What Is International SEO – Best Practices for Global Online Success
You might be known as crème de la crème for doing SEO, and you touch every nook and corner. However, the significant untapped potential of international SEO must be addressed.
What Is International SEO?
International SEO is optimizing a website so that search engines can quickly identify which countries and languages it is intended for. The main goal of international SEO is to attract organic search traffic from different countries and languages by ensuring that the content is relevant, localized, and accessible to global users.
International SEO for Global Businesses
International SEO is vital for businesses aiming to reach a global audience and expand their presence in different markets.
Focusing On Visibility on a Global Scale
Using tools can help understand regional differences in search behaviour and language choices, so conducting keyword research can show users’ language preferences.
If we look at the example, a UK-based cosmetic brand can research specific location keywords to know popular search keywords for their newly targeted product in the US. The brand can find the keywords for US-based facial creams and cosmetic stores in the US.
Then, the UK-based company can create:
- Specific location-wise versions of cosmetic product content using the right keywords (including US terms like “facial creams” instead of make-up creams.)
- Insert these specific location-wise keywords into product descriptions, URLs, metadata, etc.
- Try to get backlinks from popular US brands.
- Incorporate these methods to help the website rank in the US search results. These methods also help attract targeted users who can buy your products.
Expanded Customer Base
When you work on international SEO, which includes optimizing the site to rank for keywords relevant to different regions and languages, it can attract world audiences to search for your services or products.
It is an advantage for you as all your competitors won’t focus on the international market; you can be an option for global audiences and have an extra edge over your competitors in the market.
Moreover, you can identify whether leading brands relevant to your businesses have focused on the same market by using a keyword overview of your target regions.
The location base report can reveal whether specific keywords are positioned in that country.
How to Create an Effective International SEO Strategy
Your global identity expansion needs a systematic method to reach international audiences.
Let’s get into the strategic plan of steps that you should incorporate to see the results
A Proper Research for Different Regions
The users’ search behaviour is the critical element, and you need clarity on how they search, so applying a strategic plan of SEO can help you understand your competitors’ approaches in SEO for specific regions and keywords.
There are several tools to determine how your market competitors apply methods to get visitors and high website rankings.
Look at this competitor’ analytics
Identify Target Keywords for International Optimization
- The time has come to research keywords that new visitors use to get information related to your services or products.
- Your keyword research has to consider different languages, location-based methods and search behaviours in the international market.
- Analysing your business competitor’s keywords will help you open gates for more opportunities and discover ways to drive traffic.
- Using tools can guide you on how your business competitors choose keywords and get better rankings than others. Try to enter three competitors besides your domain to “Compare.”
The option is to apply filters to narrow down the keyword list according to monthly search volume and other aspects.
- Ensure you keep region-specific keywords based on their language, as it helps you align with visitors visiting you with the latest trends.
- Suppose you are selling mobiles and expanding to Germany, you should use the word “Handy” (which is used in Germany)
- This keyword is commonly used when searching for mobiles in Germany.
Understand Local Search Engines and Search Behavior
After completing the keyword research, you need to start analyzing search behaviour and apply your keywords in different search engines in target regions.
For example, if a UK-based company wants to expand its business in Germany, it is necessary to know how local users use German, English, or both.
As we know, Google is not alone in some countries. For instance, Japan’s search engine market share is 14 per cent to Yahoo. Likewise, we can see Baidu in China and Yandex in Russia.
Why is this important?
If you plan to expand your business to Russia and get a good ranking on Yandex, consider several aspects that Yandex expect from your site. Generally, Yandex trusts user behaviour to evaluate your site quality. This search engine recommends choosing the right region in Yandex’s Webmaster Tools settings to ensure that Yandex displays the proper content to the relevant visitor base in the apt location.
Adapt Your Content for Cultural and Regional Preferences
You should get into the shoes of their specific region, values, communication style and other cultural norms. In simple terms, you must localize your content rather than translate it.
The concept of content localizing is to understand and adapt their culture, context and other regional elements.
On the other hand, it is evident that translating is to push the matter without changing the meaning, but you miss out on localizing.
Moreover, incorporate links to websites identified as authoritative in your specific industry.
Try to include visuals that can appeal to target your industry and audiences with proper symbols and colors that can touch their beliefs and customs.
