International SEO — that’s the subject of this lesson. What exactly international SEO is, how it differs from standard SEO, how to optimize a website for foreign markets, which strategies work best — there’s plenty to get through.
As you’ll know, in our SEO Academy we cover every topic connected to search engine rankings. If you’re new here, have a look at the earlier lessons — we’ve covered a number of things that will help you follow this one.
If this lesson interests you, it’s probably because you have a site you want to optimize for users abroad, or because you want to enter new markets and don’t know where to start, or because your international Search Engine Optimization strategy isn’t getting you to your business goals.
So let’s get going!
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What is international SEO?
Let’s start with a definition of international SEO: it’s the process of improving a website’s search engine rankings for users and countries abroad.
International SEO vs standard SEO
How is international SEO different from standard SEO?
International SEO is often taken to mean simply translating an existing site into the languages of the target markets. In reality, as we’ll see shortly, it’s far more involved, and touches not only on technical optimization of the site but on social and cultural questions too. Both of those will weigh heavily on the strategy you adopt in order to give prospective customers abroad the best possible user experience (UX).
- Content properly optimized for geo-targeted keywords.
- Content built specifically for each country you care about: content written for prospective users in the United Kingdom may not perform nearly as well in other English-speaking countries (US, Australia and so on).
- Incorrect use of canonical or hreflang tags can leave some sites unindexed altogether.
- Staying with those last two points, there’s a risk of creating duplicate content across markets that share a language (US and UK, say, or Spain and Mexico).
- Finally, depending on the site, its structure and organisation and the products or services it offers, the game isn’t always worth the candle. The first job, then, is to judge whether there’s a genuine need or opportunity in foreign markets at all.
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When should you do international SEO?
For anyone set on chasing opportunities in foreign markets, the first step on the road to internationalisation is choosing the target market or markets. Useful pointers here come from reports, data and statistics published by international economic and consulting organisations (WTO, McKinsey and the like).
But valuable pointers can also be drawn from your own analytics.
In your Google Analytics dashboard (here) you can open the “Geo / Location and Language” report. It will tell you whether you already receive traffic and conversions from users in other countries, which languages they use, and whether visitors from other regions are showing interest in your products.
If the answer is a clear yes, it’s time to define an international SEO strategy.
Tools such as Google Trends (here) for spotting search trends and seasonality, Google Market Finder (here) for identifying and analysing the target market, and keyword research tools such as Wordstat (here), Ahrefs (here) or SEMrush (here) for finding the main local keywords will all prove valuable.
And this tool lets you calculate the ROI of your international SEO strategy: click here.
Image from marketfinder.thinkwithgoogle.com
How do you do international SEO?
With that preliminary analysis done, we’ve established that an international SEO strategy is worth pursuing, and we’ve identified the target markets along with the search and buying habits of prospective customers.
So we’re ready to look at the best practices of international SEO and what they cover.
Choosing the domain structure (ccTLD or gTLD, subdirectory or subdomain)
The first step, once you’ve committed to a multilingual SEO strategy, is choosing the site’s domain. Favour a structure that makes geographic targeting of the site, or of parts of it, straightforward for each region.
The options are:
- Country-code top-level domain – ccTLD: for example mywebsite.co.uk for google.co.uk, mywebsite.de for google.de, and so on. Users are more inclined to visit local sites, but this option carries high running and maintenance costs.
- Generic top-level domain – gTLD: domains with a generic extension such as .com, .net, .org and so on.
- A gTLD followed by a subfolder or subdirectory carrying the language code: for example mysite.com/de for Google.de, mysite.com/fr for Google.fr, and so on, if you’re targeting German or French users.
- A gTLD preceded by a subdomain carrying the language code: for example de.mysite.com for Google.de, fr.mysite.com for Google.fr, and so on. Subdomains, like subdirectories, are easy to implement but make it harder for the user to tell what content will appear at that URL.
- A gTLD with language parameters: for example mysite.com?lang=de for Google.de, and so on.
The best option, if the market is big enough, is to build a site for each target country, optimized for the language spoken there. That option is expensive, though, and it can be treated almost as ordinary SEO rather than international SEO — because when you run several sites on several domains (.it, .co.uk, .com, .fr, .es and so on), Google treats each as a platform in its own right.
If your budget is limited, the solution we’d recommend in most situations is to use subfolders on the site:
- mysite.com
- mysite.com/it
- mysite.com/de
- mysite.com/fr
- …
Tag markup (hreflang)
If a site serves the same content to users in different countries, languages or regions, SEO lets you optimize the search results by following the principles of international SEO.
Geolocation signals can be given to search engines through several elements, among them the hreflang tag inside the <head> section of the page’s or site’s HTML (more here).
It’s an HTML markup that tells Google and other search engines that versions in other languages of our site or its content exist.
Example: <link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”language_code“… >
This makes it easier to route users from search results — Google’s, for instance — to the version of the page in the right language.
This markup is useful when you don’t have a sitemap or can’t set HTTP response headers for the site.
Google provides a support page and additional guidelines on using it properly, and there’s more in this video by Maile Ohye (Google).
The site’s target language (or the language of its pages)
Help search engines understand which language you’ve set on the site.
Google uses only the page’s visible content to determine its language — it doesn’t rely on information taken at code level for that. So make sure you use a single language for all the content aimed at a given country, and avoid things like side-by-side translations, which cause problems.
Watch out for machine translation, too: it’s very often less than perfect and can be read as spam. If you do use machine translation, keep that content out of the index with a noindex robots meta tag, and block crawling of the auto-translated pages in robots.txt.
Other best practices:
- make sure every element of the site is in the language of the target country or region;
- don’t rely on translators such as Google Translate or similar (the translation isn’t accurate);
- if you have several versions of a page, add links pointing to the other language versions of that content;
- avoid automatic 301 redirects based on the user’s presumed language, so that every version of the site remains reachable;
- don’t use cookies or browser settings to switch the language of the content on the page.
International targeting settings in GSC
The “Country” section of the International Targeting report in Google Search Console (GSC) lets you set a country for the site.
The report’s “Language” section lets you monitor hreflang errors.
Content optimized for the language and culture of your target markets
It’s essential that the site and its pages are optimized for the language and culture of users in the target countries, so that they get the right information and the best possible experience.
An SEO strategy has to allow for the impact — sometimes considerable — of cultural differences within a single region.
Localizing a page’s content isn’t guaranteed by translating it. Translation isn’t a term-for-term match between languages; it’s the result of linguistic mediation between different cultures. The keyword an SEO campaign is built on can turn out to be completely off-target for users within the same language area. So it’s wise to run keyword research with the help of a native speaker from the receiving country.
Another aspect concerns link building. Make sure your content is relevant, so as to improve your chances of earning backlinks from sites in those countries.
Other SEO geolocation signals
Beyond the ones already covered, the signals that show search engines your site also addresses other target countries include:
- the local server’s IP address;
- a physical address in the footer and on the “contact” page;
- the business phone number shown on the pages;
- links from other local sites;
- the address on your Google My Business listing.
Conclusion
In this lesson of your favourite SEO Academy we’ve covered international SEO and given you practical guidance on defining an international SEO strategy for your site yourself, starting today.
That alone isn’t enough, though. SEO is a process in constant motion, with updates arriving almost daily, and getting to the top of Google is no simple thing. Machine learning, artificial intelligence, semantic SEO and other new arrivals affect how international SEO is done too.
Stay tuned and keep following us — in the next lessons of the SEO Academy we’ll get into plenty more interesting territory…
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