In today’s interconnected digital world, international SEO is no longer optional for businesses with global ambitions – it is essential.
The potential to reach diverse markets and accelerate growth through optimized online presence in different countries is significant.
But simply having a global website isn’t enough. To succeed internationally, your website must be competitive in each local market.
This guide provides an updated overview of the key considerations when embarking on an international SEO strategy.
The Difference Between International And Standard SEO
Fundamentally, SEO for a new market is the same as SEO for your home market, but unique complexities arise when expanding into global markets. These include:
Language Variations: Each market speaks its own language – sometimes quite literally. Proper localization and cultural nuances are critical to engaging the local consumer.
Multiple Websites: Due to legal, cultural, or engagement requirements, you may need distinct websites or sections for different countries.
Local Search Engines: Google dominates globally, but regional search engines like Baidu (China), Yandex (Russia), and Naver (South Korea) also play critical roles in certain markets.
Local Competitors & Audience: Your local competition is just as fierce as your global competition. Understanding user preferences in each market is key to gaining traction.
Cross-Market Competition: While you pay attention to each site, you must keep an eye on the overall performance when you have global websites. Otherwise, your local market websites may be competing against each other or, in the worst case, may not be indexed at all.
Failing to account for these differences can result in costly mistakes.
For example, your Mexico-targeted site outranks your Spain-focused site, or worse, your site does not appear in local searches at all due to technical missteps with hreflang or canonical tags.
Selecting linguistically correct phrases over a more popular phrase may result in significant missed opportunities.
Should You Go Global? Evaluating Market Opportunity
Before committing to international SEO, it’s essential to identify the right markets from not only a search demand perspective but also for ease of doing business, tariffs, and internet adoption. Key resources to guide this decision include:
Government and Trade Data: Websites like Trade.gov or WTO.org provide critical market and trade information.
Global Internet Usage Reports: Leverage data from McKinsey, eMarketer, or Internet World Stats to assess online penetration and growth trends in various regions.
Your Existing Website Analytics: Pay attention to organic traffic from foreign markets. If certain countries are already driving traffic and conversions, these should be prioritized.
Google Search Console: It is a rich source of opportunity identification using the performance report to identify target countries especially those where Google has translated your SERP snippet and page into the local language.
By leveraging both external reports and your internal data, you can make informed decisions on where your global SEO investments will drive the most growth.
Global Strategy: One Website Or Multiple Websites?
When the market potential, business structure, or cultural nuance justifies it, separate websites for each country offer clear advantages.
These include the ability to tailor design, content, merchandising, and SEO specifically for each market.
However, building and maintaining multiple sites is resource-intensive, and not always feasible initially.
For companies testing new markets, a multilingual site using a language-only approach and hreflang tags to specify the target languages and countries is often a good starting point.
As market presence grows, the transition to country-specific websites becomes more beneficial for both SEO and user experience.
What Domain Should You Have: ccTLD Or gTLD?
A decade ago, local domains (ccTLDs) were essential for international SEO success.
Today, while they remain important, especially in markets like China or Russia, global top-level domains (gTLDs) can also be effectively optimized, reducing your management costs.
Using hreflang enables effective geotargeting, making the domain choice more flexible.
However, consider user behavior. Local ccTLDs are still often preferred in certain regions, so understanding local consumer preferences is crucial.
Note that some of the search engines, such as Baidu, still favor websites with local ccTLD.
Also, people outside the U.S. tend to click websites with local TLD over sites with .com or other generic TLDs especially of the ccTLD is used in offline advertising.
Note that if you have a multilingual or multinational site, just having a ccTLD will not make the entire site target the country to which the ccTLD is assigned.
Does Hosting Location Matter?
Historically, hosting was an additional geotargeting signal to search engines, especially when using a dot-com domain.
But even though hosting location has become less critical for geotargeting, it still impacts site performance, particularly page load times in international markets.
Implementing a Content Delivery Network (CDN) can help ensure fast access in and across geographies.
It is recommended that you periodically test your website simulating both mobile and location connection speeds to ensure you are providing a fast and positive experience for your visitors.
Beyond hosting, proper geotargeting techniques, such as using hreflang tags for Google and language meta tags for Bing, are essential.
In addition, tools like Google Search Console allow you to assign each website a specific geographic target, which is a key factor in search engine optimization.
How Should I Go About Alternative Geotargeting?
As site owners moved away from ccTLDs to gTLDs and local hosts to CDNs, and Google sunset its GSC geotargeting feature, strong geotargeting signals were lost, making it critical to leverage other techniques, such as using hreflang tags for Google and language meta tags for Bing.
It is also essential to ensure, where possible, to add local market nuances with language, location, and currency into the pages.
Leveraging schema markup with the business location details contributes to pages appearing more local.
Optimizing For Non-Google Search Engines
While Google is by far the most used search engine worldwide, locally grown search engines are very popular in some countries.
These search engines hold the majority of market share in key markets:
China (Mainland, Simplified Chinese language) – Baidu.
Russia and Eastern European Countries – Yandex.
South Korea – Naver.
Failing to optimize for these search engines means missing out on significant opportunities in those markets.