Secrets of International SEO : A Quick Guide to Getting Started with International SEO

International SEO best practices :

country targeting

language targeting or ccTLD

gTLD with language parameters

Different domain

Example hreflang tag :

A few other best practices:

specific country

language targeting only

Marketing Resources

International SEO is about promoting and optimizing your content to make the site visible to a target market or audience across multiple countries and/or languages.

Depending on your business objectives, your site just needs to provide specific content to specific language populations.

Think of a US company that only serves the US but still recognizes the need to cater to a Spanish-speaking population.

Or a Canadian organization that needs to attract both English and French speakers. Or maybe, you’re a multinational corporation with locations in multiple regions all around the world and you need to not only have content available in local languages but maybe even entire websites dedicated to these countries.

Not only would you need a French, but for Canada’s internationalization, you would also need a French version for France, and maybe business conditions to dictate what you can or can’t sell in each country.

Or if you’re a news publisher, you may have a completely different set of content country by country.

As you begin to develop your international SEO plan, you’ll need to make sure it reflects your business needs and think carefully about whether you’re marketing to specific languages, regions, or a combination of both.

If the goal of your business is simple to provide the same content in multiple languages, then you’ll be focusing on optimizing your site’s translated content to be found by search engines.

A multilingual website simply offers users a choice of more than one language. Search engines have come a long way concerning language detection.

And these days you can assume they’ll be able to easily pick up on the languages you have your content translated into.

But no matter how smart they might be, you’re still going to want to take advantage of some techniques to send strong signals and indicators for the language you’re using on a page of content including the target language and URL structure such as in a subdomain or subfolder .

There’s one tactic that tends to work very well for this. If you were a search engine crawling through these pages, the use of either a subfolder or subdomain with internationally recognized language codes would send you a strong language signal and help you index this content appropriately.

For multinationals and larger enterprises, however, we’ll have to be able to accommodate more than just a translation of the same content into different languages. Often there’ll be different offices operating in different countries with different business environments and your optimization efforts will be spent making sure visitors can discover and consume that regionalized content. And both their local region and their local flavor of language.

The Spanish spoken in Spain for example is very different from that of Mexico. And that’s a very different Spanish than what’s spoken in Argentina. You can see how all these combinations can become pretty complex but a simple example for North America would be a website targeting the Canadian and US markets.

Even though both are English-speaking countries, there are differences and nuances in the languages that publishers need to consider and address.

And when you do, you’ll find that citizens in the respective countries will appreciate the content for its relevance and readability and find it easier to discover your site and search engines. And of course, there are large markets of French speakers in Canada and Spanish speakers in the US that will need to be accommodated as well.

At this point, you’re hopefully realizing that there’s not a single right answer to the way you’ll handle language and country targeting but instead, this will largely be driven by your business model.

Whether your site’s focus is multilingual, multi-regional, or both, you’ll need to pay close attention to how it’s structured and how search engines can discover and understand your content so that they can deliver it to the target markets when they are searching.

If you are not sure about the opportunities in different countries or have some convincing to do with your bosses, it’s always a good idea to review some market reports, stats, and even your own website data. Here’s some information that you can use to decide or prioritize the countries/markets to go after.

Government and trade organization websites , such as Trade.gov and WTO.org provide the latest international business and trade news and statistics.