International SEO is when you start tapping into international markets with the help of SEO processes. The overall goal is to drive more traffic and profits. To do this, many companies hire agencies or complete international SEO marketing strategies in-house. But they don’t always get it right, so we’re going through some best practices to be on the lookout for.
1. Know Your Markets Upfront
Take a look at your SEO metrics to be aware of which markets internationally hold the best potential for your business.
This may be any of the following:
- A market that naturally has space for you to enter
- A market with a huge search demand
- A market with a low search competition.
You don’t want to get left behind or tap into the wrong market, so this is important.
2. Know The Languages Spoken
In certain countries, there’s more than one main language at play. This goes for countries like Canada where a large percentage of the population also speaks French, but often with a specific dialect. When this is the case, you may need to target multiple languages.
In addition to this, some countries are just incredibly diverse in terms of cultures at play, such as Singapore and Malaysia. In this case, you should consider who your target audience is and if language variations are needed.
3. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
If users are struggling to load your site from other countries, it can impact your international SEO metrics and affect your search engine rankings. If you want to fix this problem, one fix is to implement a Content Delivery Network (CDN). This is when you use a group of distributed servers, ensuring visitors can load international content from a localised server, not a centralized one. By doing this load times decrease, and users have a better time.
Read Also: The Power Of A Technical SEO Consultant: Elevate Your Digital Presence
4. Keyword Research Still Needs to Happen
Just because a handful of keywords work in your current market, it doesn’t mean you can keep using the same keywords. International keyword research is needed to make sure you can tap into the language and cultural differences in each market. This way you can connect to the potential customers in these markets.
5. Stick To One Language Per Page
It can get very cluttered and confusing, both for readers and SEO if you try to incorporate multiple languages in one page. So, each piece of content needs a separate webpage for every additional language you would like this content to target. However, this doesn’t just extend to written content, you should consider optimizing metadata, images, currencies, phone numbers, time zones, and office addresses as well.
By having a different version of our website for each language, you can keep your website neat, clean, organised, and easy to navigate for locals in each market. This will also help in terms of SEO and rankings as the web pages and content will come across as fully optimised.
6. Links & Content Should Match
One early mistake many people make with international SEO is that they don’t match the webpage to the right content. That is, the website may be in French, but the link-building campaign is in English. This essentially makes the link-building campaign completely unhelpful and won’t increase your visibility or domain authority at all.
Instead, make sure that your linked content and your website content match up. This way your links will have more strength and be considered more high quality in the eyes of Google and this will then improve your rankings in that region overall.
7. Implement Hreflang Correctly
Hreflang is code that sits in the sitemap and backend of the page and allows Google to have alternative URLs for one page. This means Google understands which market the current page intends to target and gives users options for regions and languages.
When Google tries to rank these pages, Google will use the most authoritative version in the searched language to decide on a ranking. Then, when a user searches, Google will give them the most relevant version.
Now that you understand what to look for, all that’s left is to choose the best International SEO agency in the market. This is where Perfect Link building comes in. With their expert team and data-backed strategies, you’re bound to find success. Check them out here: https://perfectlinkbuilding.com/
