Unlocking new markets with international SEO

Daniel Wood at GA Agency outlines the benefits of international SEO and explains how best to manage it

 

Anyone that uses a website to sell their products or services should understand the value of search engine optimisation (SEO). But not many will have heard of or realise the importance of international SEO.

 

As increasingly more businesses expand their global reach, so they are encountering a host of different hurdles that they have to overcome when entering new markets and geographical regions. Chief among these are language and cultural barriers, which are just as prevalent online as on the ground.

 

That’s why it’s vital to have an effective international SEO strategy in place to be able to reach your target market. So, let’s take a look at what international SEO is and how it can be improved to enable you to meet your full potential on the global stage.

 

The meaning of international SEO

Simply put, international SEO is the process of optimising a website or content so that search engines identify which countries you want to reach or which languages you want to use. It takes the same principles as traditional SEO and applies them across multiple regions and/or languages, enabling the search engines to identify and segregate that content based on set parameters that produce the most relevant results for each enquiry.

 

Ways to improve international SEO

The success of international SEO is based on a range of factors. Here are some simple steps that you can take to improve your international SEO:

 

Market research. The performance of any SEO is based on the audience that it’s intended for. That’s why it’s vital to understand who they are, particularly when you are trying to reach a new group of people, focusing on their buying habits and behaviours, and the keywords they are most likely to search for. It will enable you to establish, if, indeed, there is a market for your product or service, and base your SEO approach on that.

 

Website structure. Any effective website will be designed with SEO in mind. Where international SEO is concerned, this extends to targeting customers by language or region, or both. There are different ways of achieving this too: many companies rely on geotargeting with locale-specific URLS for each version of their website, but a host of options including subdomains, subdirectories or language parameters can also be used, that will allow for simple strategy changes over time.

 

User experience. The most important part of the SEO equation is the customer. That’s why it’s critical to provide them with a seamless user experience, which means investing in functions such as site navigation, imagery, speed, interface, trust building and value proposition.

 

Content. Content is another core component of international SEO. The content has to be both meaningful and relevant in order to deliver for the end user. To achieve this in the market or region you want to reach, you need to engage local content creators and copywriters to produce it, thus overcoming any cultural or language barriers that you may encounter.

 

Language targeting. Language targeting is used to reach people in or from certain countries or geographies. Because some search engines use different language targeting tools, it’s important to know which one that specific place uses. Most popular search engines favour hreflang tags when identifying whether there’s a localised version of a site available in another language, while others use meta language tags.

 

Technical SEO. Technical SEO is key to making your site easier for search engines to crawl and index. When applied on an international scale, it needs to incorporate localised URls and images optimised for your target market.

 

Link building. One key objective of SEO should be to build backlinks from other websites to your website. That way, you can establish yourself as an authority on a subject and be identified as such by search engines. It works the same way if you partner with other trusted experts in your field and link to each other’s websites.

 

Analytics. None of these steps will be effective, however, unless their performance is regularly monitored using analytics. That means knowing who is looking at your website, what they’re looking for, for how long and where they go afterwards.

 

International SEO is now a non-negotiable if you are expanding into new markets. That’s why it’s vital to invest in an effective international SEO strategy that enables you to reach your target audience and continue to grow your business.  

 

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Daniel Wood is a highly experienced organic marketer who has been helping businesses improve their SEO strategy for more than 10 years. He is SEO Director at GA Agency, an independent digital agency based in London, specialising in international expansion, with an in-house team delivering SEO & Paid Media in over 15 languages. 

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com