International SEO is the process of optimising your website. Search engines can easily identify which countries you want to target and which languages you use for your business.
SEO has evolved in recent years. Search engines reward sites with accurate translations and engaging content that also appeals to your local audience. The good news is that this helps your user experience or drives organic traffic to your site. It is also likely to improve your SEO in your targeted countries. So, to be successful with international SEO, you should focus on strategies that make intuitive sense for both search engines and your target audience.
Here are 6 SEO tips to help your international SEO strategy:
1. Domain names
Choosing a domain for your website in multiples countries can have a huge effect on your engagement, consumer trust and search rankings in your targeted market. There are a few types of domains businesses can implement to target a particular country or language with their websites. They include the following:
- Country code top-level domain (ccTLD), e.g. company.fr, company.de
- Subdomain, e.g. fr.company.com, de.company.com
- Subdirectory or subfolder, e.g.company.com/fr/, company.com/de/
You can also use top-level domains with language parameters (e.g. company.com/?lang=de-de – not recommended) or even use an entirely different domain name (e.g. Germanywebsite.com).
Each option has its pros and cons. It’s worth looking into each one in more detail to find the best option for your business. The answer to this will depend on many factors. For example, objectives of the website, target audience, technical support, financial resources, etc.
Read how to develop an international digital marketing strategy
Depending on the method you choose, it’s important to be aware of duplicate content issues caused by having the same or similar content targeting different countries. Which takes us to the next point.
2. Geotargeting
When we are targeting our site to users across different countries and languages, ‘hreflang’ tag attributes help us to organise our localised content based on language.
When it comes to international SEO, ‘hreflang’ tags are fundamental. They are used to signal to search engines which page should be shown to visitors depending on their location and language. As an example, one page or set of pages is for German speakers in Germany, while others are for German speakers in Switzerland. The last one in for German speakers, no matter the country.
Example:
<link rel=”alternate” href=”https://www.company.com/de-de/” hreflang=”de-de” />
<link rel=”alternate” href=”https://www.company.com/de-ch/” hreflang=”de-ch” />
<link rel=”alternate” href=”https://www.company.com/de/” hreflang=”de” />
It is important to ensure that the ‘hreflang’ tag is implemented correctly. Failure to do so may affect search engine rankings and visibility in the targeted country.
3. International keyword research
Keyword research is the foundation of any SEO strategy. The inclusion of the right key terms is crucial to getting your website ranked highly on global search engines. If you don’t have the right keywords within your content, it’s unlikely your website will be found by users searching for your products. Optimising your website (product descriptions, category pages, blog posts, etc.) with the right keywords will help you to increase your website’s online presence.
We need to be conscious of the fact that the keywords we use to look for information. Products or services vary from country to country. To properly optimise our content on the site, the research for the most popular and important keywords should be in the local language for each country.
Note that keywords shouldn’t be just translated. It is not guaranteed that the translated keywords are the most used in the specific country or language. You can use the translated keywords though as a base for the additional research in the local language. That way you make sure that we capture all local nuances and any keywords you could have missed otherwise.
Using tools like Google Keyword Planner will allow you to identify the most relevant and important keywords by market and language. That will help you to get a feel of how people in each local market is searching for your services or products.
If you’re conducting keyword research in Russia or China where Google and Bing aren’t as popular, both Yandex and Baidu have their own keyword research tools to ensure you’re undertaking a customised, local-approach to keyword research.
4. Think beyond Google
An important factor in international SEO is to remember that even though Google is the most popular search engine in most countries, there are few exceptions:
- Baidu (China)
- Yandex (Russia)
- Yahoo (Japan and Hong Kong)
- Seznam (Czech Republic)
- Naver (South Korea)
Knowing which are the leading search engines in a targeted country and what their ranking criteria are, is crucial to ensure visibility to your target audience.
As mentioned in the previous point, marketers wishing to target international consumers need to ensure that their keyword research is based on search terms used on the most popular search engines in the target country.
5. International link building
Link building/earning is an essential part of SEO and we should not ignore it . This is especially important for websites structured with ccTLDs and subdomains as you need to get links to multiple websites.
Getting links to your website will help with your domain authority, promote your international websites and drive relevant local referral traffic – which in turn helps with the visibility of your international website in search engines.
Don’t forget that what matters is the quality, rather than quantity of backlinks. Gaining relevant, high-quality local backlinks will take some time as a new localised site may be competing against established online businesses with considerably more local link equity.
If you have a multilingual website, it’s essential to build incoming links to your site from other relevant sites in the same language and topic. It’s important from both a user and a search engine perspective. Users will be more likely to continue to view your products or services if they arrive on the site with the same language. Search engines value links from the same language more than they do from other languages.
6. Tailor your content to local markets
We need to be conscious of the fact that people in other countries are different. It is key to understand your local audience’s habits and behaviour to build successful campaigns in different markets. Cultural differences across countries may affect not just your content or keywords, but your website as a whole.
Make sure you are providing information that suits to your target audience(s). By using the local language, currency and time zone together with the local contact information like addresses and phone numbers, you’re sending users and search engines strong signals that this site is local specifically for them. Also, think about cultural differences when you’re creating your design and content. Different regions look at things like colours or layout in very different ways.
For example, the German language has some very long words that will need to fit onto mobile screens. For some languages with special characters, you will need to use a font that supports them. In Arabic countries, sentences are read from right to left. We have to take it into account account when designing website navigation. You can’t forget about the images that will are on the website – choose images that will be relevant to your international audience or adapt them to the local country.
SEO is very much a long game that requires a long-term bespoke strategy and will only work if you dedicate time to it. For international SEO, what works in one country may not work in another, so make sure that each country has its own unique strategy.
And if you want to be really successful:
- Research the targeted country, culture, dialects and localise the website accordingly
- Consider which URL structure will be the most beneficial for your business
- Use ‘hreflang’ tags
- Be sure to review all content with a native speaker to ensure proper localisation for content, layout, images, etc.
- Build local links
- Be sure to comply with local search engines
