In Episode 35 of the International Web Effectiveness Podcast, Bill Scully and Bill Hunt explore the decision between creating a multilingual website or a multiregional one. They explain how your web strategy should reflect your business model, whether you’re selling through e-commerce, using local distributors, or operating regional subsidiaries.
The episode covers how to align your website with global goals, improve SEO, meet legal requirements, and support long-term growth. It also discusses when a hybrid strategy makes sense as your international presence develops. This episode offers clear, actionable insights for anyone managing or planning a global web presence.
Key Takeaways
- Choose between multilingual and multiregional based on your market strategy, and organization.
- Language-only sites work for unified offerings; country-specific sites require full localization.
- Legal compliance, tariffs, and local regulations must be factored into your site structure.
- You’ll need to include cultural differences, trust signals, and local expectations to impact conversions.
- Hreflang tags and geo-targeting improve international SEO and user experience.
- Hybrid approaches often evolve as businesses grow and expand globally.
Catch the Full Episode
Youtube: https://youtu.be/GNBOJI8Qyy8
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4act9ZXSVrotyI8ubYv8Ep?si=jqNaPKA6Qjy78o4FRkjPCw
Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-choose-between-multinational-and-multilingual/id1755789311?i=1000712759447
Show Note Links
Language-Only vs. Country-Specific Websites: The Strategic Decision Framework for Global Expansion
Multinational SEO vs. multilingual SEO: What’s the difference?
Transcript
Bill Scully (00:01)
Welcome to another episode of the International Web Effectiveness Podcast, episode 35. Bill Hunt and I, Bill Scully, focus on strategies and techniques to improve your web presence and manage global websites. In episode 34, we discussed how businesses can target domestic companies looking for suppliers in the U.S. to minimize tariff exposure.
Today’s episode is about companies deciding whether to have a multilingual site or a multinational site. We’ll cover the key choices and considerations before making this decision. Hey, Bill, how’s it going?
Bill Hunt (00:43)
Doing well, and you?
Bill Scully (00:44)
Good, good. Yeah, I thought this was a great topic. I’ve seen a lot of people asking questions and facing decisions after launching websites about how to set this up. You’ve got a lot of experience with this, and I’m actually finishing an article on the topic. So I thought this would be a good one for today.
Can you describe the difference between the two?
Bill Hunt (01:22)
Sure. Simply put, companies need to make a decision when they go international or operate outside their home market. On the website front, there are two main approaches: language only or multinational.
For example, if you go to the UK, you can clone your US English site but adjust it for UK English—things like currency, language differences, taxes, etc. Most people know to do that.
The question is: do we simply clone our English-language site for the UK, or do we make changes to accommodate market-specific elements? Or do we create truly multinational or multi-regional sites? For example, one for the UK, then a German site, which also serves Switzerland and Austria because of language overlap.
Do we create one German language site for all these markets, or do we create individual sites? Many companies struggle with this. Some large multinationals, like IBM and others, are moving from market-specific sites—sometimes over a hundred market-specific versions—to just 10 to 12 language-only sites.
Software companies like Skype often choose language-only sites because there’s less need for market-specific customization. A market site is tailored to a specific market like the UK or Germany, while a language site focuses on getting the language right and uses technology to accommodate any market-specific requirements.
Bill Scully (04:00)
Right. I think there are a couple of important questions companies need to ask: Who is your primary audience? Are you targeting different languages, different countries, or both? Are you trying to reach people who speak various languages, or customers in specific countries with unique needs?
It also depends on your products and services—are they the same everywhere, or do they need to be localized by region?
Newer technologies allow companies to have language-version sites that can pull in different products. But most companies with multi-regional sites offer different products in different regions, so localization is necessary.
Bill Hunt (04:57)
And that’s one of the key considerations. I wrote an article as part of a series we’ve been working on around this topic. It started with a rant, essentially asking: why are we still stuck in the 2000s with most of our technology, strategy, and thinking? I think one reason is that many of the people with the gray hair who are brought in to champion this—especially in startups—often say, “This is the way we’ve always done it.”
