International SEO Strategy

International SEO is the process of optimising your website in such a way that search engines can show relevant content to your target audiences in different countries and/or different languages.

Consider answering the following key questions, before you choose to go ahead and optimize your site for global audiences.

• Are you getting organic traffic from a different country (or people speaking a different language or both) to the one you are located in? Check your audience data in Google Analytics.
• Do you want to gain visibility in a new market through search and also have increased search volumes?
• Do you want to generate global business and sales for your products or services? Is your business ready for this?
• Do you want to improve the customer experience for existing global customers and help understand your offering and increase your conversion rate?
• You don’t want to build a new website for each new market?

Set your SMART goals

Setting international digital marketing objectives gives you something to aim for in the long and short term, and something to build your marketing strategy around. If set using the SMARTER mnemonic, achievements become clear, defined and achievable.

Bad example: Increase international revenue from the online shoe shop.

Good example: Increase sales of Nike shoes 20% year-on-year in October on the online store across all regions.

• Specific – Ensure that your objectives are exact in what they set out to achieve.
• Measurable – Ensure that your success in reaching this objective can be measured against a specific metric.
• Achievable – Digital marketing targets should be realistic and something you can actually do. Few things are worse than beating yourself up about not hitting the numbers you set out to achieve.
• Relevant – Is what you’re measuring actually important and relevant to the goal at hand? If not, then reconsider your priorities and look at what will make a bigger impact on your business.
• Time-driven – When do you want to achieve your objective by? Putting a deadline on your objectives can help focus your mind and efforts.
• Emotion- You made sure your goal was relevant, so now let’s add in an emotional element to stay committed. Make this exciting by visualizing the end result. WHY you want to achieve this and HOW the final result will make you feel?
• Re-evaluation-By re-evaluating your goals periodically, you build flexibility into the system. It doesn’t need to be complicated. Simply analyse: What worked? What didn’t work? What you could do better?

Now that we’ve looked at SMART objectives, how do we specifically apply this principle to digital marketing? If we divide digital marketing into 3 core sections – Attract, Engage & Convert – we can set SMART objectives for each part:

• Overall objective – Increase sales of Nike shoes 20% year-on-year in October on the online store.
• Attract – Generate 300 new visitors in October at an average CPA (cost per acquisition) of £4.
• Engage – Decrease the bounce rate of the Nike category page by 25% year-on-year for the month.
• Convert – Increase the conversion rate of the Nike shoes by 15% year-on-year for the month.

These objectives are Specific (each is detailed), Measurable (each has a metric), Achievable (the numbers aren’t obscene), Relevant (each supports the other to achieve the overall objective) and Time-driven (each needs to be achieved by the end of October). While S.M.A.R.T goals strategy can help you make a headstart in ensuring your budget goals are tangible, the emotion and re-evaluation keep you in check with your progress to then scale and grow it further.

Internationalisation

Based on your business goals, you need to identify, what type of targeting you need to go for.

If you want to target users speaking different languages, then you need to go for language targeting – Multilingual SEO. Example: If you want to target Dutch and French speakers in Belgium.

If you want to target users in different countries then you would need to opt for geotargeting or country targeting – Multi regional SEO. Example: If you want to target people in the UK, US, Sweden, France, Australia.

If you want both – target users in different countries and languages – then you need to go for language and geotargeting.

How do I implement a global SEO strategy?

Local Search Engines

Although Google’s global presence is significant, and optimizing for Google will help you reach your target customers in many countries, it might be wise to also research on certain local search engines, that dominate over google in certain parts of the world. Here are a few examples.

Focus on E-A-T content ( Expertise – Authority – Trust) but also on other ranking signals that are specific to these search engines.

URL And Domain Structure

Once you have decided to go international, it is very important to decide your URL structure. This will pave the way for your future SEO efforts as well. Changing it later might prove to be too costly and difficult.

There are different ways to do this. See the examples below.

ccTLDs – Country Level Top Level Domains

This is used when you want to target a specific country. ccTLds would work well in countries where there is a universal common language spoken by the masses. It would also be required in countries where it is a legal requirement to have regional TLD ( eg. China)

Subdirectories

This approach is more useful when you want to target multiple languages within a country. Although, it can be used for geo-targeting only as well.

Subdomains

Not a preferred method, as a subdomain could lose out on the SEO equity of the main domain. But if you still want to use it for geo-targeting, you can.

HrefLang Tags

If you have multilingual sites and have customized your website for people to visit relevant content in their language on your website then use this option.  hreflang Tag (rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x”)  is added to the <head> of a website.

Eg – <link rel=” alternate” href=”https://www.yoursite.com/” hreflang=”en-US” /> used for targeting English speakers in the US

One of the most important reasons to use hreflang tags apart from user experience is to make sure that search engines do not flag your site as having duplicate content. For example, if you have content in British English as well as American English on your site Google may see them as duplicate content and index only one version.

Hreflang tags help Google to understand which is the correct version shown in search results It is better not to rely solely on hreflangs and also focus on localizing content in terms of currency, language, contact information, etc.

Both Google and Yandex look at hreflang tags to help do this.

Bing and Baidu don’t look at hreflang tags. They instead use the content-language HTML attribute.Source

<meta http-equiv=”content-language” content=”en-us”>

You can implement hreflang attribute in three ways.

• HTML tags
• HTTP headers
• Sitemaps

Localisation of content

Work with native speakers for keyword research to build a list of your target keywords in regional languages.

When it comes to expanding internationally into non-English speaking markets, don’t just rely on translating your existing content — you’ll also want to create content campaigns that are tailored to address issues the local audience cares about.

Using the currency, and time zone together with the contact information like addresses and phone numbers, you’re sending strong signals to users and search engines that they’re in the right spot on the globe.

• Translate content into the local language for the markets you are wanting to target
• Depth of translation depends on the time and resource but also the opportunity and reward for each market
• Avoid using Google Translate or automated translation services
• Don’t rely on a translation agency that is outside of the country in question. Think about where you are targeting, if you are trying to target a country find someone who is local to the area of which you are trying to target.
• Translate everything from the menu to your content and help desk
• Localization means you are using the right currency, payment methods and have addresses and telephone numbers.
• Don’t automatically change language based on a user’s IP address

International SEO should be seamless. It is all about showing the right content, in the right language, at the right time without the end-user realizing this.

Local link building

Backlinks are a very important ranking factor. A strong backlink profile in local markets can help boost your SEO efforts.

• Look into local competitors and analyze their backlinks.
• See what sort of content is being written for PR and outreach articles and use this to your advantage
• Use these signals to update content on your site.
• Create content in different formats, text, video, infographics, etc. anything that is worth sharing and gives value to the local audiences and that will help you gain links.