Are you looking to expand your reach and tap into global markets? International SEO is the key to optimizing your website for diverse audiences across countries and languages.
After establishing success domestically, it’s time to broaden your horizons and explore the potential of international business. Ready to dive into global expansion? We’ve got you covered with expert insights into international SEO.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll walk you through essential tactics like conducting international keyword research, embracing localization, and implementing best practices that will boost your site’s visibility worldwide.
What is international SEO?
International SEO involves optimizing your website to reach audiences across various countries and languages. It enables businesses to attract global users, drive organic traffic from different regions, and cater content to diverse markets.
Think of it as advanced geotargeting—except instead of focusing on different cities or states, you’re optimizing to reach customers in entirely different countries.
Why Is SEO Important on an International Level?
International SEO is crucial because it allows businesses to enhance their search rankings in multiple countries, significantly increasing global visibility and reach.
By expanding into international markets, you can tap into new customer bases, boost traffic, and accelerate business growth.
While local SEO is essential, a strong international SEO strategy enables you to scale your brand globally, building trust and credibility with international customers, and improving conversions and ROI on global campaigns.
However, simply translating your website into different languages isn’t enough. You need a tailored approach that considers the unique demands of each market.
This includes analyzing traffic potential, understanding international competitors, and studying audience behaviour to craft an effective strategy for each region.
Now that you know what international SEO is and its importance, let’s go over some more specific benefits of international SEO.
The Benefits of International SEO for Global Businesses
Investing in international SEO is a powerful way for businesses to enhance their online presence and engage with diverse audiences as they expand into new markets. By optimizing your website for different regions, you not only improve visibility but also increase your chances of connecting with potential customers across the globe. Let’s dive deeper into two key benefits of international SEO: increased global visibility and an expanded customer base.
Increased Visibility on a Global Scale
Optimizing your content for specific regions helps search engines understand its relevance to users in those areas, thereby boosting your chances of appearing in local search engine results pages (SERPs). With international SEO, you can fine-tune your content to meet the specific needs and preferences of target markets, making your website more competitive and appealing.
For example, consider a U.S.-based fashion brand expanding into the U.K. By conducting region-specific keyword research, the company can identify popular search terms such as “UK clothing brands” and “fashion stores in London.” Using these insights, the brand could:
- Create localized product descriptions that include U.K.-specific terminology (e.g., “trousers” instead of “pants”).
- Optimize URLs, metadata, and content with region-specific keywords
- Build backlinks from reputable UK-based websites.
These tactics help the brand rank higher in U.K.-specific search results, increasing the likelihood of attracting relevant visitors who are more likely to convert into customers.
Expanded Customer Base
International SEO opens up new opportunities to reach potential customers beyond your borders. By effectively targeting international markets, you can place your brand in front of new audiences who are actively searching for the products or services you offer. If your competitors aren’t employing the same strategies, international SEO gives you a competitive edge in every new market you enter.
A quick way to gauge whether your competitors are targeting a specific market is to analyze their SEO efforts. By entering their domain into an SEO tool and selecting your new target market, you can assess the keywords they rank for in that region. This data helps you identify potential opportunities to outperform your competitors.
The more markets you can penetrate with optimized content, the more opportunities you create to attract and convert relevant searchers into paying customers. Expanding your customer base through international SEO sets the stage for sustained global growth, giving your business a significant advantage as you scale internationally.
By investing in international SEO, your business can enjoy these long-term benefits, gaining visibility in new markets and growing its customer base exponentially.
Reach Other Markets More Efficiently
Most businesses initially focus on local SEO to attract customers in their immediate area. However, when you’re ready to scale and expand internationally, international SEO becomes essential. It allows you to target specific countries and regions with customized content tailored to unique user preferences.
By optimizing your marketing efforts for each location, the expansion process becomes smoother and far more effective, helping you reach new customers across the globe with precision.
Deliver Optimized and Relevant Content to Broader Audiences
International SEO ensures that your content is not only optimized but also relevant to your target audience based on their location or region. What resonates with a local customer may not have the same impact on an international one.
