Ultimate Guide to International SEO Strategy

It is an exciting but often daunting step for businesses that want to start targeting countries worldwide. Whether you are keen for your business to keep growing or have noticed a gap in the market elsewhere, taking your brand overseas requires careful planning.

Beyond determining the locations you want to target and the markets you are keen to attract, your next task involves you developing strategies that can help you succeed in reaching these goals.

One such avenue you should turn to that has already helped many businesses dominate the global market is international search engine optimisation (SEO). Even if you have nailed this complex area of digital marketing within your current region, trying the same techniques in France or Spain may leave you disappointed.

Fortunately, our handy international SEO guide is here to help you through this.

What Is International SEO?

International SEO is a digital marketing process of optimising your website to help boost your global organic presence. By implementing multilingual and multi regional SEO strategies, you are making it easier for potential customers to find you in the organic search results in their country. Remember, each country displays different results. Just because you are on page 1 in the UK doesn’t mean you would be in Germany. With global SEO techniques, you can gain a top spot everywhere.

Benefits Of International SEO

Increasing visibility and building brand awareness are just the start of the benefits you can gain from international SEO strategies. We recommend this digital marketing technique because you can also:

• Grow Traffic
• Increase Brand Discovery
• Help Users Find Solutions
• Find Brand Growth Opportunities

As the international market is considered untapped and the regular organic search is getting more competitive and crowded, this investment into international waters gives you a chance to stand out.

Your International SEO Checklist: How To Do International SEO Successfully

Creating a localised website is one of your first steps, but it isn’t enough to find victory overseas. A global SEO strategy is what you need. However, doing the wrong techniques rather than the international SEO best practices could leave you in a worse position than not doing anything at all. Learn the top approaches as detailed by SEO experts, and you will find you go beyond your SEO international expectations.

To help you navigate unknown waters, our experts have put together a checklist detailing the best international SEO tips you should be paying attention to and strategies you should implement.

Step 1: Who Are You Targeting

Before investing any money, you must determine whether the country you want to target will bring back results even with the best international SEO marketing efforts in place. You may find that one country needs your services or products, whereas another market is too competitive and won’t offer a good ROI. You may even find that your ability to operate your business in a country is much harder to achieve than in other places. Seek the ones with the most potential, e.g., massive demand for a brand like yours and low search competition.

Once you’ve settled on the country (or countries) you want to target, turn your attention to the specific audience you need. This needs to be a group motivated to buy your products or needs solutions to their problems, like offering something a competitor can’t give them. The more general you make your audience, the harder you will make your multilingual SEO strategies and, in turn, the harder you make it to get results.

Top Tip: Learn where you are ranking globally easily with Google Analytics. Under the Audience section, head to GEO, where you will find Language or Location. Click here to uncover information about your rankings.

Step 2: Website Audit

If you have created your website for your chosen target market, this doesn’t mean it is ready to help you achieve your global goals. There will likely be many areas for improvement, but an international SEO audit will conclude this for you. As part of our International and Multilingual SEO Services, we always make a website audit a priority. It sets you up for success from the get-go, ensuring nothing is holding you back that could have taken seconds to fix if only spotted sooner. Audits will cover technical aspects, structure analysis, on-page content analysis, and off-page analysis. It will also provide details on where keyword optimisation could occur and give market competition data. Our International SEO Audit also helps you learn more about how potential customers interact with your website and enables you to improve further. It could uncover you offer a poor page experience, for instance.

Step 3: URL Structure

SEO rankings will look at where the content is coming from. Most of the time, audiences will seek content from their own country as it will be the most relevant. A French individual isn’t going to read your content only applicable to those in the UK and vice versa. Google understands this and tries to display content they deem more relevant. Therefore, the international SEO URL structure you choose matters. Your international URL could be a domain with a different ccTLD, a subdomain or subdirectory of your existing domain, or it could use gTLD with language parameters.

Unless you create an entirely new website for a country with its own domain, you need to put one of the above URL structures in place. You will find all have pros and cons attached to them, so carefully consider all options based on your unique brand.

Step 4: Check Up On The Competition

You won’t be the only business that has spotted the new potential in global multilingual SEO. However, knowing who within your industry also has their eye on the prize allows you to adjust SEO strategies that put your brand ahead of them. Tools like SEMrush provide you with this insight, detailing who has more traffic in the organic search and what keywords they are ranking for.

Step 5: Conduct International SEO Keyword Research

International keyword research provides the foundation for solid optimisation efforts. Compared to regular keyword research, international research may uncover different phrases and words with a better search volume, more relevance in another country, and more traffic potential. As audiences worldwide have different cultures and customs and speak/read other languages, what Spanish users search for will likely differ from French users and your current UK users. This means keywords you currently rank for well in the UK won’t necessarily work in France, Spain, or Italy. You increase your chances of earning more rankings by targeting the right keywords. Given that content plays such a prominent part in global SEO, you want to be sure that it works in your favour.

Step 6: Content

Forming one solid international SEO strategy is great, but you don’t have to restrict yourself to this. You can use lots of overseas SEO strategies, including multiple content-based ones. As experts in International and Multilingual Content Writing, we know how best to use content to help you nail global SEO. You will want to form strategies for on site, on page, and link building. Let’s look at these in more detail.

