Go Global with Thrive Digital International SEO services
The process of optimizing your website to appear on search engine results pages in many nations is known as international SEO. Because what works in the UK might not work in another, this particular kind of SEO is essential if you want to grow your company internationally.
From the apparent rise in audience to the possible increase in income, there are many wonderful reasons why an international SEO method is a terrific choice.
A worldwide strategy into a foreign market must be very careful and well-planned in order to be effective. If done incorrectly, it might seriously impair your current digital marketing strategy.
What Is International SEO?
Forty per cent of buyers worldwide will not purchase anything from a website if it is not in their native tongue, according to CSA Research. In other words, you won’t sell overseas if you don’t have the websites, domains, or URL structures necessary to effectively translate your content and rank for keywords in other languages.
The fundamental goal of international SEO is to position your domain so that it may be indexed and crawled in the nation you are targeting. Translating your content is only one aspect of attracting visitors from different nations; another is organizing your entire domain so that search engines are aware of “where” your website is. Our technical SEO specialists are crucial in this situation.
You should have a distinct plan for each country you want to use international search engine optimization to target. Too many quirks, intentions, distinctions, and cultures exist for a single worldwide strategy.
Like any other form of digital marketing that emphasizes keyword ranking, getting your website to rank in different countries takes time and work. It is quite normal for hundreds of UK businesses, both large and small, to naturally rank for worldwide keywords in English-speaking nations. However, even in English-speaking nations, the kinds of searches and the motivations behind them are completely different, thus this incidental rating is not what global rankings are about.
There are also lots of businesses for whom international sales make up a huge proportion of their total revenue, many of whom could be your competitors. And, like ‘regular’ aspects of SEO services, there is a huge opportunity for small businesses to leverage the opportunities that are presented by capturing foreign organic traffic. Done right, large organizations can be leapfrogged by up-and-coming businesses.
Every single country is a specific market packed with opportunities.
Global Website Optimisation
There are various strategies for businesses to increase their global footprint. They can create a country-specific distinct domain that is based in a particular nation, like Norway, Italy, or the Czech Republic; in this case, the country code will appear after the firm name in the URL structure. As an alternative, the business may have a single international domain with several directories. Examples of this include websites that end in.com,.net, or.org.
Duplicate material is a major concern for many organizations, as is making sure the website loads and sends the appropriate alternate versions to particular nations. Because Google, Bing, Yahoo, and others will employ headers, the web address, and other elements like the content-language meta tag to send the appropriate localized content to the target nation, the technical aspect of your website needs to be optimized.
International Link Building. A must.
Building a solid profile of links leading to your website or a particular page is crucial for both global SEO and “regular” search optimization. When becoming worldwide, citation creation becomes considerably more complex and technical due to a number of elements, including the link’s location and language source. Because search engines will only rank your site in that target market if the backlink profile is full of links from sites in that target country, you cannot rely on the backlink providers you currently use for your UK-based website; instead, you must establish completely new relationships in that target country.
Overnight success? No way.
Whether you’re a major business in America looking to target European countries or a small E-commerce business in the north of England looking to expand into a new location, there are dozens of considerations to think about that will have a positive impact on your SEO if done right, and a negative effect if its rushed or done wrong. A multi-lingual/multi-site approach that is different from country to country can have huge ramifications on your long-term digital marketing strategy. You must have got a thorough strategy in place to mitigate these ramifications.
What Does International SEO Do for Company Websites?
Creating websites, domains, or content by country can do an enormous amount of things for your company’s websites. With international SEO you can create bespoke content that targets a new foreign market and create international websites which are filled with localization signals to search engines telling them this site is perfect for people from a certain area.
International SEO strategies are all about seizing an opportunity. The thing about maximising your global internet presence is that, in many instances, competitors won’t even think to do it for themselves. This is especially true if you already receive global attention without having done any optimisation. That is one of the biggest positive signs that you should invest in worldwide search engine optimisation.
Conversely, if your competitors in your home country are already selling globally, you really should be considering reactively implementing this type of digital search marketing to keep pace with rivals.
For ECommerce sites, global SEO is a no-brainer because it opens up your potential market size two, three, or even fourfold. Some of the biggest companies in the world rely almost entirely on international markets and sales mainly because of revenue but also it allows them to spread risk and provide long-term security. If you’re selling in 20 countries in Europe, it’s less of an issue if you fail to sell in five of them as opposed to putting all your eggs in one basket (country) and that not working out as you’d hoped.
Opting to invest resources into growing your website’s online presence in different countries won’t succeed overnight. However, if you deal with the two fundamentals – the content marketing and the back-end technical SEO side – increased profits and brand awareness will follow in time.
How Can You Build Local Links?
The principles of citation building apply to every country as do link-building strategies. It needs to be done authentically, targeting genuine sites with high domain authority, and should be about building relationships.