Therefore, creating a custom SEO strategy for each market is crucial. With international SEO, you can deliver the right content to the right people, ensuring that it appeals to a broader, more diverse audience, leading to higher engagement and conversions.
Increase Global Awareness
Global awareness is crucial for business success, and international SEO helps ensure that your target customers can find you no matter where they are located. By improving your search engine rankings across different regions, international SEO increases your visibility on a global scale. This enhanced visibility makes it easier for potential customers to connect with your brand, building recognition and trust internationally.
Increase International Sales
The more customers you reach, the more sales opportunities you create.
By making your business visible to international markets through strategic SEO, you open the door to more conversions. International SEO not only expands your reach but also helps build trust with global customers by ensuring they see tailored content that resonates with them. This leads to increased sales and greater success as your business establishes a presence in new markets.
International SEO Best Practices
| International SEO Practice | Description | Advantages | Considerations |
| Get the Technical Foundation Right | Establish technical SEO fundamentals before content-based SEO. This includes selecting the appropriate URL structure and handling geo-redirection. | Sets a strong foundation for your international SEO strategy. Helps ensure that search engines and users can navigate your site effectively. | Requires a clear understanding of URL structures (ccTLD, Subfolders, Subdomains) and avoidance of geo-redirection in favor of hreflang tags. |
| Geo-redirection | Redirect users to region-specific pages based on IP address and location. | Aims to provide a localized experience for users. | Generally not recommended for SEO due to potential user frustration and search engine penalties. Implement hreflang tags instead. |
| Hreflang Tags | HTML code indicating the language and regional targeting of a page. Ensures search engines serve the correct version of your content to users based on their location. | Helps search engines deliver the right content to users in different languages and regions. | Requires accurate implementation for all language versions of a page to avoid confusion. |
| Get to Know Your Markets | Conduct keyword research and understand user behavior and preferences in different regions. Create tailored customer profiles and relevant content. | Ensures content is relevant to specific regional audiences. Helps align your SEO strategy with local market needs. | Requires ongoing research and adjustment to stay aligned with evolving market trends and user behaviors. |
| Analyze Your Competitors | Research competitors’ SEO strategies to identify successful practices and gaps. | Helps refine your own SEO strategy and discover opportunities for differentiation. | Competitor strategies may vary; adapt insights to fit your unique business goals and market conditions. |
| Don’t Get Lost in Translation | Avoid using automatic translation tools. Hire native speakers or professional services to ensure accurate and culturally appropriate content. | Provides high-quality, contextually relevant translations that resonate with local audiences. | Professional translation services can be costly, but they ensure quality and effectiveness. |
| Build a Backlink Profile for Each Market | Develop backlinks from local, relevant websites in each target market. Avoid irrelevant backlinks from non-local sites. | Enhances local authority and relevance, boosting your site’s visibility in specific regions. | Requires ongoing effort to build and maintain high-quality, localized backlinks. |
International SEO Tools
Achieving success in international SEO requires leveraging the right tools to optimize content, track performance, and stay ahead of the competition across multiple regions and languages.
There is a wide range of international SEO tools, each offering unique features tailored to different aspects of SEO management. These tools can significantly enhance your global SEO efforts, improving visibility and engagement across diverse markets.
seoClarity
seoClarity offers a comprehensive SEO platform that integrates artificial intelligence to elevate optimization processes and deliver in-depth evaluations. This tool is invaluable for businesses looking to streamline international campaigns, as it aids in automating tasks, enhancing keyword strategy, and providing a data-driven approach to SEO.
Surfer SEO
Surfer SEO is renowned for its expertise in performing SEO audits, utilizing AI to optimize content strategies, and executing thorough keyword research. Its AI-driven analysis helps businesses tailor their content to specific markets by offering actionable insights that refine the performance of multilingual and regional campaigns.
