Benefits of International SEO

What are the main benefits of international SEO?

If you have a local business that you want to ramp up globally, you should consider implementing effective international SEO practices on your website. You need to follow up on several steps, some of which would be time-consuming, but the benefits would be worthwhile. The biggest gain to your website would be getting a lot of global customers.

Getting a lot of international customers from your website improves your marketing efficiency and effectiveness. That’s not all. You also get a lot of customer insights about your global consumers. You can now know their age, gender, location, purchase intent, and several other pieces of marketing information. Use all this data to fine-tune your international SEO strategy.

History of International SEO

International SEO has a pretty recent history. In 2006, Google ramped up its global SEO practices by focusing on Eastern Europe. The following year, it began promoting international domain names. Between 2007 and 2008, Google started providing support to geo-targeting in WMT. If there was no geo-targeting, search engines relied upon ccTLDs and servers. In 2008, Google launched Google Translate.

In 2010, international SEO efforts got a major boost when Google started looking for juices and links from NAP, local business listings, currencies, etc. Somewhere before 2011, hreflang tags were introduced. Next year, Google started using these tags in multiregional and multilanguage pages. The same year, canonical tag recommendation was removed by Google. This was a major milestone in global SEO.

In 2012, support for hreflang tags in XML pages started and the following year, 'x-default' hreflang tags were introduced. Meanwhile, Bing introduced its geo-targeting tool in its webmaster tools. In 2014, search engines began showing banners to the audience suggesting the availability of local pages. In 2014, Google introduced international targeting features in its Search Console.

What are the benefits of international SEO?

By going in for international search engine optimization, you are essentially improving your website visibility. This means people will see your website in other countries besides your host country. Increased visibility means increased visibility of your products and services. International SEO can connect your website with your target audience globally if done well.

With an effective international SEO strategy, you can discover what parts of your content is working and what isn’t. You can know precisely what stops your potential customers from proceeding to the sales cart, or if they do reach that stage, what stops your customers from making the purchase. Implement a solid global SEO strategy to improve your site's global time.

Sites that load quickly are more likely to be ranked higher by search engines. You can also optimize your site for various browsers like Chrome, IE, Firefox, Safari, etc. This means you are reaching out to all kinds of users using different browsers. International SEO also helps you determine how successful you are in acquiring organic visitors.

Strategies for global search optimization

Let's dive deep into some of the best domain strategies for your international SEO. We will also talk about their respective advantages and drawbacks. You can consider ccTLDs or country-specific- top-level-domains for your website, for example, for Australia, you can have .au, for UK, it would be .co.uk, and so on. This way, your site does well in rankings.

Another benefit is that customers prefer local websites while searching. However, having multiple local domains is quite expensive. Also, your SEO on your main website will not affect your local websites. You can add a folder or a subfolder to your domain, e.g. www.xyz.com/us. These domains can be countries or languages. Folders can be created only on TLDs.

When you have subfolders, any SEO on your main website helps these subfolders too. Also, your backlinking would work better. Lastly, this domain strategy is relatively less costly than having ccTLDs. One big problem with this strategy is that all your landing pages would compete with each other; the right LP may not get the right spot in the rankings.

Prod and Cons

Pros of ccTLD Cons of ccTLD

Pros of ccTLD

Having ccTLDs can help your website in rankings.
Local customers prefer visiting local websites.
Strengthen a company’s branding efforts.
Using a ccTLD may be a legal requirement for certain types of businesses.
ccTLD may be more readily available. This can be particularly useful if the desired domain name is already taken in other TLDs.

Cons of ccTLD

Subdomains in your international SEO strategy

Subdomains work when you want to add your country before your domain. However, this strategy works only with top-level domain websites like .com. For example, www.au.xyz.com is an example of this strategy. Some CMS tools have a default setting for subdomains, so this is one of good advantage of this strategy. Using this tactic, you can enter a new market easily.

If your main website ranks high in search engine rankings, you can ride on its goodwill while entering a new overseas market. However, search engines treat links in the drop-down as external links, which may harm your overall ranking. Also, users are less likely to associate your domain with that location because the language description starts immediately.

There are other disadvantages too. For example, there is no link to the search engines with the targeted location. Another weakness of the subdomain strategy is that search engines like Google will feature just one subdomain from your overall site. There will be competition among all your subdomains, and this won't help your search rankings much.

Global search engine optimization checklist

Your website must have a search engine-friendly structure. Your website must target the relevant international audience if you are going global. There are numerous ways by which you can find your global buyers. Identify the right keywords by researching search-engine-ranking pages. Using these results, populate your keywords into your website. Manage the multilingual pages of your website.

