International expansion offers significant opportunities for business growth and increased market share. That’s not us making a sales pitch to convince you that international SEO efforts are the way to go for your business as we move into 2025.
Around 72% of business owners told Equinix they were going to push ahead with global expansion in 2022, despite a major economic hangover from COVID-19. If you’re among those considering international expansion, remember that a strong Global SEO strategy will be vital for reaching and engaging customers in new markets.
What is Global SEO?
Let’s say that you sell electronic gadgets in the U.S. You’ve done pretty well in what you would consider your “local” market and you feel like it’s time to expand your business into another country. While your current SEO practices work well domestically, they won’t automatically help you overseas. Your new target audience may not speak the same language as your current customers and their preferences, expectations, and online behaviors may differ.
In a nutshell, your site isn’t optimized for international markets.
Global SEO solves this problem by incorporating strategies and techniques needed to optimize your website for visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) across multiple countries and languages.
3 Benefits of Global SEO
Global SEO helps you to achieve higher rankings in international search engines. Your improved performance feeds into other benefits directly impacting your company’s bottom line.
Increased Visibility
The natural result of getting better in international search results is that you get more eyeballs on your website. Let’s say you have a U.S. company that wants to expand into China, meaning Baidu will be your new global SEO target. The U.S. has about 335 million people. China has 1.4 billion. You’re getting in front of an audience four times the size of the one you have now while keeping the original market. Granted, you’ll distill this down to a target audience based on your product or service, but the fact remains that you get in front of more people, which leads to…
Expanded Customer Base
Improved search engine visibility in international markets leads to increased website traffic and a growing customer base. Think about it like this: the first result in a Google search on a desktop receives 32% of the clicks. If your website reaches the first position on Google, more people will see you and click on your site. That larger base also creates a more extensive feedback loop for your business. You gain valuable customer insights, which enhances your market research and allows for a faster expansion later.
Ability to Speak to Your Audience in Their Own Language
“Why not just let my audience use Google Translate to transform my website into one that uses the same language they speak?” Good question. Google Translate – though effective as a general tool – lacks the linguistic nuance that hiring native-speaking translators to adapt your content for local search engines provides. A lack of nuance leads to unintentional misrepresentation of your content. Global SEO solves this problem by ensuring you speak to your audience not only in their language but an authentic version of that language.
Local SEO vs Global SEO
We’ll preface this by saying that both local and global SEO can be massively important to your company’s SEO strategy. But they’re very different. Where global SEO focuses on reaching an international audience based on your expansion targets, local SEO is about success in specific geographic locations. It’s the difference between targeting China (global) and Milwaukee, Wisconsin (local). With that difference in targeting also come some changes to strategy.
Local SEO
- Keyword research on the local level (i.e., plumbers in Milwaukee)
- A focus on building relevant citations on local directories, including your business name, address, and phone number
- Geo-targeting that pushes visitors to location-specific pages on your website
Global SEO
- Localized content adapted to the languages used in your selected part of the global market
- Hreflang tags to guide search engines to the version of your site relevant to your target countries
- Potentially a different URL structure depending on how you internationalize your site
How to Create a Global SEO Strategy in 6 Steps
Now that you understand the basics of global SEO in terms of how it increases your online visibility in new markets through language targeting strategies, let’s build on this foundation and explore how to create a winning international SEO strategy.
1. Pick the Countries and Languages You want to Target
You can’t think about improving international SEO performance or start translating your content into another language before you pick the countries you want to target. Your previous sales data can help you decide which products to target with your global SEO.
Is there a local demographic that aligns with a country into which you could expand, i.e., your product sells well among Chinese-American consumers if you’re based in the U.S.? That’s a potential indicator that the product would also do well if sold in China. Your existing target audience can lead you to different countries that would welcome your product.
One piece of advice – start small and expand over time. Trying to expand your SEO strategy to be truly global to the point where you try and account for every country is costly and painful from a workload perspective. Choose a country (two if you feel ambitious) and expand. As you achieve success in these markets, you can then start looking even further afield.