I think we’ll talk in a future episode about how some more agile companies are approaching this differently. There were two objectives for this podcast specifically: one is to discuss multilingual versus multi-regional strategies, and then to go through a decision tree.
The first point, which you just touched on, is that your product set influences the decision tree. In the follow-up article to that rant, I outlined 22 different points in a decision tree. It took me back to when I was working on the mode of entry model during my undergraduate years, many years ago—about 30 years back—where you had to answer close to a thousand questions to cover everything from culture, electricity, temperature, transportation, tariffs, and so on.
That’s not exactly the purpose here, but we do have similar things to consider. We’ve discussed whether to take a language-centric or a market-centric approach.
The next big topic to address is the old-school go-to-market model. This is something we both encounter frequently. With HREF LangBuilder, I’d say two or three times a week someone contacts me, typically from the travel sector. Usually, they’re aggregators—booking aggregators or affiliate aggregators—or they have travel-related information.
They don’t care where people come from because they can take payments globally using systems like Stripe. They say, “I have this English site, but I’m not performing well in other English-speaking markets, especially the UK and Australia. SEO told me I need a dedicated Australian or UK site, so I want to clone it.” But Google flags it as duplicate content, so they try to use hreflang to tell Google it’s not.
Technically, it’s still duplicate. So I ask: what have you done to customize it for the UK or Australia? Usually, nothing. They haven’t even adjusted pricing—just a generic “click here to buy.” Their argument is their system handles it all.
This idea of a single online presence—single English, single German, single French site—may be sufficient if properly localized. And today, many platforms are more advanced. For example, Shopify lets you clone stores and detect visitors by IP. If someone visits from Germany, the system changes pricing to Euro and inserts relevant tax or jurisdictional info based on location.
That can work, and that’s where I think we’re headed. We’ll explore this more in a future episode.
Then there’s the partner model. If you have a site and do a licensing deal—like those common in the Middle East, where wealthy investors license your brand and site—most people don’t put constraints on the partner’s use. I always recommend centralizing Search Console access so you can manage hreflang and other SEO controls.
But in many cases, the partner site isn’t your site, and you may not control what they do. The legal agreements matter, especially if you license a brand. I’ve seen companies get caught thinking a license means they can clone the website for multiple markets without restrictions. Sometimes there are strict rules.
So, before deciding which approach to take, consider your ownership structure. If you have a wholly owned subsidiary, that’s a different situation. Having a physical presence in a market opens you up to various regulatory compliance requirements.
Even if you don’t have a physical presence, laws may hold you responsible if you’re actively selling into another market.
Bill Scully (10:53)
Yeah, legally, you’re intentionally selling into a market, so you should know that market.
Bill Hunt (10:58)
Exactly. When I was doing my international law courses, even something as simple as going to a trade show, actively seeking out customers, and then sending them sample products—that act alone means, from a legal standpoint, you’ve crossed into that market. I totally spaced the legal term for this, but you’ve effectively targeted that market. There’s a lot of international case law where companies have been sued because their product breaks, and even though they sold it to that market, the fact that they went there and actively traded means they can be held liable—especially from a product liability perspective.
Another decision you have to make is when you’re doing a marketplace strategy with platforms like Rakuten, Amazon, Mercado Libre—they act as the brand hub. You send your products to their warehouse, and they stock and drop-ship for you. That’s an interesting model because you can’t do much marketing on those sites other than social media promotion. You can optimize product feeds, but you need to consider those elements carefully.
Legally, you really have to think about your structure, especially when going into countries like China. For example, China requires you to be registered if you have a website in Chinese hosted in China. They won’t host you until you’re registered there, so you might need to use a CDN outside China. Baidu tends to favor websites hosted in China because of how they crawl them.
In Japan, you have to list all your country details. Many countries don’t register ccTLDs because they require you to have a designated officer or person in that country. For example, to register a .co.jp domain, you must have a person who can legally represent the company there—and potentially face legal consequences if something goes wrong. This is why many companies avoided ccTLDs in the past—not because of the cost but because of these legal requirements. Some countries, like Japan and China, still have these requirements.