An important decision for you regards language versus location targeting. Find out which strategy works well for you. You must allow users to choose their language pages easily on the website. The language dropdown menu should be easy to locate. Does your website have a short and simple URL? This URL must be descriptive enough for your users.

Please ensure your website is mobile-friendly and loads quickly. To optimize your website, you may consult several resources on the net. An important part of your international SEO is that your content must be localized. If you are using videos, please optimize them. Use clean titles, meta tags, and hreflang tags to avoid duplicate content.

Final international SEO checklist

H1, H2, H3, and H4 tags are key to your content strategy. Use these tags properly for better results. Optimize your Image Alt tags. If you have lots of text and other forms of content in your website, please interlink all of that through SEO-friendly anchor texts. Identify bad redirects and fix them periodically.

Additional steps for your international SEO strategy

You should connect your website with other similar but complementary websites. While linking, please ensure that those websites have good quality. Linking with bad-quality websites may destroy your credibility. You may also consider periodically fixing various crawling errors, broken links, and other kinds of errors. In addition, please pay attention to local, regional and country-specific citations on your website.

Benefits of international SEO and hosting

An important question to be answered is where should your web host be located. This is an important issue, though not critical. Many experts say that for getting global traffic, the location of your website host server is an important signal. The alternate view is that there are far more important signals for geotargeting. However, your server location does impact site load times.

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Benefits of International SEO - FAQ

How does International SEO help?

International SEO helps businesses reach new audiences and expand their customer base by making it easier for users in other countries to find and interact with their websites.
International SEO expands the reach, increases visibility, and ultimately drives more sales by making their website more visible and accessible to users in different countries and languages.

What is TLD or Top Level Domain?

What is ccTLD?

ccTLDs are made up of two letters corresponding to the ISO 3166-1 country code standard, such as .fr for France, .uk for the United Kingdom, .jp for Japan, etc.

Using a ccTLD for your website can help it rank better in search results for users in that specific country. Google often prioritise websites that use a ccTLD, as it is a strong indicator that the website is relevant to the country where the domain extension is used.

However, it’s worth noting that using a ccTLD doesn’t automatically guarantee a ranking boost or visibility improvement.

What is a subdomain?

A subdomain is a way to divide a larger domain into smaller sections or sections that have specific functions. A subdomain is a domain that is part of a larger domain. It is created by adding a prefix, such as “sub1”, “sub2”, etc., to the main domain name. Subdomains are separated from the main domain by a period (.).

For example, consider the domain “example.com”. A subdomain of this domain might be “sub1.example.com” or “sub2.example.com".

A common use of subdomains is organising a website into different sections, each with its specific focus.
A few examples to use subdomains are:
shop.domain.com
blog.domain.com
fr.domain.com
de.domain.com

The examples above also show how websites can use subdomains to categorise their website for international SEO. "fr.domain.com” for French-language content and another “de.domain.com” for German-language content.

Some other use cases of subdomains include:

Creating a testing environment: developers may use a subdomain to test a new feature or fix bugs before making it live.
Hosting different software or services: a subdomain for a specific platform that the website uses, such as a CMS or a forum.
Create a distinct identity for an audience, such as a student or employee portal subdomain.

However, it’s worth noting that using subdomains can also affect SEO and website visibility in SERP, as search engines may treat subdomains as separate entities. Hence, it’s important to ensure that your subdomains are correctly set up, and that search engines can crawl them and index them appropriately.

What does the hreflang tag do?

The hreflang tag is an HTML tag that helps search engines understand a webpage’s language and intended geographic audience. It’s particularly useful for websites with content in multiple languages or targeted at users in different countries.

The hreflang tag is placed in the head of a webpage and indicates to search engines the page’s language and intended geographic audience. It has the following format:

If you have a webpage that is written in French and is targeted at users in France, you would include the following hreflang tag at the head of the page:

This tells search engines that the page is in French and intended for users in France.

The hreflang tag can also indicate that the same page is available in multiple languages. For example, if you have a French version of the page and an English version, you would include the following hreflang tags at the head of each page:

This tells search engines that both pages are available in different languages and that they should serve the appropriate version of the page to users based on their language and location.

It’s worth noting that the hreflang tags must be added to both the HTML head of the page and the HTTP header so that both Googlebot and users’ browsers can discover the correct page.

Furthermore, the hreflang tags can be defined in the HTTP header using the link attribute, which allows to manage multiple rel-alternate-hreflang across multiple pages rather than adding them individually to each webpage.

Using hreflang tags correctly is crucial for a website to ensure it is showing the correct page version to the right audience, which leads to a better user experience and can improve the website’s visibility in search results.

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