A Guide to International SEO

What is International SEO?

International SEO is the process by which you tell the search engine which countries you want to target and which language you use for business. Marketing your product and website overseas is a big step for any business. Once you have all the preparations to serve the new countries you are targeting, it will be time to look at your Internet marketing strategy. Marketing to different countries, even if they predominantly speak English, must be handled correctly, or you may spend a lot of money and time with few results. Your marketing strategy will require some research and some fine-tuning to your website and landing pages.

Consider Country-Specific Domains

One of the best ways to build trust with a client is to establish the main domain name in their country. Using the country code in the domain name helps establish that you are focusing on that country and makes the end-user feel more comfortable about visiting your site. This strategy, however, is only practical if you are only targeting one or two other countries. Managing domain names for multiple countries across the globe would be an unnecessary expense. If you are going to market to a larger population or multiple countries at once, you may want to consider subdomains that will target those areas. This will allow you to compensate for the areas where the sites will be marketed as well as the languages.

URL Structures for International Websites:

ccTLD (country code top-level domain) – it is a two-letter code to indicate which countries a website is registered in. Subdomain- It is an additional part of the main domain. It is created to organize different sections of a website. gLTD with language parameters– targeted to speakers of a specific language by appending a URL parameter.  

Locale- Specific URLs

URL Structure	URL example (websites)	Pros and Cons
Country-Specific domain	https://www.eclicks.com.au	It offers local targeting and it has SEO benefits that allow the owner to be creative in creating site URLIrrelevant server location expensive (limited availability)It requires more infrastructure
Subdomains with gLTD	https://uk.hubspot.com	Strong ranking factors achieve a higher CTR and conversion rate good for regionalized backlink strategiesSubdomains get indexed as separate site visitors might not understand if the subdomain is referring to a language or a region
URL parameters	canva.com/?lang=en-us	Reduces duplicate content issues allows more efficient use of crawl budgetModerate technical implementation time

 

Research Foreign Keywords

The keywords and phrases that you use to promote your product in the US may not work in other countries. The local language and slang may have a different word for your product or service, or the words that you use may have an entirely different meaning. It will be essential that you research the keywords before starting your marketing campaign. If you are serving multiple areas, you may have to resort to subdomains again to ensure that your marketing information is being translated correctly into each area.  

Tag Your Pages Correctly

You will need to make sure that all of your web pages are tagged correctly to reach the right audience. This will require adding hreflang tags and X content tags for default pages and meta tags that are specific to the location you are trying to reach. If you are unfamiliar with this type of coding, there are several tag generators available online that you can use for this purpose.  

Update Your Analytics Page

You will need to update your Google analytics page with all of this information so that you can track the success of your marketing strategy. Without the data to show how your marketing is performing, you will risk losing a lot of money on marketing that is underperforming. While you are working on the analytics page, you may also want to do things like adding Google My Business and Bing Places to your site. These free services will give people a visual location of your business when they conduct a search. This is a great way to help build confidence in your business with overseas clients because it shows the physical location of your business.  

International Link Building

Now that you have all of your pages established and everything is ready to go, it will be time to start link building so that you can get some exposure for your site. Link building on an international level is done the same way as localized link building. However, it will require the necessary research to find where the links will perform the best in overseas markets.

 

One Final Thought

When you target an overseas market, it is vital that before you even begin your marketing plans, you look over your website and see if it will appeal culturally to the new area. Some areas of the world may be more attracted to websites that have a lot of text information, while others are more inclined to like sites with more graphics. Some areas are drawn to sites that include localized information, even if they are international companies. While there is no way that you can ever please everyone with your marketing information and setup, it will help if you have a general idea of the expectations of the target market area so that you can try to accommodate their needs. International SEO can seem overwhelming. It requires a lot of research, design, and special coding for your sites to make it very effective. As with all Internet marketing strategies, it will take time to find the right marketing method for each of your targeted areas. Expanding your business is always very exciting. With the right marketing strategies in place, you can have a very successful launch of your products in your new targeted areas. If you really want to start marketing your products in a new country with international SDEO standards, it may be in your best interest to work with an international digital marketing company for this service like eCLICKS which is a top leader in performance-based digital marketing in Australia.