As with any sort of link building, this takes time and costs money depending on who accepts links on their websites. Businesses must research, research, research. Finding five websites from the country that you’re targeting which accept well-written guest posts with one or two backlinks in them is far, more effective for your long-term international SEO than spamming forums or link farms that are based in countries you have no interest in selling to. This is the same with local and national SEO, and it is with global.
One of the best ways to grow your international backlink profile is to create valuable long-form blog content for websites in the country you wish to target. Now, crucially, if the country you’re targeting doesn’t have English as its main language, you’re going to need to employ/hire a translator who can create the content variant on your behalf in the default version of that region.
When it comes to international SEO link building a lot of English speakers think they can skip the ‘hiring the writer who is fluent in the language’ part, and simply write the content, translate into Google Translate, and post it. This is the wrong way to go about it. You have to treat international link building the same as you would national citation creation
Beyond just creating good content to send to websites in that area, be sure to research what kind of backlinks the competitors in that area have. These can be pretty easy to find, you just need to use Sistrix or Ahrefs to view their backlink profiles. Once you have a list you can simply scan through them, discard the ones that are spammy and target the sites that look and sound authentic.
Another way to get natural backlinks from URLs ending in the country code you’re targeting is by ensuring you get them when you take part in events, interviews or other marketing-related things.
Ensuring that your marketing team is aware of the need to earn backlinks as well as grow the brand awareness will help to ensure that as well as the exposure you get from doing PR or events you’re also getting the SEO benefits. Outreach to podcasts, TV studios, radio stations, and industry publications in the country/area that you’re looking to target and ask if you can appear. Places like these are desperate for content and are constantly outreaching out to people for comments, what could be more exciting for them than to have someone come to them with content.
This is where digital PR comes into your international SEO strategies. Leveraging media lists and the relationships that PR people can and have built with journalists can help you grow your online presence in a specific country. Cementing these relationships can ensure a steady stream of backlinks because you’ll be the first company that journalists go to when they require a comment.
Why Should You Care about Global SEO?
Every business that aims to grow globally needs to pay attention to international search engine optimisation at some stage. Not doing so puts a ceiling on your business’s reach.
Whether it’s today, tomorrow, next month, next year, or 10 years from now, there’s a chance that you’ll want to take your company to new territories to continue your expansion. If you’re already set up for this growth, you’ll find it much easier to start gaining authority and making yourself a household name in those new areas. However, starting from scratch can be a different experience – one that takes much longer and leaves you stuck behind several well-established industry leaders who have dominant positions in your new target locations.
Priming your website for worldwide growth can seem like a daunting task when you aren’t an SEO expert, but you don’t need to worry – our team’s on hand to give you the information, guidance, and technical international SEO strategy that you need.
Before we get started, we’ll need to get to know you and your business a little bit more – by understanding your business, your industry, and your competitors, we can formulate a bespoke strategy with targeted ranking opportunities to increase your visibility as quickly as possible.
The best time to get started on your quest for greatness is today, so don’t miss your opportunity to get in touch – this may be the start of your greatest chapter yet…
The benefits of partnering with Embryo don’t end there either – our talented team expands into several different fields of digital marketing, giving you a full-service experience that increases your touchpoints and visibility across the board.
Search engines value your ability to “show up”, and there’s nothing that helps you to do this better than a multi-channel approach.
Give us a call or fill out our contact form to learn more about how we can help you to dominate the SERPs with our intelligent use of SEO, Digital PR, PPC campaigns, and Social Media presence!
What Is the Difference between International SEO Marketing and Local SEO?
There are many differences between how international and local SEO works. The biggest difference is that while both types of SEO work to improve rankings, they do so in different ways. For example, local search engines are optimised for finding businesses within a certain radius of an address. In contrast, international search engines are designed to find companies around the world.
International SEO
With international SEO you’re targeting a list of keywords that is in the context of a global environment. This environment creates a huge number of variables that aren’t found in local SEO such as keyword volumes country by country, international competitors, and nuances in language. Global SEO does open you up to new customers and allows you to leverage the benefits of search engines in other countries, not just your own.
International SEO is relative to the company too. For instance, if you’re a business in France looking to sell products in Spain, you’d be carrying out global search engine optimization and, potentially, competing with Spanish businesses that are working on local SEO tactics.
Local SEO
Local SEO is the practice of optimising your website for the area in which your business is based. This type of search-based marketing is much smaller in scale but can have a relatively big impact on businesses if they have no interest in expanding abroad or don’t have the infrastructure in place to do it successfully.
Regional or location-based search engine optimisation is also good for leveraging parts of Google’s algorithm by promoting their brick-and-mortar locations using the Google My Business (GMB) account. If you’re selling these products online, people in that region – thanks to their IP address – will be served your business nearer the top of the search engine results page because you are providing the most relevant search for them.