When you try to register these domains, and they ask who the officer in that country is, it’s a strong sign you need someone physically there. Unlike the U.S., where you can set up an LLC under a trade name, many countries require someone physically present who can be held accountable—who can “go to jail” if you screw up.
Go ahead.
Bill Scully (14:54)
I know you can get in trouble if you set up your hreflang wrong and designate a dark market, right?
Bill Hunt (15:03)
Absolutely. It’s the same legal requirement. I need to put this on my desktop because it’s not implied; it deals with jurisdiction. The legal term is “purposeful availment.”
Bill Scully (15:14)
Explicit.
Bill Hunt (15:28)
What you’ve done, if you’ve taken your website and said, “Hey, this Arabic version is specifically for the UAE or Saudi Arabia,” is important. A dark market is somewhere you can’t sell your product — for example, if you sell alcohol, you can’t actively market or sell it there. Pharma is another restricted area. If someone tries a regional hreflang strategy and says, “This Arabic language site is our UAE website, or Saudi Arabia, or Egypt,” by setting that tag, you are purposely stating that this website is targeting those markets.
Through the legal concept of purposeful availment, you’ve said, “This website is for that market,” and you’re doing this so the website can be seen there. It’s just like when you went to a conference handing out brochures and trying to do deals and sign contracts. From a legal standpoint — I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve studied international law and contracts enough to know this can ding you.
So, someone thinking they’re doing you a favor by setting hreflang like that is actually not. I haven’t seen anyone use this tactic yet, and I haven’t pitched it to lawyers as a tool, but I’ve discussed it with my international law professors, and they thought it was interesting. I think that’s lawyer code for, “I’ll use this when I need to.” But it goes back to your legal structure and organizational goals — what are you trying to do?
Other things fall into this category, but when I pasted that into my notes, I realized it broke some other concepts. The number one factor I recommend companies consider — Bill, you brought this up — is their product differences. After spending more time on it, I found the magic number to be 20 to 30%. If 20 to 30% of your product set differs between markets…
Bill Scully (18:05)
Thank—
Bill Hunt (18:19)
—you may want to have a market-centric website. If you only have two or three…
Bill Scully (18:22)
Yeah, I think there are a lot of little nuances. Like if you’re truly international and only doing language sites, countries have different localizations — like Quebec French versus French in France, or Mexican Spanish versus Spain Spanish. Depending on what you’re selling, you might actually turn someone off if they’re reading the language but it’s not localized.
Bill Hunt (19:02)
Exactly. That’s a key point to remember. I’ve seen this time and again, especially with Spanish, where there are around 32 or 36 dialects. One stat I remember is 22 in Latin America alone. It’s Spanish, but my son’s experience shows the difference — after studying Spanish for six, eight, maybe more years, he did an internship in Spain. The first thing they told him was, “Dude, we need to send you to business Spanish courses — Spain Spanish.” Then, splitting time between Madrid and Barcelona, they said, “You need Barcelona Spanish too.”
When he was offered a great job at a multinational to be part of their web team in Argentina, he said no — he wasn’t going to go through that Spanish adjustment again.
Bill Scully (19:45)
—Yeah.
Bill Hunt (20:02)
Exactly. I used to tell people about a model I worked on — 10 categories with a thousand questions. My job was to create the weighting and database logic to output recommendations for where you should expand. I’m building some of that into this worksheet — plug in your variables and get recommendations.
Back in the day, before the internet, you had to partner with someone, set up a factory or store, or physically carry your product and sell it in person. If you were a proper company, you had to deal with tariffs, taxes, and all sorts of logistics. But now, with the internet, it’s different. I’ve heard it thousands of times: “I have a Spanish site” or “a French site,” and they point to big e-commerce companies doing the same.
One person told me, “We localized 50 languages, and I’m going to use every one of them.”
Bill Scully (21:49)
Hmm.
Bill Hunt (21:49)
And so they spun out versions of their website with simply, you know, here—or one that’s still live today—has the top five languages for every market in the world. It created like 50 million pages. I joke about this because they had, yep, five languages. So they had Spanish for Papua New Guinea.
