Are you looking to take your business to the next level? In this fast-paced digital world, ensuring your website and digital marketing strategies have been optimized for search engines is essential in ensuring you can stand out from your competitors.
Search Engine Optimisation can be a complex and ever-changing world, and if you operate an international organization, then it is crucial you are utilizing SEO for international websites. This will help you to maximize your reach and drive more traffic towards your brand.
What is international SEO?
Foreign SEO is an important digital marketing strategy that every company with international clients should adopt. Multinational SEO is the process of optimizing your website to ensure that you are targeting your content to reach customers in different countries and different languages.
By following the best international SEO guides, search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Yandex will be able to identify the countries and customers you want to target. Incorporating SEO for multiple countries might seem like a confusing and complex challenge, but many businesses will already be utilizing similar strategies such as geotargeting in their marketing efforts.
The best practices for foreign SEO
If you are looking to implement multinational SEO into your website, there are many different practices that you can incorporate to transform your digital presence and drive more traffic to your brand.
1) Deciding the content you will be providing
Before implementing multinational SEO, it is important to decide how you want to optimize your brand’s website. This means deciding whether you want your website search engines to be focusing on language, by user location, or both.
This can be as simple as professionally translating your existing content into the desired languages your customers speak or creating an entirely bespoke solution for each country. You should also regularly review your strategy by examining the countries that your website traffic is coming from and the languages users speak. Both of these can be found through GoogleAnalytics.
2) Create an international URL structure
A core part of every international SEO guide is to ensure that your website URL has been configured correctly. Google utilizes your URL to help ensure it is showing your website to the most relevant audience.
There are a number of different methods of creating an international URL, including:
- Subdirectory
This is one of the easiest options to develop and maintain, only requiring a single website domain. For example, www.example.com/US
- ccTLD
This is the process of creating a new website using a two-letter code to indicate the country, state, or territory the company is based in. For example, www.example.US
- Subdomain
A subdomain is the process of placing your content on a third-level domain, although this is not always the best solution and might not be as useful in terms of multinational SEO. For example US.example.com
3) Language-target your site
When it comes to SEO for multiple countries, another beneficial technique is to language-target your website using hreflang tags. These tags are pieces of code that inform search engines of the language your content is available in, ensuring visitors can see it in their relevant language.
Final thoughts
Of course, these are only three of many different methods of best practice for foreign SEO. By following a thorough international SEO guide, you will be able to ensure that your website is always being shown to customers in its most relevant form. When visitors are able to see content in their own language, it helps to give them a greater overall experience, making them more likely to utilize your services.