In this digital world, no geographical boundaries can prevent you from expanding your business if you have utilized best practices in your international digital marketing efforts. International SEO is one of the evident digital marketing channels.
It does not just help you expand your business in foreign markets but also engage with potential customers & gain leads from there.
Unlike popular belief, international SEO is not just about launching the website in a particular location with translated content.
International SEO is more about optimizing your website through geofencing and geotargeting to achieve website personalization and content localization based on the country, region/state, city, organization, time zones, currencies, IP address, and more.
SEO itself is very complex, and international SEO is no anomaly that makes many digital marketers fall short. But here, we have listed some best international SEO practices that will drive relevant traffic and qualified leads to your business from foreign markets.
1) Conduct in-depth research for search engines and keywords:
In this digital world, no geographical boundaries can prevent you from expanding your business if you have utilized best practices in your international digital marketing efforts. International SEO is one of the evident digital marketing channels.
It does not just help you expand your business in foreign markets but also engage with potential customers & gain leads from there.
Unlike popular belief, international SEO is not just about launching the website in a particular location with translated content.
International SEO is more about optimizing your website through geofencing and geotargeting to achieve website personalization and content localization based on the country, region/state, city, organization, time zones, currencies, IP address, and more.
SEO itself is very complex, and international SEO is no anomaly that makes many digital marketers fall short. But here, we have listed some best international SEO practices that will drive relevant traffic and qualified leads to your business from foreign markets.
Although Google is the largest search engine globally with over 90% of the market share, some countries do not use Google as a search engine and have other local search engines popular in their region.
For example, Baidu in China, Yandex in Russia, and Naver in South Korea are very popular.
So, before focusing on your international SEO strategy, you must research which search engine is popular in your targeted market.
Without a doubt, some basic optimization will remain the same for all search engines, but some technical aspects related to content placement and user experience will differ.
The same is with the keywords, especially in non-English speaking countries. You can not use the literal translation of the keywords you are targeting in the English language.
You have to work with the native speaker of that language or conduct deep research to understand the local colloquialisms, culture, and other aspects. This way, you can target semantic keywords in your content and fulfill user search intent better.
However, some keywords will have a high volume irrespective of the language or country, so you can merely translate them to use them in your content.
But for better results, you must also target some country-specific keywords, and for that, you have to do the practice we have already discussed.
2) Conduct in-depth marketing and competitor analysis to opt for the best strategy:
Conducting market research and competitor analysis is not only necessary for your business success, but also to make your international SEO efforts successful when you plan to expand your business in new foreign markets.
The reason is that the local businesses will be your primary competition on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). So, understanding their SEO strategy and content strategy will give you helpful information about your targeted customers.
As digital marketing in this era is more about personalization, having valuable information about your potential customers and their interests will make your content and SEO personalized and more engaging.
3) Optimize your website structure:
Website structure is a very crucial part of international SEO, which most companies ignore at first but regret later.
Big brands and established companies use top-level domains (TLDs) for each country they are doing business in. For example, Amazon has a website with an amazon.com domain name in the USA and an amazon.co.in domain name in India.
However, this technique works best for brands that cater to different products or services for distinct regions. In this scenario, the success of the websites depends highly on brand recognition (i.e., how famous/popular a particular brand is) because such domains are usually not integrated in terms of SEO perspective.
Hence, opting for such a website structure is not feasible for new startups and less popular brands. So, the ideal strategy in such cases is to create subdirectories in a primary TLD, For example, https://www.abc.com/fr & https://www.abc.com/fr-ch.
However, if your targeted territories speak more than one language, your website structure must include subdirectories for each language.
4) Use hreflang tags for language set up correctly:
Hreflang tags are the HTML attribute that gives Google a clear direction for your targeted language and country.
For example, . Here, Google gets that your page's language is English, and the targeted region is the USA.
You can set up your page's Hreflang tags in 3 ways: Add those to the HTML of your website, sitemap .xml file, or HTTP header.
So, no matter which website structure you decide to go with, you must connect your pages with appropriate hreflang tags to send Google a clear indication of which country you are targeting.
All Hreflangs should be bidirectional, self-referential, and point back to their canonical.
5) Do not just translate the content, but localize it:
Many brands make the common mistake of just translating the content on their website for different regions because it makes your website's content full of language nuances that will drive your visitors away from your website.
So, you must avoid machine translation and go for local translators who maintain the context of your content and apply the different dialects of a particular language.
Another reason to opt for local translators is that good content on your website highly affects your website's ranking and protects your brand reputation in users' minds.
So, as far as the user experience and personalization are concerned, avoid machine translation on your website.
6) Other important factors:
In addition to the above-listed points, you must consider the following aspects while strategizing for a successful international SEO:
Always ask users before switching them to their native language site.
Use website layout, design, and elements according to the region you are targeting for enhancing the on-page user experience of your country-specific website, which will affect your rankings.
Build links for each of your country-specific sites to increase the off-site authority of your website in a particular region.
If you want to duplicate the content across different country-specific sites, inform Google using appropriate canonical tags to highlight your primary page.
In the end, International SEO is more about being Local!
Every region is a unique market with unique mindsets of people. Hence, to succeed in your digital marketing (especially SEO) efforts, you need to personalize your content and campaigns with more local influence.
Based on the tactics above, you can strategize your SEO for international markets and get relevant traffic to your website & quality leads for your business.
However, if you are still confused about how to proceed with your international SEO strategy, Contact SEO Experts at ABK Digital.
So, contact us now and avail your first free consultation with Digital Marketing Experts!
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