Bill Scully (22:07)
My god, so for every country they had five languages? My god.
Bill Hunt (22:17)
Exactly. And every island and territory. Why? Because they could, right? Think about it: you take a list of all the countries, and if you have the country code and language code, you can mash it up to produce a site or folder for every combination. That’s what they did—they took every country code.
Bill Scully (22:29)
Yeah.
Bill Hunt (22:44)
They made a folder for the five languages. For example, if it was French, then that Papua New Guinea website folder was populated with French. They had around 100,000 SKUs or maybe 10,000 SKUs, but it ended up close to 50 million pages. They wanted to know why these pages weren’t being crawled or ranking in the UK. It’s because Google found one page first and chose that. So they used hreflang to fix it. But there was nothing materially different between these hundreds of versions of English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese, and Japanese. I couldn’t explain this until Google started saying, “I don’t need all this duplicate content.”
In the end, they decided to keep core languages but let users pick and select. Then you can bring in scripts to inject variations like French Canadian versus France French, Moroccan French, or whatever regional variation is needed. That’s key. You can’t just throw everything online and expect Google to sort it out anymore. Those days are over.
A lot of people are conspiracy-theorizing about Google’s slowdown, this apparent May update, where Google isn’t crawling as much. I don’t think it’s conspiracy; Google just doesn’t need the junk anymore.
Bill Scully (24:45)
Yeah, I’ve seen that across most of my clients too. Some saw an increase, others a slowdown. Honestly, how many pages actually change? I haven’t dug into the reasons, but yeah.
Bill Hunt (24:59)
Right. Cloudflare put out a stat recently, which I referenced in my rant about why pages aren’t being indexed. They said something like 55 or 65% of all pages Google fetched through Cloudflare had no material changes since the last crawl. It’s like Google was a kid at a buffet, taking everything it could find. Now, with so much content out there, and as Fred Fabrice talks about, the “frontier land” of undiscovered but potentially brilliant content is unreachable because of the overhead of recrawling all the duplicates.
That’s the premise behind “Index Now”—sending a signal that a page has been materially updated. We’ve jumped into this problem space because, as you said Bill, every version—whether language or market—creates exponential growth in pages.
And here’s the next problem, since we’re on problems: we recently started offering geo-targeting services. If you only have an English page launched in 40 markets and the only difference is the currency symbol, there’s no real geographic signal.
The first objection I get is, “But I have a pound symbol, why can’t Google see that? I have hreflang in place.” Even with hreflang, why would that be enough? You’ve said it’s there, but you haven’t made the content unique to that market. And yeah, that’s hard. It’s a lot of work. But imagine how hard and expensive it would be if you had to do a physical store for each market.
Bill Scully (26:53)
Yeah. Yeah. Right.
Bill Hunt (27:17)
You know, I’ve never been sympathetic to the excuse of wanting to just bulk push content out there. That’s one of the reasons Bill and I started breaking this down—geotargeting, specifically—because we were following Google when they changed their domain structure, basically pulling everything back to google.com.
Some international consultants claimed Google no longer needed hreflang, making the leap from “Google moved to google.com” to “hreflang isn’t needed anymore because Google can figure it out.” For those who don’t know, Google sucked at hreflang.
Bill Scully (28:17)
Yeah.
Bill Hunt (28:17)
And Google sucked at being found. I have dozens of screenshots from conferences where I searched for Google Argentina and Google Uruguay showed up. Or I searched for Google Peru and Chile appeared. Google Chile was right there—I literally told Google what I wanted. How hard would it have been to hardwire that?
Anyway, we started exploring geo-targeting signals and how to integrate them in case Google ever did sunset hreflang. They haven’t—they’re actually enhancing it significantly. But in doing this, we found many companies aren’t doing any geo-targeting at all.
Bill Scully (29:17)
Right. And I’d bet a majority of companies, as you described earlier, are just trying to expand into other markets with nothing but a website. If that’s all you have, you don’t have any signals. You don’t have a local phone number or a local office to visit.
Bill Hunt (29:34)
Exactly.