SEMrush
SEMrush, one of the most popular SEO platforms, provides a wide array of features perfect for companies of any size. SEMrush excels in keyword analysis, tracking rankings, and providing detailed reports on competitors. For international SEO, SEMrush offers country-specific keyword data, enabling businesses to adapt their strategies based on regional trends and search behaviours.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a highly regarded tool for its accuracy in rank tracking and deep keyword analysis. It stands out in competitive analysis, which is crucial for international SEO success. By identifying competitors in different markets, Ahrefs helps businesses adjust their strategies to outrank local and international competitors while understanding search behaviour unique to various regions.
Clearscope and Letterdrop
For businesses looking to enhance their content strategies, Clearscope and Letterdrop provide advanced insights that assist in automating SEO tasks. These tools offer in-depth analysis on topics, readability, and SEO scoring, ensuring that content not only ranks well but also resonates with diverse audiences across different languages and regions.
BuzzSumo and AnswerThePublic
BuzzSumo and AnswerThePublic offer creative approaches to keyword research and content ideation. These tools provide a clear understanding of trending topics, consumer interests, and search patterns across international markets.
Their ability to uncover emerging trends and search queries can significantly bolster content development efforts, helping businesses tap into what users are searching for in specific countries or regions.
By leveraging these international SEO tools, businesses can ensure their strategies are tailored to the unique needs of each market they operate in, leading to improved search engine visibility, better user engagement, and ultimately, higher conversions. Whether it’s refining content, tracking competitors, or uncovering new opportunities, these tools form the backbone of any successful global SEO strategy.
Step-by-Step Guide to International SEO Strategy
Now let’s get down to the main part of this article. How do you run a successful international SEO campaign in Singapore?
Step 1: Research Your Target International Market
There’s no international SEO without thorough market research in your target country. As appealing as it sounds, you need to build a serious business case, and it starts by working through the following steps:
- Define what your target audience may be interested in. You have to narrow down the specifics of your product and define what interests them. You can ask around or follow your gut. Above all, you want to confirm everything with your Google Analytics data to find out if you’re already driving traffic or getting conversions from an audience you haven’t been actively targeting.
- Define what’s so important when catering to your audience’s needs: What’s that one thing you shouldn’t miss? What do you think drives this audience to take action?
Here’s a list of things to consider in your evaluation:
- Having a ccTLD: If having a local domain name influences your target audience’s decision, why not give it a shot?
- Having localised content – and not just text but visuals: Your site visitors will want to relate to your content before making any major business decision.
- Localised pricing or enabling pricing in the local currency.
- Having a local live chat such as Tidio or LiveAgent
- Having a local phone number for contacting them
- Social proof from renowned local companies, e.g., reviews and case studies
- Are you in a position to offer your products and services to audiences in different parts of the world? For heavy products, it makes little sense to ship them to different parts of the world.
- Research your target audience to discover how they typically discover products and services: Bear in mind that not everyone searches for products and services they’re interested in on Google. Nor are they on Facebook, Twitter, or any of the coveted social media networks. For all we know, your customers could be all over the place.
Here are some ideas:
- If you’re targeting customers in Germany, we’re here to remind you that physical magazines are very popular in the country, especially for certain niches.
- Baidu is the most popular search engine in China. Also enjoying the same level of popularity in China is WeChat. It’s like people hardly use WhatsApp or any of the popular messenger apps and social media channels. In this case, you want to make sure you’ve figured out how to communicate with your target audience via WeChat.
- Yandex is the leading search engine in Russia. Chat apps like Telegram are also popular in the country. Do your research to find out where your customers can be found or their preferred communication channel before diving into anything.
- You’ve probably heard of Seznam. It might not be the most popular search engine in the Czech Republic, but it does boast a sizeable market share.
Do competitor research: Gather as much information as you possibly can on your competition. What competitive advantage do they have over you? It goes beyond SEO.
You have to dig into your competition (the future competition included) and gauge their performance with regards to:
- Paid advertising
- Content marketing
- SEO
Step 2: Do limited Keyword Research
Keyword research should be an ongoing process. It’s time-consuming and can never be covered exhaustively. Instead, you’ll only be performing keyword research to the extent that it allows you to build a business case.
