The Ultimate Guide to International SEO 1
The Ultimate Guide to International SEO
The Ultimate Guide to International SEO 2
WHAT’S INSIDE 1.1. Why you need International SEO
1.2. Identifying your International SEO opportunities
1.3. Establishing an SEO friendly Website
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1.1. Why you need International SEO
Although you might already be implementing a successful SEO strategy to improve your website’s organic search ranking, traffic and conversions, you could be missing new business opportunities by only targeting your own country, or, if you have multilingual sites, only doing SEO for the local version.
Not only do 73.2% of Internet users speak languages other than English1 but also, according to the latest eMarketer’s forecast2 “in 2014, for the first time, consumers in Asia-‐Pacific will spend more on ecommerce purchases than those in North America.” Countries in the Asia-‐Pacific region along with Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, Russia, and Italy among others will be driving ecommerce sales growth worldwide.
To expand your business and compete in the global market, you will need to translate your website into different languages and then optimize these other versions for relevant organic search visibility, traffic and conversions.
But which international market should you prioritize? What’s the specific opportunity in your industry for international search markets? What’s the level of search competition, and what does local consumer behavior look like? How do you optimize your website to rank for other languages in other countries’ search results?
In this guide you’ll learn the fundamentals for developing your own international SEO process.
1.2. Identifying your International SEO opportunities
A key part of the International SEO process is the initial analysis, as it will drive the rest of your tactics by allowing you to identify your current international organic search status as well as the potential of the international markets into which you’d like to expand.
1 http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm 2 http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Global-B2C-Ecommerce-Sales-Hit-15-Trillion-This-Year-Driven-by-Growth-Emerging-Markets/1010575
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As you work through this first section, don’t forget that the main criteria for identifying your international reach are not your own location and language but those of your target audience.
1.2.1. Analyze your current organic web traffic & search visibility Before anything else, you need to identify and analyze your current international traffic by answering the question: Which countries and languages have brought more and better organic search visibility, traffic and conversions in the last year?
You can find this information by going to the Audience > Geo > Location report in Google Analytics (or any other analytics tool) and apply the organic traffic segment.
Then you can drill down into your languages report, in order to identify which languages have been bringing not only the highest volume of traffic, but also the highest quality traffic, with the greatest number of conversions.
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Once you have identified your top countries and languages, you can analyze their traffic volume and quality, looking closely at their behavior and trends over time. Are you seeing an increase or decrease in searches? Which content attracted these international users and which products did they buy?
If you select additional dimensions in your report, such as “Landing Pages,” you can further analyze how well your content is performing by country and language
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After identifying your top referring countries and languages, as well as their trends over time, you can use Google Webmaster Tools to discover which queries your international audience has been using to search for your services, products or content.
With this information in hand, you’ll have a better understanding of your current international organic search activity. If these numbers are still very low, remember that they’re only your starting point – you can use this data to prioritize the markets in which you’re already performing well and develop a plan to reach newer markets down the road.
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1.2.2. Research your potential International search markets
Once you have determined your website’s current international search status, it’s time to identify and prioritize the most important international markets for your business.
Use keywords tools like Google AdWords Keyword Planner, Semrush and keywordtool.io, which are multilingual and multi-‐country, to identify the search terms used by your audiences across the globe. These tools can also tell you the number of times keywords are searched, so you can verify the potential search traffic you could attract by ranking in these countries.
With the Semrush Organic Search Competitors Report, you’ll also be able to identify your competitors – those websites already ranking for your relevant keywords – for each of your international markets. Although these tools will help you identify ideas for how to best optimize for search, it’s critical that you are using the right translation solution so you correctly
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take into consideration the right topics, terms and phrases from each specific country and language. Besides the relevant keywords and search volume of each international market, you should also identify their seasonality with Google Trends. Although two countries might speak the same language, their audience behavior and markets might be very different.
Next you can use the Moz Keyword Difficulty Tool to verify your keywords’ level of difficulty, depending on the authority and optimization of the websites already ranking for them.
With all the information you will have gathered after following the steps laid out in Part 1 of this document, you’ll be able to create a prioritized list of international markets to consider for your business expansion. Now what? Should you just enable new languages on your current website or create brand new websites targeting each individual country on your list?
