Google Wants to Help Your Business Go Global

Today businesses and the Internet go hand in hand. The promise of the Internet has always been that your business could be located anywhere and be able to do business around the corner or around the globe (a tired cliché, I know). The reality, though, is that if you’re a small business in Latin America, Africa, or Asia, there are still huge hurdles jump over before you can really take advantage of the global promise of the Internet.

Starting today, Google wants to help take the pain some of the pain out of internationalizing your business for the Internet. Announced in a blog post, Google has taken the wraps off a new Adwords Global Advertiser portal to coordinate important things like translation of your content, ads, and business as well as a new Global Market Finder that gives you insight into where searches for product names are coming from.

The Adwords Global Advertiser isn’t a tool in itself, but pointers to the translation and market finder tools you’ll need to help you make the global jump. Even if you don’t want to translate your whole website, it’s really worth it to look at the Market Finder to learn about potential markets you might be overlooking.

Here’s how the Market Finder works.

In Google’s blog post, they used the example of a custom tailor, so by extension I tried “custom shirts”, starting with being in Canada and got this very interesting result:

Of course the U.S., France, and Italy are right up there…but would you have guessed Brazil as well? Not only is the term searched for often, the bid price for ads is low. So now from this tool I can translate my ads into Portugese … and my website … and make sure I can receive payments from my (potential) new customers.

All that I’ll have to do is ship the items to them!

If you are a small (or large) business and already have an online presence (especially if you’re already an Adwords customer), you should check this out. If you don’t have an online presence and are wondering how you might be able to manage in a global market….looks like Google is handing you the tools on a silver platter.