Step 3: Start Selling International SEO Internally
After doing your research and preparing your case study, it’s time to get started with international SEO.
The approach you use involves educating and selling (and not just selling, like some people love to assume).
This sounds like an easy thing to do, but there are a few key things to take into consideration:
- You need a fully defined budget, not half or a fraction of it. If the budget isn’t enough, you won’t have a fair shot at succeeding. While going through your checklist, you have to make sure you have the defined budget in full.
- International SEO goes beyond translating your site content and populating it with a few relevant keywords. Your success lies in how well you understand the context.
You have to wear your new target audience’s mind and understand their way of thinking and behaviour. Your personality must also be one they can resonate with.
Step 4: Research the Most Appropriate URL Structure
What’s the best way to appeal to your target audience?
A good URL structure is great for inspiring trust and confidence. Your audience will also appreciate you using a ccTLD domain name.
Or you could still use your current domain name instead of working with subfolders. Are you encountering technical limitations? Then perhaps it would be best to work with subdomains instead.
Here are some options to work with:
- Choose a country-code top-level domain name (ccTLD).
- ccTLDs, or generic top-level domains, combined with subdomains
Examples:
- example.com
- de.example.com
- example.com.sg
- estore.example.com.sg
Each of these options comes with its share of pros and cons.
| Method | Pros | Cons |
| ccTLD |
|
|
| Subdomain |
|
|
| Subfolders |
|
|
Step 5: Keep Everything Short
You’re better off with a shorter URL.
Learn from the big boys:
- Apple.com
- Netflix.com
If you want to go with a ccTLD domain option and it turns out that your domain name is already taken, consider adding a short modifier.
The Pocket app is a prime example of this:
Pocket.com was already taken, so they decided to add the word “get” before it: getpocket.com, and must we mention that it worked for them. Alternatively, you can use one of the new available TLDs, such as tips, .me, or. Tech.
Keep in mind that the URL you choose must inspire trust and confidence. In this case, you want to make sure your domain name is both memorable and recognisable.
Lastly, avoid using a domain name with dashes. Such domain names have been misused to the point that they no longer inspire confidence.
Step 6: Define How You Plan to Manage Your International SEO Strategy
You need a well-defined strategy for managing your international SEO. Your strategy must be long-sighted or focused on the future.
The last thing you want to do is paint yourself in a corner. You can have two separate teams for this – the first to define your international SEO strategy and the second to execute the defined strategy.
Step 7: Thorough Keyword Research
Continue with the keyword research you began, only that you have to go even deeper this time.
Forget about the keywords you used in your original website and instead focus on your target audience.
Don’t Translate Keywords
- Keywords cannot be translated.
- Some of these keywords, when translated, could mean a completely different thing.
- The best approach should be to find a native of the country you’re targeting and offer to partner with them. They’re to educate you on your audience’s context. They can educate you about the slang used and words with double meanings in the country.
Develop a Keyword Strategy
- After doing your keyword research, the next thing you want to do is develop a detailed keyword strategy.
- Use the keywords you researched to develop the strategy.
- Your keyword strategy should define what type of content you need to create and rank for and for what duration.
Define Your Localisation Process
- Your keyword strategy should describe the type of articles or posts you need to create. But before you go further with that, you have to look at your localisation strategy.
- How do you intend to make your business known locally in the country you’re targeting?
Here’s a list of things to consider:
- How do you plan to use some of the words in all of your content consistently? This should be part of your content strategy – and not just for the search engine. Users also want to see consistency in how you package your content.
- How do you plan to manage your localisation process? You need tools such as Trello and Google Spreadsheet for this.
- Do you have someone go through your content, proofread it, and edit it? You need a native for this.
- In addition to text, your site could also use some nice visuals and videos. If you agree, then it helps to figure out who will be helping you make them.
- How do you plan to address your audience? Will you be taking a formal or casual approach?
- What constraints are you likely to experience?