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Ideally, you should geo-‐target each country, which will allow you to localize not just your content but also the overall user experience in a much more granular way. The English in the U.S.. for example, differs from the English spoken in the U.K. or Australia, just as the Spanish spoken in Spain differs from that spoken in various Latin American countries. While there are feasible and cost-‐effective ways to do this right from the start, for some companies it might not be so critical.
So, ask yourself: Is location a factor in your business and web operations? For news websites, web-‐based software services, or technology blogs, the country location of their users might not be as critical as for an ecommerce site or retailer. If location is an important factor, is there enough potential traffic to target each of the relevant countries? To answer this question you can use the previously identified keyword search volume for each of your top country markets.
1.3. Establishing an SEO friendly Website
Once you have identified whether you’re going to target languages or countries and which you will focus on, the next step is to establish an optimized, crawlable website structure for each one of them, allowing search engines and users to effectively find your internationally optimized content.
1.3.1. Selecting the best international website structure Depending on whether you’re targeting languages or countries, you’ll have different options for enabling your international website versions:
• Language Targeting
From a web structure perspective, there are two ways to organize and configure each website language version to target the right language audience:
o Language targeting with subdirectories
Enable the main language in the domain root and each additional language as a subdirectory. For example:
! English: www.yourbrand.com ! Spanish: www.yourbrand.com/es/ ! German: www.yourbrand.com/de/ ! French: www.yourbrand.com/fr/
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This is the most commonly used option, because it’s easier for each language version situated in the subdirectories to inherit the popularity of the root domain. The Atlassian site is language targeting by using subdirectories.
Using subdirectories might not be ideal if a high volume of pages are going to be published and will need to be indexed. In that case, subdomains are a better alternative.
o Language targeting with subdomains
Enable the main language in the www subdomain and each additional language as a subdomain. For example:
! English: www.yourbrand.com ! Spanish: es.yourbrand.com
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! German: de.yourbrand.com ! French: fr.yourbrand.com
Although this is the best option if you need to publish and index a high volume of pages for each of your language versions, more link-‐building efforts will be required to grow your websites’ popularity, because the subdomains will no longer be able to inherit the popularity of your main site.
Wordpress.com is language targeting by using subdomains.
• By Country Targeting
In this case, you are organizing and configuring each web country version to target the right audience, which can be done in three different ways from a website structure perspective:
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o Country targeting with ccTLDs By enabling each country’s web version under its own ccTLD. For example:
! U.S.A in English: www.yourbrand.com ! U.S.A in Spanish: www.yourbrand.com/es/ ! Spain: www.yourbrand.es ! Mexico: www.yourbrand.com.mx ! Germany: www.yourbrand.de
This is the best alternative for country targeting since ccTLDs are directly geo-targeted to their relevant country. Again, it’s important to note that, as each ccTLD is an independent domain, they will require more efforts to grow their popularity, since they cannot easily inherit it from each other. Tripadvisor is country targeting by using ccTLDs.
o Country targeting with subdirectories
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Enable the main country in the domain root of a generic domain (such as .com, .net, .org, etc.) and each additional country as a subdirectory. For example:
! U.S.A in English: www.yourbrand.com ! U.S.A in Spanish: www.yourbrand.com/es/ ! Spain: www.yourbrand.com/es-es/ ! Mexico: www.yourbrand.com.com/es-mx/ ! Germany: www.yourbrand.com/de-de/
With this approach, your website is not automatically geo-targeted as ccTLDs are, and will need additional efforts to be geolocalized. However, each subdirectory will inherit the popularity of the root domain and will help to consolidate each other’s authority, as they will all be under the same domain. EA is country targeting by using subdirectories.
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o Country targeting with subdomains Enable the main country in the domain root of a generic domain (such as .com, .net, .org, etc.) and each additional country as a subdomain. For example:
! U.S.A in English: www.yourbrand.com ! U.S.A in Spanish: es.yourbrand.com ! Spain: es-‐es.yourbrand.com ! Mexico: es-‐mx.yourbrand.com ! Germany: de-‐de.yourbrand.com
Using subdomains won’t provide the automatic geolocation like ccTLDs, and each country version will need to independently grow its popularity as each of its subdomains are seen as independent entities, but they’re better than subdirectories for publishing and indexing a large number of pages in each country version.
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The Beats by Dr. Dre website is an example of country targeting by using subdomains.
