International SEO - Guide to Getting Started

International SEO

International SEO is becoming more and more important than ever for many businesses. When executed properly, even a small business can expect a huge return on investment (ROI).

Good news: there is plenty of information about international SEO available to read and learn.

Bad news: There are many outdated information that can cause misinformation.

I have met some SEO professionals who have been managing global sites for years but have lost their meaning due to updates and changes.

If you already know them, wonderful. Just consider them as a confirmation of the knowledge of your best practices.

How Different is International SEO from Classic SEO?

Your global sites should not be the "copy and paste" version of your home country's location in different languages, although I see this on many websites.

Yes, translating and locating the content of the site is one of the first steps. But then you have to optimize the locations for the local audience of each country from messages and offers to the user's overall experience from the site.

A site with popular content with good performance on the Greek market may not be so great in England or South America and may require additional content edits and optimization tasks.

Although you pay attention to each location, you need to keep track of the overall performance. Otherwise, your sites may be competing with each other or, in the worst case, they may not be indexed at all on search engines.

For example, your site designed for Mexico should not go beyond or show up in search results in Spain if you have a different site designed for Spain.

If you misuse the regular or hreflang tag, some sites may not be indexed by the search engines or create a double index pointer.

Do I have to go global? And where is my market?

If you are not sure of the opportunities that exist in different countries or you want to convince your supervisors, it's always a good idea to review some of your purchase reports, statistics, and even your own site data.

Here are some information you can use to decide or prioritize the countries/markets that will follow.

Government and trade organizations such as Trade.gov and WTO.org provide the latest international news and business and trade statistics.

Many companies provide reports and statistics about the Internet, such as Internet World Stats, Econsultancy, McKinsey & Company and eMarketer. There are many websites that provide country-specific information.

Your analytics data. Do you see someone visiting your site from other countries? Is there a country that sends more traffic to your site than others? It is worth paying attention, especially if some of these elements are already converted into customers.

Do I need a site for each country?

Sure, yes, if the market is big enough to invest. Not only for SEO purposes, but also to provide a better user experience to local visitors, it is always better to have a specific site for each country in your goals.

However, this can not be a feasible option for you, at least not at first. In this case, you will have a website for each language spoken in your countries of destination.

It's not a bad choice for a start, as you might want to try out the waters first before you dive into very deep waters. Fortunately, we can use the Hreflang tags to tell Google which language and country has been created for each site.

What Domain Do You Have - ccTLD or gTLD?

The reality is that not everyone can have this choice for a variety of reasons.

In 2019, it does not have much impact on your SEO as search engines have gone a long way, and we have other options for geo-targeting sites specifically with Google.

Note that some of the search engines like Baidu still favor sites with local ccTLD. Also, people outside the U.S. tend to click on websites with local TLD websites with .com or other generic TLDs.

What kind of hospitality should I get?

The location of the site host was one of the important messages for international SEO related to geographic targeting.

However, it is not so important now that we have other ways to properly map your site's target market to search engines and CDNs that are managed at a regional level.

The host location has a great effect on the speed of the page. Make sure your site can be reached quickly in the destination countries.

How do I need to make alternative geographic targeting?

Perhaps, geographic targeting is one of the simplest practices where many sites make mistakes, as site owners move from ccTLDs to hosting the local market.

There are several ways to geographically target your sites and pages. Here are some of the popular methods:

Granting a Geographic Allocation to Google Search Console 
Hreflang Label for Google 
Bing Language Language Meta tag Information

Note: Recently, Google with Rankbrain began to produce search results based on the position of the researcher, regardless of the local version of Google used by the researcher.

For example, you used different search results from Google.com from Google UK (google.co.uk) or Google Australia (google.com.au) even when you search for the same keyword.

But now you will get the same results on all three Google searches unless you search in three different countries.

Google or not on Google?

While Google is by far the most popular use of search engines around the world, in some countries there are search engines that are locally grown and are much more popular than Google.

If your target country is one of the following, you'll need to pay close attention to tracking these local locations and for additional optimization tasks.

China (Mainland, Simplified Chinese) 
Russia and the Eastern European countries 
South Korea

What else should I look at before going global?

One of the biggest challenges facing most companies with global websites, including multinational companies, is local resources.

No one has the luxury of having unlimited resources in each target country, and this can become a significant congestion, especially since SEO is not a one-time project but requires continuous efforts.

The key is to schedule the allocation of tasks and responsibilities between headquarters and local offices, such as:

Technical resources: IT and Internet functionality Language resources: Content tracking and optimization Website data analysis: Reporting and recognizing SEO opportunities Now you may not have offices or dealers in other countries, or resources are not available at local offices. In these cases, you should consider whether you want to lease one or more external resources.

Conclusion

There are a great deal more about international SEO, even what I have been thinking about in this article.

I plan to dig deeper into each of the basic elements that are obviously important, and some that are overlooked or appear slightly in my future articles.