Bill Scully (29:44)
I keep saying this—we’re lucky to live in the U.S. with access to almost everything. But if I were in another country and found something in my local language from the U.S., I’d probably keep looking.
Bill Hunt (29:57)
Yeah, trying to find something in your own market, because there’s a whole host of trust issues—you wonder if they’ll actually deliver it. You’d think if it’s in your city or at least in your country, it’d be better. But then there’s tariffs. That’s a great point. We need to write about that, because we’re old enough to remember the early days of FedEx and UPS, when you ordered something from another country and then the UPS guy would come and say, “Yeah, it’s $45 for the tariff.” And you’re like, “What? It’s a $4 item!” Plus you get gouged on shipping.
Bill Scully (30:31)
My god, what a nightmare.
Bill Hunt (30:51)
Yeah. I’ve paid ten times what the item cost. And to your point, I couldn’t find it locally, so I was willing to pay a premium to have it shipped. Then because it triggered some category, I got hit with a tariff.
Quick story: My first company was Quake Gear—we made earthquake kits. The whole reason I’m in search today was because of an order we got. It was a large deal selling kits to a department store across Japan. When we sent the first samples, customs held them up because we had to declare the kit components on the manifest. One line item was an empty plastic bottle—the recommendation was to take your medication and put a couple days’ supply in that bottle.
Do you know what we called that bottle on the inventory list?
Bill Scully (32:11)
Medicine bottle or something?
Bill Hunt (32:13)
Pill bottle.
There were no pills—just an empty plastic container. But because we called it a pill bottle, it got categorized as pharmaceutical. Customs then demanded a pharmaceutical sales license and all sorts of crazy paperwork. Eventually, we just removed that item and left only the recommendation.
Bill Scully (32:20)
You… wow.
Bill Hunt (32:45)
Hey, just find a Ziploc bag or whatever and put some medicine in it—that’s how crazy it is. Now, if you try to ship something, these shippers have all kinds of checklists: what kind of products, what components. AI can actually check your inventory list and flag all this. But people are still afraid of these complexities.
Then there are tariffs. The whole de minimis restriction where you could buy something under $300 or $800 and not pay a tariff—that’s gone in the United States. So even if you buy something for 50 cents, you’re going to pay a tariff now. Before, it was waived. That’s why some companies are getting hammered because their little widget or tchotchke just isn’t working in the new tariff environment.
That was my second point after product variety. Are there any seasonal variations, like between the Northern and Southern hemispheres? If you’re selling globally, how you structure your website matters. For example, here in Connecticut, we just had the second hottest day of the year so far—which is why we’re both sweating, since we’re too cheap to turn on the AC this early. But in other parts of the world, it’s winter. They want to see parkas, puffy jackets, and sweaters, while here people want shorts, tank tops, and swimsuits. That’s another reason you may need automated content switching.
Then there are regulatory issues—safety, product approvals, licensing requirements, import-export restrictions—all of which are important.
Another big factor we run into is supply chain and logistics. That was a big topic back when I was an undergrad, but I didn’t really understand the modern implications until working with global e-commerce clients on hreflang.
One common challenge was product SKUs—product numbers or barcodes. Every country or region has different standards. For example, the EU uses a different SKU standard than the US. So companies often have different SKUs on their websites for the same product.
It was fascinating to see how much SKUs deviated—not just because of differences like electrical plugs, but also due to sourcing. A company with 50 market websites might have 50 different SKUs for one product, reflecting those nuances.
Take IKEA’s Billy bookcase: it’s called the Billy bookcase everywhere, but in 100+ countries it has a different SKU for each market.
I’m about to publish an article recommending that before launching your first market website, create a global product ID. If it’s the same product—even with minor differences—you assign one global ID. That way, you can match it later for analytics, hreflang, or whatever else.
Back to language and market: if you have local sourcing, shipping restrictions, or complex inventory management, and if you’re one of the 99.9% of e-commerce companies using one CMS in the US and another in Europe (or Shopify plus others), you often need to create different hubs. For example, a European hub tailored to EU regulations, a North American hub—which may be complicated by tariff changes and evolving trade agreements—and then Australia and ASEAN hubs.
