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International SEO
International SEO Strategies Can Start With Local Keyword Research
How do you decide where you will expand your business?
Almost every business with international expansion on the brain will end up conducting some sort of market research. But if you’re waiting for an SEO signal, there are two factors that can help nudge you in the right direction.
1. You notice a spike in organic traffic from a foreign market that piques your interest.
2. You don’t have to be an astrophysicist to understand that a spike in users from a particular place often translates to a demand for your product or
service on that market. That’s easy.
3. You notice a spike in users or customers from a particular country or region.
The Difference Between Global SEO, Local SEO and General SEO
General SEO covers all the fundamental factors that help search engines crawl, index and list your content in the results pages for searches.
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Global SEO
Whether you serve a local or global market, you’ll always have to put these SEO practices in place. General SEO factors include:
1. Sitemap
2. Site speed
3. Backlinks
4. Keyword optimization
5. Schema markup
6. UX
While working on local SEO, global SEO or any other type of SEO, you’ll use general SEO principles—the key is that you’ll tweak them to suit your specific purpose. Of course, local and global SEO tactics have unique nuances and tactics, so you want to go beyond the general.
Global SEO targets audiences across the globe. You’ll be optimizing for your audiences’ languages, cultures, behavioral tendencies, local internet
regulations and policies in your marketing messages and methods.
Local SEO is typically for offline businesses with a brick-and-mortar presence in a given city, state or country. Apart from applying general SEO rules,
Google relies on customer reviews, local directories and business information networks for local search rankings.
There are some global SEO tactics that are more general, like translating existing content into a variety of languages. And then to some extent, it’s a
matter of repeating local SEO over and over, until you’ve covered every specific region of interest. We’ll cover both.
For the purpose of this article, I’m talking about going international for SEO, but the same opportunity applies across paid search and social media.
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There are two ways to target international queries for SEO:
1. Through international geotargeting. This means making alternative versions of your website based on the region. You don’t necessarily have to translate your website to another language to target other regions. You can have a default (x-default) English website, with alternatives in Canada (en-ca) and the UK
(en-gb). Or you can have a default English website, with Spanish alternatives in Mexico (es-mx) and Spain (es-es).
2. Through simple multilingual targeting. This means making an alternative version of your website in another language. This will cover that language in its entirety, across all geos. For example, you may have a Spanish version of your website at es.website.com with the tag: hreflang=”es” (Not sure what hreflang is? Read up on it here).
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