How can you optimize your website for international markets?
To help our readers as they think about SEO optimization on a global scale, we asked CEOs and marketing professionals this question for their best ideas on how to reach international markets via search traffic. Many ideas were shared, and from using automatic translation software to optimizing for local search engines, there are several keys that we spotlight below that will help companies as they establish themselves in foreign markets.
5 ideas for optimizing SEO for international markets:
- Use Automatic Translation Software
- Consider Cultural Differences
- Conduct Keyword Research for International Markets
- Focus on Real Visitors, Not Robots
- Optimize for Local Search Engines
Use Automatic Translation Software
Dale Reardon of All Accessibility Matters provides, “A fast, easy and affordable solution for improving your website for international markets is to use a tool such as Weglot.com for automatic translation. It’s a great tool because it works automatically with many CMS systems and can even work with completely custom websites, including Shopify.”
“A tool such as this automatically makes your site comply with best practices for multilingual SEO and website presentations. You’ll improve international traffic by having customers interact with content in their language. It can also allow manual editing of translations and integrations with professional translators if that is required for parts of the site. This improves accessibility and inclusion for your site visitors as they can browse and interact in their preferred language.”
Consider Cultural Differences
Sunny Kumar of TheWPX states, “One practical tip for optimizing your website for international markets is to ensure that your website is culturally relevant for your target market. For example, avoid using images or text that could be offensive in other cultures and think about users’ different needs and expectations in other markets. Finally, make sure to localize your website by including country-specific information such as currency, shipping options, and contact details.”
Conduct Keyword Research for International Markets
Shivanshi Srivastava of Loans UK comments, “Conducting keyword research can help you to optimize your website for international markets. It helps you find the right keywords for your campaign and drive leads interested in your business. f you want the best result for your campaign, focus on long-tail keywords that contain three or more words. They are specific and tell you exactly what your audience wants. Choose a native of the country to conduct keyword research.”
Focus on Real Visitors, Not Robots
Mike Quayle of Marketeering Group explains, “Technical adjustments are great (HREFLANG, canonical links, etc.), but the best method for optimizing a website for international markets is to adjust the content. Aim to make each international page at least 30% unique from other geo-targeted pages and ensure you mention the target market in major areas (meta title, main content area, header tags, etc.) Remember that Google looks for elements that are visible to a normal web user, not a search engine robot. So you’ll also want to have a clear language/region selector in the header/footer so the user can tell where they are in your international site structure.”
Optimize for Local Search Engines
Boye Fajinmi of TheFutureParty quotes, “International websites should optimize their SEO regarding the most popular search engines in each country they plan to do business in. Google is obviously still going to be a top contender globally, however, there are places in the world, Cuba, Iran, and several countries in Asia, such as China and South Korea for example, where Google is not the top search engine. Optimizing a website for Google searches and one or two other top search engines in each respective country will pay off. It will require a bit of research, but it will be worth the effort to ensure that your website achieves the best results in an international market.”
Special shout out to Terkel for their assistance in developing this article. Read more of Nativa’s Online Marketing and SEO articles.
