Global business
With the world more connected than ever, any business seeking to expand internationally needs a global website to succeed. Still, even the most beautifully designed website can’t guarantee success unless it attracts visitors. To truly thrive in the global market, businesses must optimize their websites for international SEO.
International SEO is one of the most effective ways to leverage organic search to reach target audiences in different countries. This comprehensive guide will explore the concept of international SEO, why it’s important for global business, and how to create an effective international SEO strategy for lasting success.
International SEO is the practice of optimizing a website to make it more visible and rank higher in search engines in different countries and languages.
International SEO ensures that search engines can easily identify which countries your business wants to target. It also shows search engines which languages you use to attract customers from different countries.
Whether you’re a fashion brand looking into how to reach a global audience or an ecommerce company targeting specific countries, international SEO can help increase your global online visibility.
Google and other search engines are engineered to match search results to the language and location of users. International SEO works by letting search engines know that your site has content suitable for searchers based in a particular country—or users who are searching for products or services like yours in a specific language.
International SEO uses country or language targeting, hreflang tags, designated URL structures, and other localization signals to target content to your users around the world.
Dive deeper
What is localization, and why does it matter?
Find out why localization isn’t the same as translation and how it can support companies in expanding the global footprint of their business.
While both international SEO and local SEO aim to improve a website’s visibility in search engines, there are some critical differences between both concepts.
| Local SEO targets keywords and audiences within a particular area | International SEO targets keywords and audiences across geographic regions |
| Website content is optimized to attract local customers.
Location-specific information may be incorporated, such as the name of the city or region, in your content and metadata. Includes optimizing your website for local directories and listings, such as Google My Business, to improve visibility in local search results. |
A more comprehensive approach used catering to multiple languages, cultures, and markets.
Apart from language considerations, international SEO involves adapting content and websites to different cultural norms and preferences. Sites are also customized to legal or regulatory requirements that exist in different countries. |
The customization inherent in both local SEO and international SEO is ultimately aimed at helping human audiences, but it’s also useful for communicating your site’s value to search engines.
When search engines understand that you have localized content for specific countries, users are directed to the most relevant versions of your website based on their locations—ultimately improving the overall user experience for your customers in other markets.
If your competitors don’t optimize their content for certain countries or languages, you can take advantage of that by tailoring your content to those countries to bring in even more traffic and gain a competitive edge. Let’s delve into the core benefits of international SEO for businesses looking into global expansion.
With the internet’s global nature, the potential to reach a vast and diverse audience is immense. By implementing international SEO strategies, businesses can target specific markets and languages, allowing them to connect with potential customers across the world. This expanded reach can lead to increased traffic, brand exposure, and potential sales in various markets.
Appearing in search results for relevant keywords in different languages and locations can significantly increase organic traffic to a website. When international SEO is executed correctly, it attracts users who are actively searching for products or services in their native languages and regions. This targeted approach can lead to higher conversion rates, ultimately boosting revenue and business growth.
Building a strong online presence in various countries and regions helps to enhance brand visibility and credibility on a global scale. When users consistently find a brand listed in search results in their native language, it instills trust and confidence in the brand’s legitimacy. Positive user experiences and brand recognition foster loyalty and encourage word-of-mouth marketing, further strengthening the brand’s position in the international market.
Given these benefits, creating your own international SEO strategy is worth the time and investment.
Now that we have covered the basics, let’s have a look at the steps you can take to create a powerful international SEO strategy.
To get started, it’s essential to delve into the current state of your website:
Based on these insights, try to answer the following questions to determine the scope of your international SEO strategy more effectively:
What is website localization?
Website localization goes beyond translation, fully adapting your site to the language and culture of diverse target markets. Learn more about how to make it work effectively.
Setting clear goals is essential for any SEO strategy, and international SEO is no exception. Having specific goals provides direction and allows you to measure your progress towards improving your international SEO results:
With your international SEO goals in place, you can move on to conducting thorough market research and monitoring your competition. Market research will reveal the preferences and behaviors of your target audience in different countries or regions. Analyzing your competitors’ SEO strategies can help you differentiate yourself in each target market.
Keywords are important components of any SEO strategy, and the same applies to international SEO. To effectively reach your target audience in different markets, you need to conduct keyword research separately for each market.
Keyword research will help you find the right terms and phrases that customers in each market use when looking for products or services like yours. With this information, you can start creating content and pages optimized for those keywords in the respective language.
In most cases, keywords should be transcreated and not just translated.
Some keywords will be difficult to transcreate while others can be left as-is and translated directly. Some international industries like medicine or IT, for example, frequently use English terms even if English isn’t the country’s official language, so translating these keywords won’t make any sense.
Find out what local users are searching for, and adapt your keywords to fit local search patterns. For example, Mothers’ Day in the US is on a completely different date from Mothers’ Day in the UK. This means that users in both countries will be looking for Mothers’ Day gifts in different months of the year.
Use tools like Google Ads’ Keyword Planner to find out keywords’ monthly search volumes in the relevant markets and incorporate the most relevant keywords into your international SEO strategy.
No 2 international SEO approaches are the same. Which approach you should take will greatly depend on your business goals, target customers, and resources.
When targeting international audiences, you have 2 options: language targeting or country targeting:
For example, content in Spanish could be used to target international audiences of Spanish speakers across different countries and regions.
You could use language targeting to reach Spanish speakers in general and use country targeting for Spain, which speaks a different dialect from the Spanish spoken in Latin America.
Similarly, If you want to target Portuguese speakers, you may decide to use country targeting specific to Brazil or Portugal.
You could create separate Portuguese and Spanish content, using international SEO to help search engines bring users to the right site versions.
Tip: In an ideal scenario, you would target every country separately to resonate as much as possible with your target audience. However, the feasibility of such a comprehensive strategy heavily relies on your financial resources and technical capabilities.
