August 9, 2021
International SEO, also known as Global SEO, is an SEO technique designed specifically to increase a website’s or business’ traffic, and monthly sales.
For businesses or companies looking to attract international sales, International SEO is a great tool and is highly recommended to garner traffic from international audiences.
What is International SEO?
Briefly defined, International SEO is essentially the process of targeting audiences around the world by optimizing a website or a business’s digital presence.
It involves techniques such as geo-targeting to optimize your product or service offering and allow for consumer searches on a worldwide basis. If you are hoping to break international barriers and go truly global, you absolutely need to invest in international SEO.
Why is international SEO important?
In order to stay competitive and stay relevant, it is important that companies invest in International SEO practices to ensure that their products and services get the widest reach possible.
In order to take your business international and to make it a global brand, it is imperative that as a manager you invest in International SEO practices.
It adds to your website’s footfall, increases traffic, targets audiences internationally, creates global visibility and builds authority for your online presence.
How to implement International SEO?
In order to implement International SEO, there are a few steps your company would have to follow which include:
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Determining the type of content
This includes determining the type of international content your website would provide. For this purpose, your website could either focus on language or on geo-targeting.
If your website focuses on language, any user entering your website would be able to choose their preferred language to view your website in.
However, you may also choose to focus on both language and geo-targeting such as websites like eBay that have separate web pages for consumers depending on their location and preferred language.
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Setting up international URL structure
Your URL structure helps search engine crawlers identify which countries your website and webpages target. Hence, your URL structure should include indications in terms of the countries it targets.
You could either have separate websites for different countries or maintain a subdirectory of web pages within your main website for different countries.
While setting up a sub-directory is easy, it isn’t very impactful in terms of your SEO score.
However, while setting up different websites for each country and using respective domains is difficult, it can be very impactful in terms of SEO.
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Incorporate Hreflang Tags for Language Targeting
Hreflang tags are essentially codes that websites use when they feature content in different languages.
They help search engine crawlers understand your web pages and match your different language content with searchers.
For instance, someone from the United Kingdom would see your website optimized for UK English and someone from France would be able to see your website optimized for French.
Investing and working towards improving your SEO efforts internationally involves much more than simply showing prices in different currencies.
It involves an active and dedicated approach towards improving your global presence and improving your SEO score.
