Account-Based Experience Digital Marketing

How to Use Non-English Keywords to Uncover Demand In New Markets

November 22, 2022 —

3 min

If you’re entering new markets, or building a business case to do so, the ability to uncover demand and see which customers are primed to buy creates immediate momentum.

An effective way to uncover this demand is through the use of intent data, which provides insights into the behavior of accounts actively researching businesses like yours. One powerful form of intent data is keyword insights — the ability to shine a light on anonymous demand by using keywords to capture the details about which topics accounts are researching.

But how do you capture this data when potential customers may speak different languages?

Simple: You’ll need to track keywords in their preferred languages.

This quick guide will cover how to use non-English keywords to track intent in new markets.

Language Use On The Internet

To better understand non-English keyword selection for intent tracking, it’s worth quickly looking at language use across the internet.

Language usage on the internet doesn’t correlate with population size or internet use — there are disparities. English-language content represents over 60% of written content on the internet. The prevalence of English content means intent signals derived from English keywords remain most common — even in foreign countries.

But only one-third of English speakers consider it their native language. So if you ignore non-English keywords, you not only miss out on the big chunk of prospects using different languages, but part of multilingual searchers’ journey too.

Either way, it’s a huge opportunity to let slip by.

6sense & Non-English Keywords

6sense supports keywords entered in both English and non-English languages to help you gather the broadest spectrum of intent data across every region.

We don’t translate keywords, but the 6sense platform accepts keywords in all languages that consist of single- and multi-byte characters. (Examples of multi-byte character languages include Japanese and Chinese.)

6sense’s B2B Network is made up of signals from all major languages. But, due to the prevalence of English content, it’s still common to see English-language keyword signals coming from international regions.

In fact, whichever region you’re targeting, when setting up keyword tracking you should expect a lower volume on non-English keywords and still enter the nearest English equivalent for best results.

Optimizing Your Keyword Selection

Here are some useful tips to optimize both your English and non-English keyword selection and intent tracking.

Enter English and Non-English Versions

To maximize intent capture, we recommend that you enter both the English version and other relevant language versions of a keyword for the market you’re targeting. This gives you extra coverage because non-English sites often encode pages in English to help search engines and social media sites pick them up.

Include Commonly Misspelled Variants

For commonly misspelled words, include variants as separate keywords (e.g., 6sense, 6cents, Six-sence). This applies to any language and ensures you don’t miss out on intent signals due to misspellings.

Don’t Overload Your Keywords

Cast a net for the things that really matter, but don’t be overly specific. You don’t want to overload your keywords with 800 variants of one specific non-English keyword.

Group By Topic

Finally, group related English and non-English keywords together by topic. Keyword groups make it easier for those who aren’t bilingual to build intent-based segments leveraging non-English keywords. It’s also a huge time saver because you can filter an entire group rather than filtering on five, 20, or 20+ keywords.