Newson Gale are market leaders in anti static electricity safety equipment, selling their products throughout the world through a network of distributors and agents. We’ve been commisioned to build a completely new content managment system for their international group of websites targetting users in each country from the UK to France to China and promote in each country using geographically targetted SEO and online marketing.

Whilst the new system is being built, we’ve kicked off the international SEO work by building a series of individual satellites sites, to gain some recognition in the search engines before the main site goes live. There are a number of advantages to this approach:

- localised domain name and hosting can be sourced in advance of the main build (This can be a time-consuming task depending on the territories involved)

- localised keyword research can be undertaken without holding up the web build

- launching a basic site lets the search engines begin to index your domain to help reduce the ‘Sandbox Effect’

- links can begin to be built to the correct long-term domain

- writing a brief one-page description of a business is often a good way to start the copywriting and content generation process and can help a company focus on their USPs and main selling points

- a well-designed and promoted satellite site can even generate business, depending on the competition!

We’ve found this to be a sensible approach as it really does reduce the dreaded ‘Google Sandbox’ which hurts the first few month’s SEO for a new site when a client is often the keenest to see results. Of course, a single page satellite only goes some way to getting your site noticed but it is far better than a generic holding page or the over-used ‘Under Construction’ graphic!

So far for Newson Gale we’ve build satellite sites for Spain, Italy, China with France and Germany coming soon. On top of that we have the established US and UK sites which we are actively promoting prior to the launch of our new GMS version - watch this space.