Choose an SEO strategy that works for you
Worldwide search engine optimisation predominately aims at ranking for large-scale keywords that are being searched by people across the world (with the caveat that you can carry out international-local SEO in regions of countries that you don’t live in). This is in contrast to local SEO which focuses on ranking for specific keywords that are relevant to your location and the one in which you want to do business.
For instance, if you were a plumber in Manchester and you ranked for ‘plumbing services’ you might get a lot of traffic from the thousands of people globally who search for that term. However, ranking for this term may not bring you a lot of sales because people will want to pay for someone that is near them. This is why ranking for ‘plumbing Manchester’, ‘plumbing services Manchester’, or even ‘plumber near me’ is a far more effective local SEO strategy.
Working with an expert global SEO agency such as Embryo can ensure your spending is going to the place where it’s going to provide you with the most return on investment. By carrying out extensive keyword research, an competitor analysis and understanding your globalisation strategy, we can help build an effective plan.
Why Global SEO Is Important
Global SEO is important if you’re a business that is interested in expanding your company across the world or in specific countries. Going global online involves a great deal of investment and time, it shouldn’t be undertaken lightly.
That’s not to say, however, that international SEO isn’t important, especially for those businesses that have the capacity and opportunity to dominate potential markets. Unless you have a brick-and-mortar location with absolutely no e-Commerce element to your business, there’s a good chance that at least a small percentage of your sales come from abroad. This is more than likely incidental, nevertheless, it’s an important signal that there is a desire by people to purchase your products and services. International SEO can break down borders and language barriers and allow you to attract business from all across the world.
Being present in other countries just allows you to do more, sell more, and take more of the market share. Its benefits and importance of it are extracted when the process is carried out correctly. This is to say that your international SEO strategies should be global in theory and specific in practice. Yes, you want to rank globally and attract French speakers, German speakers, and people all across the world. But, to do that, you have to create strategies for specific countries to benefit globally.
Optimising your site, or separate websites, for a global audience is in some ways a reaction to how the internet has created a borderless e-Commerce internet landscape. 3 out of every 4 people that use the internet will use a search engine, making the need to be seen online more and more important. To run truly global E-commerce sites, worldwide search engine optimization has to be at the heart of your business strategy.
As well as making your site more visible, global SEO can also provide you with a mountain of data that you can use to make smarter, more informed decisions. By marketing to more people you can glean a more accurate picture of how well your website performs and at what stage people make decisions, abandon their cart, or bounce from your site.
Do You Need to Go International?
While having an internet presence in your local area, or country, is pretty much a necessity for virtually any business, going global is a different story. Working out if you need to go beyond your borders and market to people in other countries, in their native language, is a question you do need to ask yourself.
Whether you need to invest in an international SEO strategy entirely depends on your long-term goals. If you don’t have any plans to increase your sales overseas and are satisfied with the market share you have in your local or national area then opting to invest in a global online presence won’t work and will most likely harm the way you do business.
Why? Well, as well as taking resources away from your well-performing local or national SEO strategies you can also completely ruin the progress you’ve made from a user point of view. Suddenly changing your website to appeal to an international audience (that you may not even know are there) is going to put a lot of people off who came to your site for the local and relatable content you provided them.
If you are looking to expand beyond your borders then it is certainly worth, at the very least, exploring the possibility of worldwide search engine optimisation. If you are looking to do it it’s important to be thorough. The reason for the thoroughness is that you’re going to be a small fish in a massive pond, one that is filled with competitors from all across the world, or at the very least, a country or two.
This admittedly daunting prospect is the reason you need to be comprehensive, both in your strategy and your investment. You’ll be competing with competitors who’ve never heard of you and have well-established SEO plans in place for their local area, the one you’re targeting.
Even if a business is set up to target countries abroad, they’ll be hesitant simply because it’s unknown. However, organizations should think of worldwide SEO as an enhanced version of geo-targeting. Rather than targeting a city or a region, you’re ‘simply’ targeting a nation.
Assess your current business infrastructure, capacity, staffing levels, capabilities, and, frankly, your desire to invest that amount of time and money into it, before you decide on whether or not to jump in with both feet.
Is International SEO Worth the Effort?
The short answer to this is yes. If you are looking to grow your business globally, international SEO is worth every moment you spend on it.
As of 2022, 92.96% of global online traffic runs through Google, making it the most widely adopted search engine worldwide. If you are hoping to achieve an international presence for your business and commandeer some of Google’s reach, international SEO is not only worth it, but it is an absolute necessity.
To give you an idea as to why international SEO is worth it, the car company Ford makes 36.7% of sales in international markets, by investing in international SEO, allows small businesses to compete with well-established international brands such as Ford.
What Localisation Factors Matter Most?
Localisation factors refer to the process you go through to make sure the content and website. There are four things a good international SEO agency would consider when looking at this.