have you ever thought about having your website reach other parts of the world? Have you ever thought about selling your products or services in other countries? If so, we want to tell you that it is possible to do it, as long as you take into account how international SEO works. Would you like to know how to do it? Keep reading!
what is international SEO ?
First of all, before we start talking about what international SEO is and how it works, we must distinguish this SEO from the local or national SEO we are used to. If you have a website about an online business, you are probably developing a local SEO campaign or a national SEO campaign. For example, if your website is about a beauty salon in Madrid, what you want is to be positioned organically at a local level, so that users from this city find you more quickly. However, it would not make sense to direct your SEO action to position yourself in other cities far away, such as Seville, for example.
On the other hand, national SEO is commonly used by all those online businesses in our country that want to appear in the first Google search results when a user searches for any of the keywords related to their products or services.
Finally, we can talk about international SEO, on which we are going to focus our post to explain how to carry out such a campaign for your company. Well, when we want to expand our business, to reach other countries, that our brand makes a niche at an international level, we must work on SEO to position ourselves correctly.
To carry out our SEO positioning campaign we will not do anything special different that we have not already worked on our local or national SEO, however, we must take into account some aspects that will influence our organic positioning.
For example, when we carry out an SEO campaign in Spain, almost all our action is focused on the main search engine, which is Google. Google is the most used search engine worldwide, it is true, but there are also other commonly used search engines in other countries, and we must take this into account.
In addition to taking factors like this into account, we must follow a series of steps for our strategy to work and have an impact in other countries.
We are going to describe below some of the steps and aspects that you should take into account so that your international SEO campaign is as optimal as those of national or local SEO, which you are probably already carrying out. It is just a matter of adapting to new circumstances and working on what we already have in order to achieve greater success.
how to run an international SEO campaign?
When we want to carry out an international marketing campaign, in this case based on SEO positioning, we must take into account several factors:
- Study the audience: As you can imagine, national and international audiences are not the same. Depending on the country and culture, market trends will be different. Therefore, you must understand what interests the new international audience you are going to target from now on: how they speak, what expressions they use, what devices they most frequently use to search for products on the internet, etc.
- Study the competition: When we launch a product or service in Spain, we usually know our competition and which companies we should "overtake". The same thing happens in international SEO. Analyse what content they work with and how they do it to help you in the previous point of knowing the audience of the country in question. This will help you to evaluate how you can improve that content to obtain a better positioning.
- Translation of content: As we have already mentioned, one of the main goals is to reach a global audience. Therefore, we must adapt our commercial campaign to the different languages spoken in the countries where we want to advertise. However, it is not just a matter of translating our campaign from the original language to the new one, but of adapting it to the cultures of that country, as well as to their tastes and preferences.
We must not forget that, despite the advent of globalisation, each country has its own traditions, culture, trends, etc., which are different from the others.
- Adaptation of the content: Depending on the cultures and trends of each country, the topics and keywords most consulted in search engines will vary, which is why there will be keywords that are highly searched in one country, but not so much in another.
However, there will be keywords that are popular in more than one country. In these cases it is very important not to automatically translate the content. For example, although Spanish is spoken in Spain and Latin America, the same words and expressions are not used. This is why it is recommended to localise the content, i.e. adapt it to the audience in each country.
- Preparing our website: It is not necessary to create different websites for each country, i.e. with a different domain for each of them. You can use, for example, subdomains or subdirectories. You can choose the one that best suits your needs: if you want to sacrifice a little SEO in exchange for having more capacity for movement and versatility, you can choose subdomains (e.g. www.es.wordpress.com). If, however, you have the necessary resources and want greater SEO, you can choose subdirectories (e.g. www.wordpress.com/es).
- Social networks: The last aspect to bear in mind is that we must also adapt the strategy of our social networks: use the networks that are used in the country in question, adapt the language, offer what interests the public in each country... There are companies, such as Netflix, that have an account for each country in which it is positioned (@netflix.es, @netflix.mex) or you can use the same one, but it will be more complicated as you have to create different publications and the public will not know which one to identify with.
The best thing to do is to have a main account and depending on each country, one with its language, the memes from there, etc...
what do you think of these tips to develop your international SEO campaign? We hope we have encouraged you to launch your products and services beyond the borders of your country. Good luck!
