We’ve all encountered situations where Agency A insists on a critical action while Agency B claims it’s not essential and prioritizes other tasks.
Also, there are times when web guidelines or the CMS restrict changes. How is this reconciliation handled?
A major challenge is the lack of SEO expertise in local markets.
Often, these markets do not have a dedicated SEO agency or personnel, as SEO is just one of many responsibilities.
They could greatly benefit from shared experience and documented guidelines to clarify focus areas and CMS capabilities.
All markets can enhance their SEO strategies and maintain a unified approach by collaborating to develop consistent guidelines, processes and templates.
Dig deeper: International SEO: How to avoid common translation and localization pitfalls
Don’t forget your templates
In a centralized development structure, most markets use the same templates, particularly for product pages. When a change is made to one template, it affects all websites, making template-related tickets and optimization actions crucial.
While consistency in webpage templates and SEO presents challenges, it also offers opportunities. Focusing on templates can lead to significant improvements; once fixes are deployed globally, everyone benefits.
It’s surprising to see many multinational websites with identical templates undergoing numerous audits. If all markets share a common template, there’s less need for individual audits, allowing budgets to be allocated to unique market needs instead.
It’s beneficial to share site audits, especially when multiple markets use the same template. Auditing the template infrastructure should yield consistent results.
Agencies can check for any deviations from the template, ensuring a more efficient use of resources. This allows teams to concentrate on content, backlinks and other important areas rather than redundant audits.
4. Use centralized solutions
Many SEO activities, from analytics to tools, could be centralized at a global level or in markets with more resources. However, despite the potential efficiency, I’ve found this is often more challenging in practice.
Centralized funding and management of SEO diagnostic tools can be more effective than having each market fund various tools independently.
For example, I’ve seen mid-sized companies use an old desktop computer with a single Screaming Frog license to crawl all markets and store reports on a shared drive.
After discovering that many of their CMS-generated XML sitemaps had errors, they created validated XML sitemaps for all markets and stored them centrally.
While discussing keywords is often discouraged, collaborative teams can benefit by sharing paid search keyword lists, ad copy and negative lists.
This collaboration is crucial for same-language markets, allowing them to build on existing work and focus their time and resources on adaptation and expansion.
5. Consider global and local
Local markets may see the shift toward consistency and standardized processes as restricting their autonomy and may resist if they believe it could impact their KPIs.
They need web elements and processes unique to their markets. Still, they should recognize that adopting consistent templates, centralized task alignment and best practices can help them focus more on local activities.
Getting SEO initiatives into the development pipeline is a significant challenge at any level, but a consistent workflow and aligned markets enhance effectiveness.
This uniformity facilitates the integration of cross-market analytics and AI solutions, creating further opportunities for scaling.
Dig deeper: The best AI tools for global SEO expansion
Streamlining global SEO: Centralized strategies for sustainable success
Incorporating standardized frameworks and centralized processes into global SEO strategies promotes consistency, efficiency and scalability across markets.
Organizations can more effectively allocate resources and uncover growth opportunities by streamlining reporting, ticket management and template usage.
This holistic approach improves site performance and enables local markets to focus on region-specific initiatives, driving sustainable SEO success on a global scale.
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