Expanding your business amongst the international audience needs time and effort. There are two ways to achieve this goal. The first one is through paid channels, and the second one is through organic channels. Search engine optimization is one of the most powerful organic channels to take your business to heights and scale it in a cost-effective manner. Thus, it comes under affordable SEO marketing services.
Businesses are increasingly becoming global with the rising trend of globalization. It implies that every business should think from a global perspective to stay ahead of its competitors.
You have optimized your website for search engines in your native language. Is that enough? Don’t you think you need to also prepare it for international SEO? Of course, yes. That’s where international SEO best practices come in. Here, we have come up with effective international strategies to take your business game up. Let’s get started.
What is International SEO?
International SEO is a process of website optimization for users located in multiple geographical regions. It includes optimizing everything, from meta descriptions to backlinks to images and every other element that you need for your website to earn a higher ranking in the SERPs. It ensures that users land on relevant web pages and hence aims to provide a seamless user experience.
Develop the Best International SEO strategies.
Follow a strategic approach to reach global audiences through the means of International SEO. Here is the list of best international SEO strategies to reach your goals –
Market research
A thorough market research of a particular region is the first step towards learning about the search behavior of the users and, hence, designing your SEO strategies. You can perform the research with the help of research tools like SEM Rush. It will let you know more about your competitors existing in the market, about your audience, and so on.
Target keywords
You have understood your audience’s behavior. Now comes the next international SEO best practice, “discovering target keywords.” Keyword research for business must take cultural nuances, language variations, and specific search behaviors into account. Analyze the keywords your competitors are using. It will make you discover invaluable business opportunities along with the queries and phrases that are driving more traffic and conversions.
A keyword gap tool can help you in this case. Its assistance makes comparison of the current rankings against your competitors easy. Once you are done with the keyword research, see how users are using search engines in your target countries, and accordingly make the optimization efforts.
Site and URL Structure
If you want the search engine to rank for a particular language or country, have dedicated URLs targeting that reach region. It gives the search engine the opportunity to rank your regional content. You can use the strategy of language targeting where you don’t target a particular country but take into account all the users in the world who search in that specific language.
Different URL Structure options are –
ccTLD
Two-letter domains for specific countries are called country code top-level domains, which are shortly called ccTLD. For instance, .fr is for France, .eu is for the European Union, and .au is for Australia. The list is endless. Choosing a unique ccTLD may help improve your international SEO where you are delivering your products or services.
gTLD
Domain extensions having three or more characters come under generic top-level domains. Internet-assigned numbers authority maintains these TLDs. Some examples of gTLD are – .org and .com. A gTLD allows search engines to not restrict the results on the basis of region. However, it may have a negative impact on total traffic (reducing it) because many users prefer clicking those sites that include their country code TLD.
Content delivery network
If your page loading speed is low and users are facing a tough time loading it, your international SEO rankings are bound to suffer. Using a subfolder URL structure or ccTLD and pairing each site with localized hosting means your content will have a fast loading speed.
But if you are catering to the needs of users in numerous countries by means of only one international site, it is the right time to start using a content delivery network. A group of distributed servers is used in CDNs to ensure visitors can use a localized server to load the international content in comparison to using a centralized server. It helps reduce page load times, which leads to a satisfactory user experience.
Backlink profile
To make a global impact, you need to build authority in the new foreign markets in which you wish to have your presence. And there is a wonderful method named link building for the same. People often overlook this step. International SEO tips include checking the state of your backlinks in every country. You can use the Ahref tool to check the backlink profile by clicking on “Overview” then “Backlink profile”. Paying attention to the backlink profile of your website helps you identify where you need to focus more on for your link-building efforts.
Conclusion
There is no denying the fact that expanding your business to several locations and new markets can transform your business. But it is only possible when you follow the best international SEO tips.
If you are facing any challenges to go global, we are here to help you. Our best SEO company in Canada will conduct thorough market research, identify relevant keywords, and devise strategies of digital excellence for you to give you the desired results. Contact us for more information.
