If you are looking forward to target a global audience, then you have to spend some time to apply best possible efforts to arrange and optimize your website for different countries across the globe. Once you have setup a good web presence in terms of local operations then you might consider getting start with international SEO which can help to grow the visibility of your website and extend your reach to international audience. It will give the power to your business to drive a wholesome amount of web traffic from other countries and boost up your conversion rates also.
What is International SEO?
International search engine optimization is the process of optimizing web presence of your brand or organization website helping various search engines to identify the list of countries you plan to reach. You can even target any specific country with your preferred list of keywords for the people who are residing in different locations and by using geo targeting, hreflang tags and other localization tags can help to better optimize your web content around the world. Google search engine constantly keep working on to show their results according to the language and location of the searcher. Special type of signals and tags are being used by Google and other search engines to present your website content which is perfect for the searcher relevant to their location and language. You can organize the content of web pages separately for different parts of the country to target.
If you want to successfully achieve new heights in international seo, then it is important to put together below mention effective steps that would be beneficial to make your seo campaign a winning part of story for you.
- Strong Research On Keywords:
It is most imperative to start your international SEO campaign with strong research on keyword list that will helpful to identify the potential of each keyword relevant to targeted region on the globe. This research work proves to be beneficial in making business oriented goals and tasks. Use Google’s Keyword Planner tool to start your keyword analysis task and then focus on your top international countries along with language preferences and to track out search behaviour of international people. Google Keyword Planner tool will help you to evaluate the best keywords for international campaign to gain a number of users from other countries.
- Targeting Country:
In this step, you should make a plan to target countries with keywords having good amount of organic search volume, reasonably competitive. If organic search volume of keywords ideally not good to target country, then you should start over with language based targeting strategy.
This strategy could be fruitful as it enables you to first flourish the amount of web traffic and conversion process & then move on to country based target approach to connect with much more groups of people. Online shopping and eCommerce websites are best example of this methodology.
- Optimizing:
Once you have finalized the right international web target, your final step should be to optimize your site accordingly. This means to ensure that your content is relevant, indexable, and crawlable by the search engines. You need to guarantee that your site provides ideal targeting signals, so that you can avoid search results misalignment. It’s essential that you deal with duplicate content and other URL issues for various countries. Manage it to get proper visibility by following the Google Webmaster guidelines for multi-regional and multilingual sites.
- Set up SEO Friendly URL Structure:
The url structure of your website matters a lot for google to list down the number of pages for web searchers in different countries. This task comes under geo targeting which mainly focuses on location. There many business organizations in the market whose websites are specifically built keeping in mind this vision to target any country or it can be even possible by placing sub directory structure in their existing website. Creating sub directory setup is very easy; just create a new folder in the website cPanel to taget each country specified with the country’s two letter ISO code. For example, if you want to target your content for the people in spain then, your subdirectory structure should look like this: example.com/es.
- Use Hreflang Tags for Langauge Targeting:
Hreflang tags are small piece of code used on websites with content in multiple languages which helps the search engines to serve searchers better SERP’s match up with their exact language. For example, german speaker will see your german content instead of to it in English or Spanish.
Here is a one big question, how does google know about the preferred language of user? When user enter his or her query to Google, Google read out the query and look up into user setting of website, search history, location preferences and which specific domain company is using, e.g. (example.com or example.de). The hreflang tag is very useful as it provides complete translation of entire website in subdirectories or subdomains.
- Use of Additional Local Signals:
There are some additional geo targeting signals that will work better in your favour by choosing below mention strategies indicating the country and preferred language of user.
- Include your proper location links in popular social media platforms.
- Display your service or product prices in local currencies.
- Display physical address and contact numbers of your offices.
Conclusion: Thinking about to apply international seo practices likely to lead you to unexpected limits of success which is very tricky and time consuming process to achieve significant heights of progress. So therefore, if you think it’s time to go global then make international SEO an important chapter to add up into your general SEO practice.