Ideally, you should use dedicated URLs to avoid confusion between the original and localized content. Each URL links to each content page with content adapted in a certain language. Webmasters use a few different URL structures to target specific markets and languages.
Let’s review the most common URL structures:
If you need designated webpages for specific countries, having country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) may be the best solution. Domains like example.es and example.fr send signals to search engines that these sites should be served to users located in Spain and France.
However, as ccTLDs are separate domains, this strategy is typically the most expensive and time-consuming. Each ccTLD domain needs its own digital PR, content marketing, and link-building strategy. You also won’t be able to carry over any link acquisition efforts or domain authority acquired from off-site activity on other web pages.
Global top-level domains (gTLDs) combined with subdomains like de.example.com enable improved geographical targeting and enhanced brand recognition in each target market. However, challenges arise from technical setup and maintenance complexity, as well as potential SEO alignment issues with subdomains.
If the location of your audience doesn’t have any impact on your products and services, you can use a single domain, and make use of subdirectories (subfolders) to host your designated language or country pages: example.com/es/.
These are typically used by businesses that want to target users in a single market with multiple languages being spoken. They also apply to geographical regions encompassing 2 or more countries that speak the same language, for example, Spanish-speaking Latin America.
gTLDs combined with subdomains and subfolders (es.example.com/es-mx/) allow for versatile site organization: While subdomains enable a more granular regional targeting, subfolders organize content within the main domain.
Benefits include enhanced targeted marketing and streamlined navigation, making websites more relevant to specific audiences. However, they’re quite complex to handle and have drawbacks to be aware of: cookie sharing, considerable server resources, long URLs, and potentially diluted SEO.
Given the benefits and drawbacks of each type of URL structure, you will want to carefully consider the needs of your business and your anticipated growth into new markets as you make your decision.
The hreflang attribute indicates what language your content is in and what geographical region your content is for. Hreflang attributes also help you to avoid duplicate content issues on the various language versions of your website, i.e. for the English language pages designated for the US, the UK, and Australia, used to target various locations.
You can implement the hreflang attribute by including it in any of the following:
<head> sectionWhen using the hreflang attribute, stick to these best practices:
Building local links in each target market can help improve your website’s domain authority and its visibility in search results across markets. Collaborating with local influencers, guest blogging on relevant websites, and participating in local directories are some effective ways to build local links.
For example, if your site gets a lot of backlinks from URLs ending with “.de,” it signals to Google that your site is relevant to audiences in Germany. Therefore, it can rank your page accordingly on those local search results. Local links will have the highest impact on search results so it’s worth investing time in building a strong link-building strategy for each page.
Social media and user reviews can significantly impact your international SEO efforts. Engaging with customers through social media platforms and encouraging user reviews can help boost your online visibility and build trust with your target audience in different markets. Implementing social media and review management strategies is a key component of any successful international SEO strategy.
It might seem like the perfect solution, but automatically redirecting visitors and/or search engines based on IP addresses or browser settings is annoying for users. It can be confusing for search engines too. It can even mean that visitors and search engines never find certain content.
Instead, let visitors and search engines know about an alternative version of a page by showing a banner at the top or bottom of the page with a message and a link to the suggested page.
Your goal is to ensure that the content published on country-specific pages is relevant to the local audience. For example, content discussing winter fashion trends in Norway might not be relevant to website visitors from the Dominican Republic. That’s why it’s important to strive for targeted content that genuinely benefits the readers in each country.
There are various ways to create localized content. One option is to hire content creators in the respective language. However, this approach can be quite costly. Another method involves professional linguists transcreating your original content with the help of localization technology. The advantage here is that you can own the process and have greater control over it, ensuring the best possible quality.
Unlock global business with the Phrase Localization Suite
Expand into new markets with all the tools you need in one technology suite for high-quality, fast, and scalable localization.
After implementing your international SEO strategy, it’s important to measure the progress and evaluate the performance of your international SEO efforts. This will allow you to identify areas of improvement and optimize your strategy further.
| Key metrics to consider when measuring international SEO performance | |
| Organic traffic | Monitor the number of organic page visits from specific countries over a given period using tools like Google Analytics or other SEO analytics platforms. |
| Country-specific keyword rankings | Keep an eye on how well your targeted keywords rank in popular search engines in each country to optimize your localized content further. |
| Backlink analysis | Assess the quantity and quality of backlinks from domains across countries and check their relevance and authority to gauge your website’s overall strength. |
| Localization | Evaluate which localized content types users in each country most interact with, while also assessing the effectiveness of language tags and hreflang attributes for precise targeting. |
| Competitor analysis | Compare your performance against competitors in every country by evaluating keyword rankings, backlink profiles, and overall organic traffic to identify strengths and weaknesses. |
| Bounce rates and time spent on site | Monitor how many visitors leave your site after viewing only one page and how long they stay on your site in each country. |
| Conversion rates | Measure the percentage of website visitors from different countries who complete a desired action (making a purchase, filling out a form, or similar). |
By regularly monitoring and analyzing these metrics, you can gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of your international SEO strategy and make informed decisions to optimize your website for global success.
Optimizing your website for international SEO is essential to expanding your global reach. By understanding the nuances of your target markets and implementing effective international SEO strategies, you can attract a broader audience, boost traffic, and improve conversions.
Tailoring user experiences to cultural and linguistic differences in your target markets and continuously analyzing performance will help you refine your international SEO strategy in the long run. With International SEO, your business is better prepared to embrace global opportunities.
Speak with an expert
Want to learn how our solutions can help you unlock global opportunity? We’d be happy to show you around the Phrase Localization Suite and answer any questions you may have.
Last updated on August 30, 2023.