2. Develop an Extensive Content Strategy
Content is king. It’s a saying that’s practically as old as SEO itself, but it remains a fact that high-quality content will always be one of the primary drivers of organic traffic to your website. That’s as true internationally as it is domestically. Compare content marketing to traditional outbound marketing and you see this in action. Good website content can deliver three times as many leads as outbound strategies while costing your business 62% less.
You need a strong content strategy for global SEO, with these key approaches feeding into that strategy.
Keyword Research with a Global Focus
You’re still shooting for strong keyword rankings with global SEO. However, your approach to achieving those rankings may need to be adjusted. Maybe searchers in your new market are more grammatically correct with their search queries than in your existing market, or they use different terminology for the product you’re selling. These differences can only be discovered when you conduct keyword research.
Hiring Native Speaking Translators
We mentioned this earlier – native-speaking translators capture the language nuances that tools like Google Translate miss. Not only does a proper translation mean your content lands better with your new audience but it’s better for search engine optimization, too. We refer back to the keyword research points above. Your website’s visibility in search is impacted by the specific language your new target audience uses and your content has to reflect that nuance.
Identifying Pages That Will Drive Business
Information from the Google Search Console linked to your site, as well as your Google Analytics account, helps you dig into the best-performing pages on your existing website. You’re looking for pages with high view counts and low bounce rates. Any that convert – i.e., lead to a sale or a sign-up for newsletters and the like – are also great pages primed for your international content strategy.
Blog Content Localization
We’ll keep this one simple – companies that add blogging into their global content marketing strategy get 67% more leads than those that don’t and have a 434% higher chance of being ranked well in search engines. You have hired native-speaking translators already, so get them to work on your existing blog posts and use their skills to create more blogs (incorporating relevant keywords) for your new international audience.
Bonus Tip: Using Videos
When you think of “content,” you might limit yourself to what you write for web pages and blog posts. Don’t place those limits on your business. Video is just as powerful a tool as your written content, especially when you create video content in the language of the new country you’re targeting. The stats bear this out too – 78% of marketers say that using video has helped them improve sales.
3. Build Your Site & Structure To Support Global SEO
Expanding your reach globally impacts your website’s domain and URL structure. You have several options for implementing these changes, each with the goal of clearly communicating to search engines the target language and region of your website.
Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs)
Every country has a ccTLD – think .fr for France or .co.uk for the United Kingdom. While ccTLDs offer clear geo-targeting and can potentially enhance trust with local users, they may not directly guarantee better international SEO rankings. This means that you will need to start from scratch when building domain authority in another language.
Example – www.yourbusiness.fr
Subdomains
Using subdomains for different language versions of your website can help preserve authority built via your main domain. It’s a lot easier to set up a portion of your site to target a particular country with this method and you can take advantage of regional hosting options. Just be wary when implementing hreflang – you’ll have to go deeper with these tags to specify subdomains as alternate versions of pages and identify the languages in which they’re written.
Example – fr.yourbusiness.com
Subdirectories
Like subdomains, subdirectories let you keep your existing domain authority and are easy to set up and manage. However, you lose out on the geo-targeting front as search engines struggle a little more with ranking these types of pages.
Example – www.yourbusiness.com/fr
Generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) with Language Parameters
Again, you’re keeping hold of your domain authority and getting a simple way to adapt your website to appeal to multiple countries with the gTLD option. You just may not see your site appear as you’d like in search engine results pages. URL confusion can abound with this approach and your geo-targeting won’t be as clear as with a ccTLD.
Example – www.yourbusiness.com/?lang=fr
Different Domain Names
You could just bite the bullet and build a brand new domain for your new audience. You’ll have to do this for every country into which you expand, losing existing domain authority along the way. However, starting from scratch isn’t necessarily a bad thing. You get to build a customized SEO plan for each domain, allowing you to tailor each domain to the dominant search engine for the country you’re targeting.