Step 8: Create a Link Building Strategy
Unless you’re an established brand, your site is not going to attract backlinks naturally. You have to develop a link-building strategy for this. So how do you plan to gain these links?
Remember: You’re creating a link-building strategy for each market. And no two markets are the same.
How is International SEO Different from Regular SEO?
Take a look at this table that highlights key differences and emphasizes the complexities of international SEO compared to local SEO.
| Local SEO | International SEO | |
| Primary Focus | Optimizing for local search engine visibility and performance | Optimizing for global search visibility across multiple countries |
| Language | Typically focuses on one language, localized for a specific region | Requires translation and localization of content for different languages |
| Target Audience | Usually focused on a single market or geographic region | Focused on multiple markets, each with unique audience preferences |
| Website Structure | Single website optimized for one region or country | Multiple localized websites, each optimized for a different country |
| Brand Messaging | Tailored to a specific local audience | Needs to be adapted for different cultures, languages, and expectations |
| User Experience (UX) | Designed for a local audience with specific preferences | Tailored UX for each market to match local user behavior and cultural norms |
| Search Engines | Primarily optimized for a specific search engine (e.g., Google in one region) | Needs to optimize for different search engines in various countries (e.g., Baidu in China, Yandex in Russia) |
| Competing Websites | Risk of competing with other local competitors | Risk of competing against your own websites if not properly optimized for different markets |
| Indexing Issues | Focuses on ensuring the site is indexed by local search engines | Requires careful use of hreflang and canonical tags to avoid indexing issues and duplicate content |
| Success Metrics | Measured by local rankings, traffic, and conversions | Success varies by country, with separate metrics for each localized version of the website |
Identifying Opportunities for International SEO
After assessing your business and establishing that there’s a lot to gain by investing in international SEO, the next thing you want to do is identify some of the available opportunities for international SEO.
Here’s How to Go About It
Assess your Business Model
This is where you take an in-depth look at your business model. You have a few essential questions to answer regarding this:
- How does your company or business operate online?
- What online business goals do you have?
- How do you deliver your products or services?
- Do you offer local services, or are your services completely site-based?
- Are you in a position to deliver your products or services globally?
- What business constraints do you have?
These questions are to help you understand the implications of globalising your business right from the beginning. They’re to help you save a lot of your time and resources.
You have to carefully evaluate your business for its weaknesses and strengths to avoid incurring unnecessary international SEO expenses
Assess Your Potential for International SEO
The next thing you want to do is evaluate the potential of your site for international SEO.
The easiest way to do this is to go through your Google Analytics data: – Audience ~> Location.
This is a great option for discovering which country your site visitors are coming from.
To view your visibility in organic search listings, add organic traffic as the second dimension.
The next thing would be to check out your language information. Go to Audience ~> Overview ~> Location Report. This should give you an idea of how to approach multilingual SEO.
There’s a chance for you to go even deeper. You can check the traffic sources for each country and language. Go to Acquisition ~> All Traffic ~> Channels.
Now go ahead and click on “Organic Search,” followed by “Source” as the primary dimension.
It’s safe to say that Google has critical information that you can use to determine whether or not international SEO is a worthy investment for you.
Look into Other Search Engines, not just Google
Google might be the leading search engine globally, but it’s not the only one with potential.
It’s the most popular search engine in most countries, but not quite as popular in a few.
For example:
- The most popular search engine in Russia is Yandex (with a 60% market share).
- The most popular search engine in South Korea is Naver (with a 70% market share).
- The most popular search engine in China is Baidu (with an 80% market share).
As you can see, it’s critical to find out which search engine is popular in your target country. You also want to research this search engine and figure out how to conduct your SEO operations best.
Research the International Search Market
Still, to identify international SEO opportunities, you have to research the international search markets. Remember: keyword research tends to vary from country to country, and it’s very different from what you’re used to in regular SEO.
Be sure to research potential search phrases, organic traffic, behaviours, and potential competitors. You need a keyword research tool such as SEMrush to help you out with this.
