Nowadays, companies in countries like the U.S, UK, and Australia have been applying more long-term strategies to their digital marketing activities with SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This is the process of increasing both the quantity and quality of leads and website traffic to your business.
Given the circumstances of the pandemic and the evolving landscape of marketing, your brand might be facing the dilemma of attaining a much wider online presence. Hiring your own SEO specialist who is also capable of boosting your website’s content targeting in order to be easily identified by other countries and speak different languages for your brand is one of the best practices of SEO companies that focus on International SEO. Others would include defining a strategy for each country you wish to target, free website hosting, and many more.
Luckily, we have listed down the 24 tips for effective international SEO and on how you can maximize the time of your SEO virtual assistant:
1. Plan and organize ahead
There is nothing worse than scaling your site internationally by going in blind. Choosing your URL structure, target countries, and href tags alone can take time. Consider countless factors that can help you reach a global scale before attempting anything else.
2. Finding the right tools
When doing extensive research on how a product or content can perform and be perceived in international markets, you will need to find the right tools to also know how the SERP is different in each market or any tool that can show metrics on search features. This can also help you determine what you are competing for in order to better optimize your site presence.
3. Conduct keyword research
This is an important feature in any aspect of SEO. Practising keyword research helps you determine the right keywords to use for your campaign in order to find and generate leads that are most interested in your business.
4. Understand market entry
Make sure to understand the search landscape and capability of the markets you are entering. Focus on SERP features and probable competitors.
5. Market maturity
Understand business goals and growth markets. What will your product look like in that market? Will people understand it? How can you bring value despite constant changes?
6. Tackling GDPR
Sixth on our list of 24 tips for effective international SEO is tackling GDPR. Whether you are working at an SEO company or optimizing your strategy by yourself, it is critical to understand how the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) can affect your business. This can be a major challenge when targeting countries around Europe and the United Kingdom. You will never know which countries can be potentially part of your target market once you really dig deep on the influencing factors brought about by this implementation.
7. Auditing a legacy or primary domain
When entering a new market, you might have a main site that has an existing ranking in that market. Understand the performance of your site in all markets you’ve entered so as to avoid cannibalization.
8. Using correct canonical tags
Canonical tags are used to signal search engines of a specific URL that represents an official version or master copy of a page. These tags help avoid problems of duplicate content that could appear on multiple URLs. Make sure your canonical tags for local language versions are correct.
9. Website hosting
Having a hosting and IP address in the country where you want to drive most of your leads from can also help build links from local resources.
10. Add extensions by country
Since Google is structured by country, you can adapt to the situation by using the local extension of the countries you’d like to target to your domain to increase site traffic.
11. Customize page per language
Whether it be in French or English, making your content monolingual in the most essential tabs of your site can be beneficial wherever your target audience may be.
12. Avoid auto-generated translations
Choosing to use machine translation can deliver a bad experience to your audience. You want to invest time in marketing your products properly and correctly. Auto translators may also cause poor SEO targeting.
13. Link-building for each market
Especially for startup companies, you may not be able to attain links organically. You will always need to conduct how you can strategically gain links by creating one for each market. However, do note that not all plans may work in the same markets.
14. Use of ccTLD
If you opt to target a specific geographical area and not just by language, ccTLD can be your best choice. Do not isolate your work to just one ccTLD, subfolder, or subdomain without understanding the performance of other sites.
15. Localizing content
Consider how you can handle customer service from an international perspective. Take into consideration your chosen country’s local time zones, currencies, and many more.
16. Never auto-redirect
Auto-redirecting visitors or search engines based on their browser settings or IP addresses may confuse not just your users but also the search engines that find your content. Try to actively add banners that show alternative versions of your page. This can make your site way easier to navigate.
17. Anchor texts
Make it a point that your anchor text needs to be in the language of the country you want to increase traffic from.
18. Personalize cold emails
Focus more on business development rather than direct questions. Invest a significant amount of time in the way you approach people. This could also help your backlink outreach.
19. Blogging
Blogging can be a big source or evergreen content for your website and a great resource for sending out your target keywords. It can help keep your content current and fresh. Users have more of a reason to stay and read along your website by producing quality blogs.
20. Using the HREF tag properly
As your website expands, it is much faster and easier to update a set of href tags to avoid input errors and inconsistencies.
21. Non-local pages ranking
Take time to see if any non-local pages are driving or ranking in the market you’ve chosen. This will make adjusting href tags more convenient.
22. Choose your countries wisely
In other countries such as China (Baidu) and Russia (Yandex), they are dominated by other metrics in terms of SEO. Weigh out your strategy to avoid salvaging existing traffic.
23. Validate your identity
Especially if you are aiming to drive leads and sales to your site (e.g. from the USA), you need to validate your identity with social profiles, high authority citations for your business, etc.
24. Find the right team
Hiring your own SEO specialist or SEO virtual assistant can save you a lot of time, effort, and cost in planning an SEO strategy tailored for your business.
Investing time in how you can approach your global business objectives is key. With these 24 tips for effective international SEO and defining your marketing localization strategy, you can receive great results despite the evolving measures of SEO throughout the world.