Example – www.yourbusinessfrance.com
4. Build Backlinks to Key Pages
A good link-building strategy is massively important for global SEO. Backlinks account for about 60% of the typical SEO strategy. Yet far too many businesses don’t build backlinks at all, preferring to focus on writing content rather than building domain authority through substantial and authoritative links.
A combined approach is the best way to achieve the search engine rankings you want with global SEO. Conduct a competitor analysis on the sites against which you’ll vie for position to see from which sources they get their backlinks. And remember the words we used above – “substantial and authoritative.” Good backlinking strategies focus on obtaining links from relevant and reputable websites, not spammy directories or link farms. It’s better to put in the research and get one high-quality backlink than it is to build dozens of poor ones that could put you in line for a Google penalty.
5. Technical SEO
So far, we’ve covered finding your international target market, creating an extensive content strategy, choosing a domain and URL structure, and building links. Next up, let’s handle the technical side of your global SEO strategy.
E-E-A-T
Experience. Expertise. Authoritativeness. Trustworthiness. Combine the four and you get E.E.A.T. – Google’s formula for what it wants to see in every piece of content you create. Your copy has to showcase your in-depth knowledge and experience within your specific field. It also needs to highlight your understanding of the target country’s culture, consumer behavior, and market nuances. This helps you establish authority and positions you as a trusted source of information within your industry and within the new market.
Hreflang
Hreflang is an HTML attribute that helps search engines understand the language and target region of your web pages. Both are vital for a global SEO strategy. For instance, the “hreflang=”es-mx” tab specifies that a page is written in the Mexican version of Spanish and is thus intended for a Mexican audience. Use these tags throughout your website on any page dedicated to an international audience.
SCHEMA
SCHEMA or schema markup is a type of code you add to your web pages to help search engines understand and categorize your content better. Search engines use schema markup to generate rich snippets, which your audience sees as a sign that you can be trusted. Think star ratings, product price and availability, contact information, article author information, and anything else that shows your website (and the business to which it’s connected) are real. Remember – E.E.A.T. This data feeds into that.
Site Speed
A slow website can devastate an otherwise effective international SEO strategy. Say you have an e-commerce site. A massive 40% of your visitors will bounce – meaning they leave your website completely – if your shopping cart takes more than three seconds to load. We recommend a regular SEO audit to uncover issues (such as unoptimized images and messy code) that slow your site down.
Core Web Vitals
Rolled out in March 2024, Interaction to Next Paint (INP) is an important Core Web Vitals metric that measures a web page’s responsiveness to user interactions to evaluate how well (or otherwise) a visitor interacts with a page. This includes mouse clicks, taps on touchscreens, and key presses on keyboards. It’s a complex metric, but the general rule is that high latency between user interactions and the visual feedback from the page impacts user satisfaction negatively and can affect your search rankings. Optimizing for INP involves minimizing delays in page responses to user actions, ensuring a smooth and engaging user experience across all your pages.
6. Track Performance Over Time
To truly succeed on the global scale with your SEO, you have to track performance using these three tools:
- Google Analytics – Your main source of data for user behavior on your website (remember Core Web Vitals) and information about where your website traffic comes from.
- User Experience/User Recordings – What better way to track your website’s performance than to ask users directly? Surveys and feedback forms will help you understand what your website visitors like or don’t like about your site, which can give you ideas on what to implement to appeal to the local culture.
- Keyword Tracking – There’s no point in implementing what amounts to an international SEO checklist if you’re not tracking the performance of your site for its target keywords. Tools like Semrush and Ahrefs offer automated trackers if you don’t want to handle this task manually.
Unleash Your Site’s Potential With Global SEO
Adapting your website – or rebuilding it from scratch – to account for cultural nuances lies at the heart of global SEO. However, traditional SEO practices, particularly on the technical and content creation fronts, are still as important as they’ve always been. Linkflow can help you with both – Book a call with our SaaS SEO agency today.
