If you intend to sell your products or services internationally, you need to take some steps to optimise your website. This may help you rank from an international SEO perspective and give the search engines a helping hand. What are the best ways to achieve these goals?
Tailoring Your Approach
If you cater to website visitors from a foreign country or those who may speak a different language from your host, ensure that you set things up correctly. You may need to make significant changes to your website so that each visitor has a great experience, no matter where they come from or their local dialect.
Still, international SEO is not that hard to achieve when optimising the content and structure for different countries and languages.
The Three-Step Process
Begin by setting up an international-friendly URL structure to target the appropriate countries. You can then add language tags to the relevant pages and should make an effort to create content in your target user’s language. This may be one of the more tricky parts of the process, but don’t be tempted to take a shortcut by automatically translating base content using an online tool.
1. International-Friendly URL Structures
To set up an international-friendly URL structure, you can take one of several approaches. First, you could modify your current site by adding a subdomain, subdirectory or subfolder to house all your new content. For example, that would look like my subdomain.mysite.com or mysite.com/newdirectory.
Alternatively, you could introduce a country-coded, top-level domain (ccTLD), which will use the two-letter codes for each country. These codes signify where the website is registered, like mysite.eu or mysite.us. Finally, if you want to stick with your current “.com” site, you can add a gTLD parameter at the end. Here you will append a parameter that will tell the search engine where to focus. For example, you would add /?lang=es-mx to focus on the Spanish language in Mexico.
Clearly, there are pros and cons associated with each approach. For example, if you set up an entirely new ccTLD, this would be more expensive to maintain. It would also have its separate domain authority. On the other hand, a subdirectory or subdomain is not ranked highly by the search engines, although these tend to be easier to maintain.
2. Language Targeting
Next, move on to language targeting. Here, you’ll need to insert specific meta tags or code to tell the search engine that an alternative version of the content is available in the given language at the link provided. Also, don’t use specific scripts or cookies that attempt to display different language versions of a page to a given user. This approach will not help your SEO as the search engines can’t crawl that dynamic content.
3. Content Creation
And finally, the most involved part of the process — creating the specific content. You are best placed to understand your target audience in these other countries but may need to consider cultural differences, time zones and other factors as you craft your content. If you like to add humour, you can’t automatically assume that people from another country and culture may always “get” your point. Still, if you make it very clear that you have gone out of your way to create this page for them, they may well stick around longer, and this can also be a good pointer from an SEO perspective.
Getting Additional Information
If you’d like some additional training to help you and your staff master the art of international SEO, get in touch with the experts at Amire. They can also introduce you to paid search options if you want to reach out to your foreign prospects this way.