You also want to evaluate the keywords that you already rank for – again, SEMrush is the tool for this. Just click on “Top organic keywords” to pull up a complete list of keywords you already rank for. Next, go ahead and evaluate these keywords for their search volumes, keyword difficulty, CPCs, and competition.
Since you’re just starting, we’d like to assume you’re not ranking in any keywords. That means you can only conduct a competitive analysis of other similar websites. Use Alexa to check out the top 500 websites for each territory or country.
Keyword Research Tools for International SEO
- Ubersuggest
- Google Trends
- Google’s Global Market Finder – a great tool for researching international opportunities.
- Search Metric Essentials
How do Search Engines Determine Your International SEO Target Audience?
What happens when it’s now part of search engines to do their job?
In an ideal world of marketing, search engines must appropriately rank your website for its intended audience. The problem is that there isn’t such a thing.
Search engines depend on you to feed them with hints of what you think your target audience might be.
Let’s go through some of these hints and find out how they impact your international SEO effort:
| Description | Impact on International SEO | Search Engines Affected | |
| Content Analysis | The language your content is written in (e.g., American English vs. British English). | Helps search engines determine the most appropriate audience based on language and dialect differences. | Google, Bing, Yandex |
| Domain Hints (ccTLDs) | Country-code Top-Level Domains (e.g., .au for Australia, .sg for Singapore) | Signals to search engines that your content is targeting specific regions based on the domain extension. | Google, Bing, Yandex |
| Backlink Profile | The geographical origin of the backlinks to your site. | Search engines infer the target audience by analyzing the region where most backlinks originate. | Google, Bing, Yandex |
| Hreflang Hints | HTML attribute that indicates the language and target region of your content. | Helps search engines serve the correct language version of your content to users in different regions. | Google, Yandex (but not Bing or Baidu) |
| Content Language HTML Attribute | HTML attribute specifying the primary language of the page content. | Ensures that search engines like Baidu and Bing recognize the correct language of the content. | Baidu, Bing |
| Webmaster Tools | Geotargeting and language settings in Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console. | Provides search engines with explicit information about the geographical and linguistic target of your content. | Google, Bing |
| Business Listings | Listing your business on Google My Business or Bing Places. | Gives search engines geographical clues about your target audience based on your local business listing. | Google, Bing |
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is it important to understand cultural differences in International SEO?
Recognizing the importance of cultural differences plays a crucial role in achieving effective communication and consumer involvement when it comes to International SEO, as this guarantees that your content is pertinent and appealing to local viewers.
Adapting your strategy to accommodate cultural subtleties can markedly improve the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
How do hreflang tags help in International SEO?
Hreflang tags play a crucial role in international SEO, indicating to search engines the specific language and regional focus of web pages. This helps avoid problems with duplicate content while making sure that users receive content that is most appropriate for their geographic location.
By adopting this strategy, not only is user experience optimized, but it also boosts the search rankings across various regions.
What are the benefits of using a Content Delivery Network (CDN)?
Incorporating a CDN into your website can drastically improve its performance. It achieves this by cutting down on loading times, increasing user satisfaction and safeguarding against DDoS attacks – benefits that can contribute to better SEO rankings.
Thus, implementing a CDN is a wise decision for any site looking to enhance its online visibility and effectiveness.
How can keyword research tools aid in International SEO?
Essential for bolstering your international SEO strategy, tools such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Google Keyword Planner provide critical insights into search volumes and competitive landscapes. They facilitate the identification of popular terms within distinct regions, enabling you to refine your content optimization effectively for a variety of global audiences through precise keyword research.
What should be included in an International SEO checklist?
Certainly, an effective international SEO checklist ought to incorporate the choice of a suitable URL structure and the undertaking of comprehensive keyword research. It’s also important to localize content appropriately while ensuring hreflang tags are in place.
It’s advisable to employ a Content Delivery Network (CDN), keep track of website performance vigilantly, and focus on cultivating domain authority as strategies for expanding your global presence.
