For many companies, having a global website is one of the best ways to reach a wider audience to grow their business.
As faster and easier website design services are available, even an individual can start a business by targeting foreign countries via a global website.
The thing is, having a global website does not make you successful in other countries.
Also, following standard SEO practices will not make your website competitive in all target countries. While it seems like there is unlimited information on international SEO available, it is a fact that many of them are either old or wrong.
In this post, I will cover some of the key areas of international SEO.
Contents
- 1 What Are The Differences Between International & Regular SEO?
- 2 Should I Go Global? And Where Is My Market?
- 3 One Global Site Or Multiple Website?
- 4 Which Domain To Have: ccTLD or gTLD?
- 5 Does Hosting Location Matter?
- 6 How Should I Go About Alternative Geotargeting?
- 7 Google Or Not Google?
- 8 Do I Need to Care About Other Search Engines?
- 9 Translation And Localization
- 10 Do I Need To Build Links For Each Website?
- 11 What Else Should I Consider Before I Go Global?
- 12 Conclusion and Takeaway
What Are The Differences Between International & Regular SEO?
Standard SEO best practices are certainly the foundation of international SEO as the search engine algorithms are very similar, if not the same, from country to country.
I would say that international SEO is built on standard SEO knowledge and skills.
So what makes international SEO different? The main reasons are:
While paying attention to each site, you need to keep an eye on the overall performance when you have global websites. Otherwise, your local marketplace websites may be competing against each other or in the worst case scenario, they may not be indexed at all.
For example, your website designed for Mexico should not outrank or appear in search results in Spain if you have a different site designed for Spain.
If you abuse the canonical tag or hreflang tag, some sites may not be indexed by search engines or create duplicate indexing.
Should I Go Global? And Where Is My Market?
Before getting into international SEO, it is always a good idea to review certain market reports, stats, and even your website data to help you make the decision.
This is especially important if you are unsure of the opportunities in different countries or have any concerns about what to do with your employers.
Here are some sources of information you can use to decide or prioritize countries / markets.
One Global Site Or Multiple Website?
If the market is big enough for you to invest, be sure to go with a separate site for each destination country.
Not only for SEO reasons, but also to provide a better user experience to local visitors, it is always better to have a dedicated site for each of your target countries. It also allows you to use different designs and content on each site, if needed.
However, this may not be a feasible option for you, at least not in the beginning. In this case, you have a site for each language that is spoken in your destination countries.
It’s okay to do this because you may want to try the water first before diving too deep.
Fortunately, we can use hreflang tags to tell Google what language and country each site is created in.
Which Domain To Have: ccTLD or gTLD?
If you asked me this question in 2008, my answer was always to go with a ccTLD. The reality is that not everyone can have this option for various reasons.
Luckily, it doesn’t have much impact on your SEO as the search engines have advanced a lot. We now have other options for geotargeting sites, especially with Google.
Note that some search engines like Baidu still favor websites with local ccTLDs.
In addition, people outside the United States tend to click websites with local TLDs on sites with .com or other generic TLDs.
Does Hosting Location Matter?
Website hosting was one of the important signals for international SEO in relation to geotargeting.
However, it is not so important now that we have other ways to correctly target your website to the regionally managed search engines and CDNs.
However, the location of the host has a large impact on page speed. Make sure your site is accessible quickly in the destination countries.
How Should I Go About Alternative Geotargeting?
Perhaps, geotargeting is one of the simplest practices where many websites make mistakes as the site owners have moved away from ccTLD and local market hosting.
There are many ways to geotarget your websites and pages. Here are some popular methods:
Side note: Google now generates search results based on the location of the search engine, no matter which local version of Google a search engine uses.
For example, you used to get different search results from Google.com than Google UK (google.co.uk) or Google Australia (google.com.au) even when searching for the same keyword.
But now, you get the same results in all three Google searches, unless you do that search in three different countries.
Google Or Not Google?
While Google is by far the most popular search engine in the world, in some countries, there are locally grown search engines that are much more popular than Google.
If your destination country is one of those below, you need to pay extra attention to monitoring these local sites and for additional optimization work.
Do I Need to Care About Other Search Engines?
While Google is by far the most popular search engine in the world, in some countries, there are locally grown search engines that are very popular.
Ignore these search engines, ignore huge business opportunities in those countries.
If your destination country is one of those below, you need to pay extra attention to monitoring these local sites and for additional optimization work.
Of course, even in the countries where Google is most popular, ignoring other popular search engines including Bing limits your business potential.
Translation And Localization
Your global sites may not be the copied and pasted version of your home country website in multiple languages, although I do see it happening on many websites.
Yes, translating and localizing the content of the website is one of the first steps. But then, you need to optimize the sites for each country’s local audience by messaging and offering them to the overall user experience of the site.
A site with popular and good content in the U.S. market may not perform well in Asia or South America and may need additional content editing and optimization work.
For these reasons, it is important to do keyword research in each target country from the point of view of understanding the local interests and the keywords they use.
Keep in mind that even if translators or translation agencies provide a correctly translated document, they may not use the same words that people use to search for information.
Do I Need To Build Links For Each Website?
Even when you have a global site with all the country or language sites under the same domain, you still want to build links for each site even when you already have tons of links pointing to your domain.
That’s because your home country site is likely to have links coming from external sites that are in the same country of origin.
In order for your global websites to be competitive in each country, you need links from that country-specific website.
For example, you want to gain links from websites in India or targeting India to your Indian website. Having links from local websites is a good indication to search engines that your website is designed and tailored for that country.
What Else Should I Consider Before I Go Global?
One of the biggest challenges that most businesses with global websites face, including multinational companies Fortune 100, is local resources.
No one has the luxury of having unlimited resources in every destination country, and this can become a major bottleneck, especially since SEO is not a unique project, but requires ongoing efforts.
The key is to plan the assignment of work and responsibilities between headquarters and local offices such as:
Now, you may not have offices or representatives in other countries, or no resources available in local offices.
In these cases, you need to consider whether you want to use one or more external resources.
Conclusion and Takeaway
International SEO is built on best standard SEO practices.
The optimized website does not always produce an optimized global website even after it is translated, and there are several key points in the technical and content optimization efforts that need to be considered.
In fact, adding more languages and content creates more work because of duplicate content and geotargeting issues, as well as link building.
A global website is a great way to expand your market reach, but it also requires extra resources and budget to do good international SEO.
You do not need to target multiple languages and countries.
Search your business opportunities using your data and market reports from the trusted authority to decide where you want to be visible in search results.
Image presented: Sozina Kseniia / Shutterstock