Trying to rank your website in Google and other major search engines in your own country is often hard enough, especially when you are aiming high for some tough keywords, but when it comes to International SEO and trying to rank your website in countries far afield, the challenge often becomes even harder.
Even though it is a tough challenge to face head on, this is not to say it cannot be done, but simply changing your title tag to France and chucking Google Translate onto your website is not going to cut it.
We offer our main considerations when looking at international SEO and how to make sure you get success when trying to rank outside of your own country:
Website Hosting
In my opinion, hosting your website in the country that you want to start focusing on, along with all the things we cover below, is just another element that can help you to start getting the rankings in this country. This on its own will not do much, but if you then combine it with the correct ccTLD, professionally translated content and localised linking as we go onto discuss, then it really is another few points in the right direction. You can also look at hosting in your own country but using Google Webmaster Tools to Geolocate, which basically means you tell Google which country your site is supposed to target, or of course, you could do both and host in the targeted country and use GWMT to specify this as well.
Website Structure
One of the first things you need to consider is how you are going to plan your site in terms of the domain you are a going to use. If you decide to use a .com, then you are of course using a domain name that often ranks in many countries, but you should consider using localised ccTLDs, which are basically the correct domain ending for the country you are trying to rank for. For example, France uses .fr, Spain uses .es and in the UK we use .co.uk, but every country has its own ccTLD, which means that it can often be worth trying to match local hosting with a “localised” domain name, as it is another boxed ticked when looking to rank in another country.
You could however go down the road of sub domains or sub directions, so your site would look like www.domainname.com/spain/ or www.domainname.com/es/ if you were targeting Spain for example. This technique can work but has a few limitations, along with the use of sub domains, which is why it can sometimes be the best route to split your sites and locally focus on them, rather than have one master site that covers many countries. Amazon is a fine example of this, as they have a website for pretty much every country, rather than just have one main site with options to divert off into sections per language or country.
Website Content
One thing that can often be overlooked, but that is so critical and vital to get right, is making sure you employ a professional website translation company to take your content and turn it into the correct language that reads perfectly. I have seen too many businesses say they do not rank in Spain or Germany or China but yet they have simply set up a spain.domain.com subdomain and used Google Translate or another of the free and automated services to convert their content into the targeted language. As good as these programs are, they are undoubtedly flawed and sloppy in their results, which is why any search engine and more importantly customer is going to read the content and realise it just a lazy effort and you will get no rewards.
Localised Linking
Local links are worth more than non-local links when it comes to targeting new countries, so for example, a link from a high quality, high trust flow and high domain authority website in Spain if you are looking to rank in Spain, is worth slightly more than the same kind of link from any other country. This is why it is so very important to consider your link strategy and then make sure you are thinking about it from a localised basis, as if you are trying to rank in another country but all of your links are from the UK, then this is going to raise questions that you are just not going to be able to answer. You can still follow a similar kind of strategy to your normal SEO campaign (as long as it works of course) but try to put the local element on it.
Local Search Engines
The final point to make is that most of the larger countries, like China and Russia do not rely on Google, in fact they have their own major search engines that you need to make sure your site is listed in. Do not just assume that Google covers every country you are looking to target, or that it is the major dominance in terms of search engines, so do you research and make sure that the country you are looking to get new business from has your site appearing in their most used search engine(s), else you are never going to be found no matter how hard you try.
By Ian Spencer, IS Digital Marketing.
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