International SEO, or SEO for other countries, is the process of optimizing a website so that search engines identify which countries you want to reach and which languages are used on your website.
It can be said that international positioning is the geolocation of SEO, where instead of optimizing your website to attract traffic from your area, city or country, you optimize it to get visits from different countries and languages.
What is international SEO for?
In addition to local SEO and national SEO, the international aspect of optimizing our digital positioning is a facet that we must take into account if we want to attract traffic, not only from our region and our country, but from different countries and in different languages .
This is relevant for companies in the process of internationalization since a solid SEO strategy abroad will contribute to give our brand greater visibility, increase our competitiveness, favor interaction and boost sales.
And for this, international SEO is used, not only to indicate your languages and regions to search engines, but also to configure your website in such a way that it sends the instructions to the engines appropriately and you manage to reach the countries that you want. propose through the Internet.
Creating an international SEO strategy is key if you are thinking of internationalizing your company.
Benefits of international positioning
Apart from the advantages mentioned above, this type of SEO has other benefits such as:
- Help improve the visibility of your website.
- Increase the volume of visits from other countries.
- High return on investment.
- You will be able to connect with audiences around the world.
- It allows to publicize the international profile of your website.
- Increase the sales of your products or services.
And now that you know what international SEO is and what are the advantages of SEO for other countries, we are going to see some essential steps to work on international positioning.
How to do SEO for other countries (Essential factors)
There are several questions you should ask yourself when planning your company's international SEO strategy.
What target audience do you want to impact?
The first of them, how could it be otherwise, has to do with the target audience we are addressing.
Since when we seek to project our project internationally it will not always be worthwhile to position ourselves well in Google, we will have to take into account the search engines used in each specific country (eg Baidu, Yandex, Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ask, Dogpile , etc.).
In order to check how our website works from abroad we can always follow one of the many guides on how to connect from abroad with a VPN
Therefore, you must take into account:
- Which search engines are the most popular in the destination country.
- To what extent do they have access to the Internet.
- What is the quality of the network connection in those places.
- What kind of devices do they use.
- Or, what are the main preferences in terms of content consumption, favorite social networks, etc;
Do you have adapted content and well-translated texts?
Another factor to take into account is the quality of the content, that it is interesting and that it is well translated and adapted.
This is where many companies that want to position their sites in other countries fail, since they use automatic translators, which are simpler, but the quality of the texts and content decreases, and that offers a bad user experience.
Hence, the importance of the first step, the study of the target audience, to know:
- How you speak and the terms you use.
- What type of search engines do you use?
- Or if you speak Spanish from Spain or Latin America.
Web structure: Do I use a different domain, a subdomain or a subdirectory?
We must also take into account on our website: its structure, its architecture or the languages in which we offer our content ... all this helps to comply with all the requirements to be attractive to the algorithm of the search engine to which we point in the specific destination.
For example, a very important point within the web structure is the domain part. Do you have to create a new website for each country? o Is it a better option to do it in a subdomain or subdirectory?
I explain the differences in a summarized way:
- If it is with a different domain: the website will start with authority 0 in a new country, since the link juice and the authority of the main domain will not be shared. Which implies more work and effort to position this new project.
- If it is a subdomain: there would be a main domain and a subdomain for each country (example: es.claudioinacio.com, pt.claudioinacio, br.claudioinacio.com), in this case SEO also means multiplying efforts for each subdomain.
- If you use a subdirectory: in this case, the link juice and the authority of the main domain is distributed, so when entering a new country it would not start from 0 and we would not have so much effort and difficulties at the SEO level.
What kind of content do you have to create? What keywords should you rank for?
In this step, the most important thing is to make a selection of the content that you are going to use through a search for keywords.
And for this it is essential to make an in-depth analysis of the interests and concerns of the target audience to understand what they are looking for and how they are looking for it. Since it may differ a lot from what we find in our country of origin, but it will be key to creating a successful strategy.
Keep in mind that a highly searched keyword in Spain does not have to be in Mexico, or perhaps it will be, but translated in a different way.
Therefore, my advice is that to determine what content you are going to create and what keywords to rank for, you should do a keyword search in the countries you want to rank for.
Don't forget about the Hreflang tag
This tag is important to tell Google that we have different URLs with the same content but translated or segmented for users from different countries.
For example, you should use it if: your content is fully translated and there are different versions of each page: in Spanish, Portuguese, English, etc.
I recommend that you find out how to implement this attribute or Hreflang tag so that you have no doubts about how and when to use it.
Other factors that you should also take into account in an international SEO strategy are:
- Study of the competition of the country to impact to know what content works and how they do it, will give us many ideas of content to create.
- The geolocation of the contents;
- The international link building;
- The social networks used in the country to impact;
- A hosting with servers located in the different countries to which you are going so that the content is loaded quickly.
Date update on 2021-10-18. Date published on 2021-10-18. Category: Computer class Author: Oscar olg Fuente: claudioinacio