As you can see, all the alternatives have pros and cons, but it’s important that you choose one of them, as they all will offer a crawlable international web structure for each one of your versions.
What we do not recommend is using URL parameters for your international web versions, or showing the different versions through the same URLs using scripts.
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Although it might require more initial work to set independent web structures for each language or country, your international websites will be easier to manage, target, optimize and track in the long-‐term.
1.3.2. Optimizing your international website structure
Once you have selected and established a language or country targeted web structure for each one of your international versions, the next step is to optimize them so it’s easier for search engines to identify their relevance.
o Optimize your web content and user experience for your target
language
After having correctly established your international web structure, you must make not only your content but the overall web experience relevant to your new international audiences – making sure they are translated to the proper languages, using the relevant keywords you identified in the previous research phase. Use the optimized keywords in your:
! Titles ! Meta Descriptions ! URLs ! Menu & navigation elements ! Headings ! Images ALT descriptions ! Page content
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o Link between your international web versions
It’s recommended that you link to and from your different language or country website versions so search engines can discover them and users can switch between them.
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o Suggest the relevant international version to your visitors
You can detect the location and language of your visitors by identifying their IP and their browser language. If they are visiting a language or country version that is not relevant for them – for example, a visitor accessing the Mexican version of your website from Spain – you can suggest the correct site in a non-‐intrusive way, as Amazon does.
You should also always take the user to the specific page they were looking for, but in the right country or language version.
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For example, if your visitors were looking to access the “About Us” page, you should take them to the specific “About Us” page of the country or language you are suggesting for them. In other words, don’t divert them to your website’s homepage to suggest a change in language or country version.
o Use hreflang annotations to specify each of your international web versions country or language targeting
Hreflang annotations are used by search engines like Google & Yandex to identify web pages’ language and country targeting.
The usage of hreflang annotations avoids language and country misalignment issues in search engines results.
These tags not only specify the language and, alternatively, the country targeting of each page, but also refer to other languages and country versions that are available.
They should be included in the header area of your web pages’ HTML, in the HTTP header, or in the XML sitemaps as specified here by Google.
You can use this tool to facilitate the generation of the hreflang tags
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or this other tool, which will include them in the XML sitemaps.
Use the International Targeting Report in Google Webmaster Tools to see if there are any errors in your hreflang annotations.
o Use HTML “lang” and “content-‐language” meta tags
Besides hreflang annotations, we also recommended using the HTML “lang” attribute and the “content-‐language” tag. These attributes are still taken into consideration to establish your pages country and language targeting by search engines like Bing, as detailed here.
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o Geo-‐target your subdirectories or subdomains if you’re country targeting and not using ccTLDs
If you have chosen to use subdirectories or subdomains to country target, then you can geolocate each one of them to their relevant country by using the correct option in Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Tools, or Yandex Webmaster Tools.
o Use the appropriate character encoding
You should specify the character encoding in your pages as described here, in addition to using UTF-‐8, to effectively display non-‐ASCII characters.
1.3.3. Monitoring your international search results After you have launched and optimized your international web versions, you should continue monitoring your search results for each country and language.
There are two ways to check your ranking for your targeted international keywords: 1. Use tools such as I Search From, Search Latte or impersonal.me that allow you
to manually verify your international results (or search by using proxies that allow you to select your location, such as HMA or ProxyBonanza).
2. Use rank checkers that support international results, such as AuthorityLabs or Advanced Web Ranking.
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By doing this you can not only verify how you’re ranking against your competitors in your international markets, but also identify trends in these results, such as the type of pages that are ranked and how well they’re optimized.
You should also keep an eye on your organic search traffic via Google Analytics, making sure that each of your international web versions are attracting and converting traffic as expected.
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Although there’s plenty more you can do when it comes to growing your business’s popularity in highly competitive international markets, by following these basic steps you’ll have effectively set up a good baseline for your international SEO.
About Smartling Smartling is the leader in translation management and delivery solutions, helping globally minded, technology-driven companies eliminate the inefficiencies of manually managing translation processes, tools, and vendors. Enterprises and fast-growing companies use Smartling’s multi-tenant cloud platform to create, manage, and deliver their translated content. Smartling services innovative customers like GoPro, HubSpot, Optimizely, Pinterest, Spotify, SurveyMonkey, and Zuora.
To learn more about Smartling and how we can support your global SEO strategy, contact us.
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