How a global buyer evaluates a Turkish supplier online

In export, a website is not a promotional surface. It is a remote supplier pre-qualification file. The buyer cannot visit you, wants to verify you before asking for references, and the only independent source in their hands is your site. Every contact — a trade fair conversation, a marketplace profile, a recommendation from another buyer — gets confirmed by looking at the same place.

So the measure of an export-oriented site is not visitor count. The measure is this: can a qualified buyer in the target market find the technical information they are looking for, in their own language and their own terminology, and do they know whom to write to?

The structural gaps repeat across exporter websites, and they are remarkably consistent:

• The language version is half-built. Home page and corporate text are translated; product and document pages are left in Turkish.
• No reciprocal mapping. Because hreflang is not declared, the two versions are treated as separate, similar documents rather than as language alternates of each other.
• Machine-translated terminology. Standard codes, material grades and units are not written the way the target market writes them.
• Certificates published as images. Documents appear as undated logo graphics; number, scope and validity are nowhere in text.
• A single contact channel. There is no foreign trade contact, the form carries no response commitment, and no time zone is stated.
• Performance never measured. The catalogue page has never been tested the way it is actually opened: from another continent, on a mobile network.

What these gaps share is that none of them is a translation problem. Each one is a decision about information architecture, structured data and international SEO.

We call the work of becoming the cited source in answer boxes AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), and the work of being citable inside generative engines GEO (Generative Engine Optimization). The definitions and the difference between them are set out separately in what AEO is and what GEO is.

This channel carries unusual weight in export for one reason: the overseas buyer does not know the Turkish market, cannot name its trade bodies or regional clusters, and often makes the first shortlist from behind a language barrier. The moment they can ask the question in their own language and receive a summarised supplier list, whether you are on that list depends directly on how machine-readable you are.

The table below is not a list of assumptions. It is the page equivalent of the information items that repeat in supplier evaluation forms, import compliance files and distributorship applications.

An export-facing contact page is therefore not a single box with a form in it. At minimum it carries the name and role of the foreign trade contact, the languages spoken, working hours written with the time zone, a separate request-for-quotation flow with fields for product, quantity, target market and delivery terms, and a stated response time.

The contractual counterpart of that commitment — service levels, reporting rhythm and escalation — is published in writing in how we work.

Services can also be taken separately; this table is a prioritisation proposal, not a package requirement. If your existing site can be improved without a rewrite, Phase 1 is narrowed according to the audit result. Deliverables and acceptance criteria for each phase are written out in how we work.

The production side of the same problem — catalogue architecture, capacity narrative and document archive — is covered in manufacturing and factory solutions. If you also manage a distributor network abroad, franchise and dealer network solutions is the companion page to this one.

Language codes are written in ISO 639-1 form and region codes in ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 form. A region code is never used on its own: hreflang="de" is valid, while hreflang="DE" is not a language declaration at all. The other recurring mistake is writing en-UK; the valid code for the United Kingdom is en-GB.

1. Map languages against markets. Decide which language is published for which market, and record the commercial reason. The decision is written into a table; changing it later means changing the address structure.
2. Give every version a permanent, unique address. Language is not switched by query parameter, cookie or IP-based redirect. Both the buyer and the crawler expect an address they can reach directly and paste into an email.
3. List every version on every page, including itself. Each page in the cluster points to the others with absolute addresses and references itself. A cluster without return links is disregarded.
4. Declare x-default. State which version is served when no language or region matches. For an exporting manufacturer this is usually the English version.
5. Verify with a crawl and Search Console. Look for missing return links, redirecting addresses, canonical conflicts and invalid codes. The target error count is zero, re-measured on every release.

Below is what that cluster looks like in markup for a three-language product page. The same list is repeated verbatim on the other two pages — an incomplete repetition invalidates the entire cluster, not just the page that is missing it.

The six mistakes we find most often:

• One-way mapping. The Turkish page points to the English one, the English one does not point back; the cluster is ignored.
• Missing self-reference. The page leaves itself out of its own list, breaking the integrity of the set.
• Invalid codes. Non-standard values such as en-UK or tr-TURKEY are discarded.
• Canonical conflict. Each language version must declare its own canonical address; if they all point at one version, the rest are not indexed.
• Redirecting addresses. The annotation points at an address that returns a 301 or is no longer published.
• Forced IP-based redirects. A setup that automatically throws visitors to another version locks both the buyer and the crawler into a single version.

This page is its own worked example. The annotations published in the head of the page you are reading right now are exactly these — you can confirm them by viewing source:

The Turkish counterpart, İhracatçı Sanayi Çözümleri, declares the same cluster in the opposite direction. The mapping is repeated in the sitemap as well: every address is published together with its language alternates.

The minimum fields of a document record:

• Identity: document name, issuing body, certificate number, first issue and validity dates.
• Scope: which product family, which process and which facility it covers — a certificate without a stated scope carries no information for the buyer.
• Verification: the issuing body's lookup link or the method by which the document can be checked.
• Language: the record itself is also published in the target-market language, while the document stays in its original language.
• File: a PDF with a searchable text layer. A scanned image PDF is an empty page as far as a search engine is concerned.
• Archive: an expired document is not deleted but moved to an archive record, because buyers verify historical conformity too.

The honesty rule applies here as well: no document, capacity figure or claim that cannot be verified gets published. We hold ourselves to the same rule — where we cannot measure a line, we delete it rather than publish it, and the reasoning is written out in why Baki Bilisim.

How document and product records are described to machines is set out with worked examples in the Schema.org and JSON-LD guide.

Our own acceptance threshold sits below that value and is measured for every page we deliver. What the metrics mean is explained in the Core Web Vitals guide, and the method for fixing them in the performance engineering service. The measured figures for this site are published on the proof page.

We also write down the limits of this framework: we do not guarantee rankings, and we have no control over what an AI assistant produces. What we measure in that channel is a sample of how often the brand is cited against a fixed question set in the target language; it is recorded with a date stamp and shared in the report in raw form.

How measurement is set up, the reporting rhythm and the content of the governance meeting are described in how we work. Our own site's measured values are on the proof page.

For the digital requirements of other segments see the solutions index; for where we are based and why the Kocaeli industrial belt matters to an overseas buyer, see corporate web design in Kocaeli.