Each could be on different CMSs, creating more complexity.
That leads to another question you should ask early on: technically, how will you manage this—and how will you maintain it? Supply chain and web infrastructure are key factors in deciding which markets you target.
This gets simpler if you’re selling information or downloadable software because you don’t have physical products or inventory to manage. But with physical products and presence, it’s a lot more complex.
I’ve even heard that using marketplace warehouses like Amazon might simplify some of these challenges.
Bill Scully (38:14)
Yeah. Yeah.
Bill Hunt (38:36)
You could also be put into a local jurisdiction. I haven’t seen any clear outcomes of international law on that, but if you send a container of your product to be warehoused in Mexico or Argentina, even though it’s your product in their warehouse, there may be jurisdictional issues.
Bill Scully (38:45)
Wait, say that again?
Bill Hunt (39:05)
Sure. Basically, they’ve effectively bought it from you, but it’s still your product. It’s interesting when you start looking into liability. Not every country sues like the U.S. If you get a paper cut opening the box, some people sue over that here, but that’s not as common elsewhere. But if you sell something with a lithium battery and it burns down someone’s house, they’re going to come after you—and then you have to sue the battery manufacturer.
Anyway, these are the kinds of legal nuances you have to consider. Another thing on our list was e-commerce sizing. I did a rant on this before—people bury size charts in support pages. Why not have a simple widget where I can enter my country or my size and it tells me the equivalent size for that market?
I mean, many shoes have multiple sizes printed inside the tongue—why can’t we have a widget instead of a static table that requires mental math?
Bill Scully (40:22)
Yeah, UK, US.
Bill Hunt (40:33)
Exactly. Centimeters, millimeters—America is the only major market using the imperial system, and yes, that makes us the problem.
Bill Scully (40:35)
Yeah, we’re the problem. Have you ever ordered something off Amazon and it comes in sized for a toddler? It’s ridiculous.
Bill Hunt (40:53)
Exactly, the sizing is wonky. I love that the disclaimer section in some size charts is longer than the instructions. They say things like, “The way this is sewn varies by market,” or “The fabric may differ.” The models are usually skinny people, but you’re not that model. Columbia does this well—they show the model’s height, chest, and inseam so you can gauge fit. But most don’t.
So, in e-commerce, cultural nuances like sizing and local preferences matter a lot. Have you really adapted your sizes? Have you localized the wording? My wife has hundreds of examples from conferences about clients insisting on certain terms. They need to get with the program, but actually, you need to adapt to the customer.
Bill Scully (42:46)
Yeah.
Bill Hunt (42:51)
If customers call it something specific, you need to reference that term or something similar. Another big challenge is legal and regulatory pricing.
Bill Scully (42:57)
Right. Go ahead, finish that thought.
Bill Hunt (43:11)
Sure. Whether you’re using Shopify, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, or any global enterprise tool, most have some logic for dynamic pricing. But in every annual e-commerce report, after the Google warning statement, there’s always a tariff or currency fluctuation statement.
Currencies like the dollar, yen, and pound sterling fluctuate wildly. If your dynamic pricing is based on your home market’s price converted to local currency, you’re vulnerable to those swings—unless it’s adjusted in near real-time. For example, if the dollar drops one day, prices might go up 8 to 12%. Customers notice and complain.
So dynamic pricing is a tough problem to solve. Also, trust signals are huge—you have to think about how to adapt those for each market.
Bill Scully (44:33)
Yeah, we’re running a little long. I want to finish up with, I don’t know, I guess you call it organizational structure. We talk a lot about language versions, but I think there should also be some minimal requirements for different national sites. And I also think there are good reasons for this. So I want to talk about it for a couple of minutes.
One thing I see companies struggling with is when they have a non-regional structure, and there are local marketing teams that want to make changes. First night—kudos to them for having a local marketing team. I would say it’s almost necessary that if you’re going to have a regional site structure, there should be someone dedicated—maybe not from the region, but dedicated to that market.
Because if there isn’t, there’s almost no reason to have it, unless it’s just a product structure, which we talked about having dynamic pricing and things like that. Have you seen any interesting ways people have dealt with regional marketing teams trying to work within a language site?