Things to consider based on the location are:
Different date formats (MM-DD-YYYY in the US vs. DD-MM-YYYY in Europe)
Seasons are different from country to country, so you should be aware of it
Currency
Government regulations on price and tax are different from place to place.
Build Relevant Links
Attaining backlinks from popular sites related to your business can help your website rank better.
To get the backlinks from your product-related websites, your content should resonate with the audiences in local regions. Images, content, and videos must be relevant to the local visitors.
Now, you must add your business competitors and click on compare, get your competitors backlink data and start link building.
Technical Elements for International SEO
Working on technical SEO elements can ensure search engines crawl and index your content for the international market. When you provide each component of technical aspects up to the mark, your website ranking and visibility in specific regions will be high.
Implement Region-Specific URLs
A localized URL can help identify your content is apt to the users and enhance search engines to understand who your content is relevant.
Google recommends implementing one of the following practices:
Keep a country-specific domain:
It can help you to separate sites and is helpful when server location is not a matter. Although expensive, it will limit your target to a single region – for example, www.example.in, www.example.co.uk, www.example.de, etc.
And a subdomain with regular and best domain (gTLD):
A subdomain with (gTLD): can be easy to set up and apt for websites hosted on servers in different locations. It is not so easy to identify whether the domain will refer to the country or specific language.
Use a subdirectory with gTLD:
Subdirectories can be easy to set up and need proper maintenance as you use the same hosting. However, it is not easy to separate websites, and the regions might not always be apparent from the URL
Implement Hreflang Tags
Hreflang tags are known as HTML attributes, and you can apply them to inform a search engine about the language and location target of pages on websites with different languages.
These are considered vital elements for international SEO
Why?
As hreflang tags can signal to search engines that the page is the most relevant to your users’ region and language.
Here, I want to show you how the hreflang tag looks like a company based in the UK that wants to serve content in German to its new user’s location in Germany.
Handle Duplicate Content and Canonicalization Issues
rel=”canonical”: The rel attribute indicates the relationship between the current page and the specified URL as being the canonical version.
href=”https://www.example.com/original-page”: The href attribute contains the URL of the preferred or canonical version of the content. This URL should point to the primary version of the page that you want search engines to index and consider as the authoritative source.
Ensure that you need to be cautious when you use hreflang and canonical tags at the same time. Because there is a chance of conflicting messages to search engines. Finally, it leads to ignoring both the hreflang attribute and canonical tag.
To avoid such issues, when using the hreflang attribute, Google will recommend a particular canonical page in the same language.
Optimize Website Speed and Performance
Once they visit your website, one must recognize it as a vital aspect to give a positive user experience. If your site takes longer to load, it could also increase the bounce rate and affect your site ranking.
- It would help if you considered a few things for optimizing your website speed for visitors across the globe:
- The Content Delivery Network (CDN) can be the best option for distributing content on different servers worldwide.
- Try to compress the files as it would help reduce the page size
- Ensure your site is mobile-friendly
- It is necessary to store static HTML versions of the site pages to serve visitors better.
Regularly Audit Your Site to Uncover Any Technical SEO Issues
Site audit is the critical aspect, and today, there are several tools for your site audit to discover technical SEO issues for your site. With the help of the audit report, you can find missing H1 headings, wrong pages in the sitemap, duplicate title tags, and more issues in the Hreflang tag implementation.
Site overview report
Analyze International SEO Performance
Using the best tools for your site audit to measure and analyze your international SEO performance is crucial to success in the market.
First, you should have the right tools like Google Analytics 4 (GA4).
GA4 can guide you in monitoring and analyzing visitors’ behaviours to identify what they look for.
You can check the overviews of your site analytics in detail according to your needs and requirements.
I want to give you more insights that are useful for tracking your international SEO performance.
Traffic report: Access the information by navigating to Life Cycle on the Report tab. Click on the option of acquisition by choosing traffic acquisition. This is how you can see your site report on organic traffic.
Landing Page Report:
Once you open the tool, go to the Reports tab, click Engagement, and then go to the landing page. Here, you can see the pages were served as users entered.
There is a position tracking tool that can help you add relevant keywords for each location and monitor the ranking aspects.
Position Tracking
Add your targeting keywords
Excel Your Global Market with International SEO
Every business owner’s dream is to spread their business wings into new regions. Still, you should get visibility by working on international SEO best practices.
As tools are available, you should implement them to check their feasibility, which is crucial to expanding your brand into more locations.
