in What Counts as Normal.

That changes what a good India page is. It has to serve an American or British buyer evaluating an offshore partner, not only a local one, and the providers who belong on it are the ones who can serve that buyer well.

Being on the list is not the same as winning locally

The opposite case came from Southeast Asia. In 2018 an agency based in Singapore was already advertising in our Singapore rankings and asked about placement in the Malaysia, Hong Kong and Australia lists as well. Its budget was modest, and it explained why:

As our business is based in Singapore and we are just testing out the market. It will be much tougher for us to convert any leads compared to the local vendors.

A foreign provider could be visible on a local list. It could not easily turn that visibility into clients, because local buyers preferred local firms. A country page that fills its positions with whoever will pay for them, regardless of whether they can serve local buyers, is not a local site. It is an advertising board with a country’s name on it.

What localising actually meant

Looking at what we did in practice, the parts that copied easily were:

• the page structure, categories and templates;
• writing titles and addresses in the words people in that country searched;
• linking internally within the country site rather than sending everyone back to the US one.

The parts that did not copy were:

• who the buyer was. Local businesses, foreign buyers sourcing in that country, or both.
• which providers belonged. Firms that could actually serve those buyers, local or not.
• what the list should look like. In a single city years later, I learned that even the length of the list was local: Ten Was the Default. Five Was Right.

The question to ask first

A country version of a comparison platform should start with the question the template cannot answer: who reads this page, from where, and to do what? Then which providers belong for that reader. Only then is it worth copying the template.

Going global is a technical project. Becoming local is an editorial one, and it does not finish.