Bill Hunt (46:07)
Right. Yeah, I think one question is: what do they need that they can’t get from the core site? That’s the argument I always get: “We need our own market site because we need stuff on it—our stuff.” And when you pin them down, like, “What’s your stuff?” it’s typically things like marketing events and campaigns.
Obviously, they want the description and all that stuff to be right—that’s a given. But a lot of times, when you dig deeper, they don’t actually need a whole site; they just need a place to put that content. And if one market needs it, often everybody needs it, so you have to accommodate that.
There’s actually a really good article I wrote based on one of my grad school professors about this decision tree and how to blend a hybrid approach. People can check it out; we’ll link to it. But the key questions are: What are their needs? What do you want them to do? What can they edit themselves, especially on the language side?
An interesting trend I’m seeing is companies with a high-end or expensive CMS also using a smaller CMS. For example, Milestone Internet’s CMS is designed for multi-tenant. What they’ve been doing is licensing their CMS much more economically, so all regional marketing managers can have access. It uses an API with something like AEM or Commerce Cloud, allowing them to edit certain content—like descriptions—within a framework. They edit it in the low-end CMS where they have rights and restrictions, and then through the API, it pushes content to the big CMS.
Bill Scully (48:08)
Okay, so is it… interesting?
Bill Hunt (48:19)
Yeah, it’s an interesting way to handle it. It gives local markets a level of autonomy within gated parameters but also reduces the expense of paying, say, $100,000 for a license for a market where it’s only a fractional amount of a person’s time—maybe one one-hundredth of their day or week editing content. So that’s one way to do it.
And I love the idea of having someone dedicated for the market.
Bill Scully (48:27)
Hmm. Right, great.
Bill Hunt (48:49)
At least at HQ, there’s empathy, sympathy, and collaboration with these teams to try to accommodate them. I think another really big issue arises during releases. Often, the English version will overwrite the local market version or seriously degrade it.
Another problem is when an English version is spun out where the localized version is non-existent—treating the localized version like a child rather than the parent page, which it may actually be in your CMS.
That’s a great point. People need to think about what needs to be done in each market—what they should do, what they can do, and, more importantly, how we can make the site, in whatever fragmented way it’s deployed, accommodate those needs.
In the article, I discuss some hybrid decision frameworks that reflect this. Some markets might operate on a market basis; others might be based on market and language. Some might just redirect users back to the global market site. The key is to review these decisions carefully and stay aware that local teams are there to do their job and meet their KPIs. We need to be accommodating of that.
Bill Scully (50:19)
Yep. Yeah. And if you’re not, they’ll use that as an excuse when you find their campaign website that no one else was told about.
Bill Hunt (50:29)
Exactly. They have KPIs just like you do, and if you get in their way, they’ll go to plan B and spin out a campaign or parallel site without you. So the best approach is to get them involved early. One key takeaway from this episode is to do this as far upstream in the cycle as possible—so we’ve made these grown-up decisions early, are accommodating and understanding of the market, and can determine what to repurpose for scale and speed to market versus what we truly need from the local market.
In the article my professor and his associates wrote, they call this the dual pillars of growth—balancing scalability with the unique needs of the local market.
Bill Scully (51:46)
Hmm. Yeah. It’s not an easy challenge. Sometimes it’s a business decision. This is why you and I are focused on doing audits that add web value and create value. I see companies where 50% of their markets are untouched or just “translate and push it out.” Sure, they get traffic, but is there real value in that?
Any final words?
Bill Hunt (52:17)
Yep. What are you doing with that traffic?
Go through the checklist and check out Bill’s new article expanding on these ideas. Use the framework whether you’re launching your first or 51st market. Think about how to realign against existing markets. Bill nailed it: how do you get strategic value out of these precious assets and make them work exponentially harder for you?
Bill Scully (53:06)
Right. Thanks. We hope you’re finding value in our conversations. If you’re enjoying the show, please take a moment to rate and review the podcast on your favorite platform.
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Bill Hunt (53:46)
See you.