• On Site

You may already know how important your content is for your UK website, but now you need to concentrate on your global website. You need quality content for all countries you are targeting. This doesn’t just mean producing content in your target audience’s language. If you want to make it highly relevant to your audience, you need to understand their cultures, environments – politically and culturally – terms, colloquialisms, slang, regional spelling differences, and the proper local formats for dates, punctuation, and addresses.

Simply put, you must always consider your target audience. Making a buyer persona can often help at this stage.

You may find that some content works well for all countries you have target markets in, so once you reach out to a quality translator, you have some content ready to go! However, it is worth keeping an eye on trends worldwide to see if there are content opportunities for your new market. Writing fresh content specifically for your international audience is always highly beneficial.

Also, look at what the competition is doing. If you are a brand selling soft furnishings and notice your competition has written a blog detailing 5 Ways To Make Your Bedroom Cosy, assess what their blog is missing and make yours better. Write 10 ways, a benefits section, and expert advice for redesigning a bedroom.

Some tips for creating fresh content for your global audience include:

• Write shorter sentences
• Use active over passive voice
• Limit pronouns
• Provide context
• Stick to a consistent style
• Minimise fluff
• Use simple verb formats

Top Tip: It may be helpful to create a glossary of any specific product or service terms that your target audience may not know.

• On Page

Consumers are more likely to buy from you when they can read about product or service information in their native language, so it is important to translate your current content for your new target audience. Before you translate, though, this is the perfect time to assess what you have. Is it relevant to them and localised? Is it optimised correctly for your new audiences?

Even if you have optimised your UK content, remember that the keywords you need for your new target may differ. Your audit will uncover all this, so when it comes to editing or rewriting these pages, you will know exactly how to achieve an optimised page. You should also look at specifics like currencies, time zones, phone numbers, office addresses, and specific phrases.

• Link Building

Link building is a fantastic way to climb up the organic search and boost domain authority. Before you get started on this, we recommend reading a guide on multilingual and international link building. This will give you an idea of what is included. This strategy requires time and effort, and the more countries you choose to target, the more links you need to earn. For example, if you have plenty of links from French domains, Google will start to notice that it is relevant for its French users. You will need a specific strategy for each country you target.

It is possible to do it yourself – check out our 6 top tips for multilingual link building if you feel ready to tackle this yourself. Still, you may prefer to reach out to get our experts on the task due to the influence it can have on your success.

Step 7: Language Target

Google wants to keep its users as happy as possible by showing them the most relevant content in their native language. This is why you need to use the correct language. If you have translated your content, you need to add the hreflang tag to inform Google of your new page in another language. If you made German and French pages, it might look like this:

<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://yourwebsiteurlname/de” hreflang=”de-de”/>

<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://yourwebsiteurlname/fr” hreflang=”fr-fr”/>

Top Tip: You should give your users a chance to switch the language back to English or another language you have available for that content. Not everyone in the country you are targeting will speak the language. Think ex-pats, those on working visas, or those travelling.

Step 8: Internal Linking

Checking that all your internal links are going to the right pages is a long and arduous process but highly important. You want to be sending the right signals to Google and your users, so make it a priority to double-check all internal linking. The better your internal linking is set up, the better Google can understand the hierarchy of your website, and the easier your visitors can navigate your website. Plus, as one of the ranking factors, it massively helps your global SEO strategy.

Top Tip: Ensure you have enough content ready for that target market to make the most of internal linking practices.

Step 9: Make It Mobile Friendly

As one of the ranking factors, mobile responsiveness matters whether you are focused on your UK, US, or international website. As you work on your international SEO strategy, test your website’s performance on mobile and ensure the user experience is spot on. In addition, your design for your global website may need to be updated to work better for the audience.

Step 10: Monitor, Improve, And Update 

SEO is a long game, but that doesn’t mean you can monitor its progress. When you start to get results, look over what SEO techniques have worked the best, what needs improvements, and what you will need to maintain because they returned great results. If you aren’t too sure what to monitor, this quick guide will help. If you still need help, experts are on hand to do this for you. You will want to watch:

• Your Organic Traffic – Compare this against your competitors.
• Keywords Rankings – What keywords are you ranking well for?
• SERP Visibility – How many people are seeing your website?
• Click-Through Rate (CTR) – How effective have your title tags and meta’s been for your CTR?
• Website Authority – As your score increased since implementing SEO measures?
• Backlinks – You don’t want any poor backlinks!
• Page Speed – This could be affected if your traffic increases.
• Time Spent On Page – Learn the average time a visitor spends on your page.
• Conversion Rate – Have you seen a boost in sales?

How We Can Help

Global SEO is fantastic for helping you achieve your international goals, but it can be time-consuming and require high levels of skills to compete with other businesses. Those dominating the international SERPs probably won’t do it all alone. Most turn to agencies that can handle every step thoroughly, leaving them time to focus on other business areas.

Our International and Multilingual Link Building Services are here to help you succeed. You can book a consultation with our team to discuss your needs and learn more about what we can help you with.

Of course, SEO isn’t the only approach you can take. You can combine this with PPC and social techniques too. Our Digital Marketing For International Audiences Guide explains the main tactics for international targeting. Combining the top SEO global strategies with PPC, social, content marketing, and more means you have the recipe for success. We can help you with all aspects of your international marketing.