Are you just focusing on just local online market? It will earn you good credibility for regional customers. Do you want to increase your ROI and sales? International SEO helps you a great deal in improving your customer base. It includes SEO strategies to cover all areas with common human behavior.
No doubt, it is challenging to create content with variant customer behavior. Here, the thing that works is understanding how to touch the hearts of your customers across different demographics. Many brands are successful with using international SEO marketing techniques. Let's see how you can proceed further with global SEO and be successful in this.
International
SEO best practices
Content thriving local customers doesn't mean it will work for other markets as well. You may be a rockstar in the USA, doesn't mean the same SEO strategy will suffice for European markets. So, deep consideration is necessary for expanding your business to different countries. These are the must-know tips:
Optimize
for different search engines
Google covers the lion's share having 84% of the internet users. But, marketers need to think beyond Google to increase their business. Baidu is prominent in China, while Yandex is popular in Russia. Also, DuckDuckGo covers users loving their privacy. Likewise, other search engines are there Microsoft Bing and Yahoo. SEO company in India can help align your SEO strategy with different search engines.
The website needs to adapt optimization strategies for other search engines. For example, Chine allows only Baidu in its country. It has installed a "Great Firewall" to block Google. Baidu pays importance to image alt tags, prefers high-quality visuals to other image-related descriptions. Further, it lays a higher value on local hosting. Also, it doesn't support Flash or Javascript but HTML website coding.
Strategize
domain structure
Domain structure matters
most for international SEO. A ".com" domain name seems too generic to
relate to a specific country. It doesn't give place-related to the target
audience of a country. You can always opt for an effective SEO strategy
whatever suits you best amongst these three:
● ccTLD
● Subdirectory
● Subdomain
Every country has its country code top-level domain like Canada: .ca, France: .fr, and USA: .us. Using these domain names improves your online visibility in these countries. Moreover, search engines automatically choose your domain name in these countries in search results.
Furthermore, subdomain is also one of the options. It operates like ca.example.com. But, users can't associate with these domains. It doesn't hit the right chords.
Next, subdirectories are always an effective way to address localized audiences. URL structure goes like: www.example.com/ca. It earns you more backlinks and enhances the value of the domain in terms of domain authority and page authority. Also, it is a simple and cost-effective method.
Adopt
a localized content strategy
A localized content strategy is an effective way to optimize your website for international SEO. The best way is to conduct country-specific keyword research. The potential clients in different countries use separate keywords. Accordingly, marketers can plan a content marketing strategy.
These keywords work as
trump cards as these keywords are part of local customer behavior. If we talk
about the English language itself, the same word may have different spellings
even in English-speaking countries like Australia, Canada, Britain, and the
USA. Then, you can use these keywords at different places like:
● Meta description
● Title
● Heading tags
● Alt texts
● Schema markup
With this, it will become easier for search engines to pick up your web pages in search results.
Make
use of hreflang tags.
Hreflang tags act as active indicators for Google which language is valid for a particular country. These tags are part of HTML code. It tells Google what the most appropriate version of the page that users can easily comprehend is. For instance, someone is searching for a term in the Netherlands, hreflang will inform Google to display the Dutch version of the web page
Also, language is particular to regions. So, it's crucial to mention language and region in the hreflang tag. If we talk about Portuguese, it is the national language of Brazil. But, it is entirely different from what is there in Portugal. English in the US will follow the pattern "en-us," and Portuguese in Brazil "po-br."
Consider
cultural differences
User experience varies from country to country. Some people prefer simple navigation and other cluttered ones. Also, they could have color preferences as well. It is best to use SEO strategies matching with country culture.
Final
Words
After a certain limit, expanding business becomes a need of the hour. For this, international SEO works wonders. Localized content, effective domain strategy, and hreflang are the basics required for improving global rankings.
.jpg)
