With the world more interconnected than ever, a website plays a crucial role in the success of any business looking to expand internationally. However, even the most beautifully designed website cannot guarantee success unless it attracts visitors. To truly thrive in the global marketplace, you need to optimize your website for international SEO.

International SEO is one of the most effective ways to leverage natural search to reach your target audience in different countries. This comprehensive guide explores the concept of international SEO, why it’s essential for global businesses, and how to create an effective international SEO strategy for long-term success.

What is International SEO?
International SEO is the practice of optimizing your website to make it more visible and rank higher in search engines across multiple countries and languages.

International SEO ensures that search engines can easily identify the country your business is targeting. It also informs search engines about the language you are using to attract customers from different countries.

Whether you are a fashion brand looking to reach a global audience or an e-commerce company targeting specific countries, international SEO can help boost your global online visibility.

How does International SEO work?
Google and other search engines are designed to match search results with the language and location of the user. International SEO works by letting search engines know that your website has content relevant to searchers in a specific country, or users searching for products or services like yours in a specific language.

International SEO uses country or language targeting, hreflang tags, designated URL structure, and other localization signals to target content to users worldwide.

How is international SEO different from local SEO?
Although both international SEO and local SEO aim to improve a website’s visibility on search engines, there are some key differences between the two concepts.

Local SEO targets keywords and audiences in a specific area
-Website content is optimized to attract local customers.
-Specific location information, such as city or region name, may be incorporated into your content and metadata.
-Includes optimizing your website for local directories and listings, such as Google My Business, to improve visibility in local search results.

International SEO targets keywords and audiences across geographical areas
-A more comprehensive approach is taken to cater to multiple languages, cultures, and markets.
-In addition to language considerations, international SEO involves adapting content and websites to different cultural norms and preferences.
-Websites are also customized to comply with applicable legal or regulatory requirements in different countries.

The ultimate goal of localization, present in both local SEO and international SEO, is to benefit the user, but it also helps convey the value of your website to search engines.

When search engines understand that you have localized content for specific countries, users will be directed to the most suitable versions of the website based on their location, thus improving the overall user experience for your customers in different markets.

Why is international SEO important for global businesses
If your competitors are not optimizing their content for certain countries or languages, you can capitalize on that by tailoring your content to those countries to attract more traffic and gain a competitive edge. Let’s dive deeper into the core benefits of international SEO for businesses seeking global expansion.

Reach a wider audience
With the global nature of the internet, the potential to reach a vast and diverse audience is immense. By implementing international SEO strategies, businesses can target specific markets and languages, allowing them to connect with potential customers around the world. This expanded reach can lead to increased traffic, brand exposure, and potential sales in various markets.

Increase organic traffic, conversions, and revenue
Appearing in search results for relevant keywords in different languages and locations can significantly increase organic traffic to a website. When international SEO is done correctly, it attracts users who are actively searching for products or services in their native language and region. This targeted approach can lead to higher conversion rates, ultimately boosting revenue and business growth.

Improve global brand visibility
Building a strong online presence across multiple countries and regions strengthens brand visibility and credibility on a global scale. When users consistently find a brand listed in search results in their native language, it builds trust and confidence in the brand’s legitimacy. Positive user experience and brand recognition foster loyalty and encourage word-of-mouth marketing, further solidifying the brand’s position in the international marketplace.

With these benefits, creating your own international SEO strategy is completely worth the time and investment.

How to create an effective international SEO strategy
After gaining a basic understanding, let’s consider the steps you can take to create an effective international SEO strategy.

To begin, it’s crucial to understand the current state of your website:

-Examine your website’s current organic traffic coming from different countries and languages. Utilize tools like Google Analytics to analyze the volume and trends of traffic and conversions by country and language.
-Assess your website’s organic search visibility in other countries. Google Webmaster Tools or dedicated SEO platforms can help you identify the most popular queries and pages appearing in search results for the countries you’ve previously identified.

Based on these insights, try to answer the following questions to define the scope of your international SEO strategy more effectively:

-What countries or regions do you want to target?
-What languages do your target markets speak?
-How will you handle website localization?

Outline your international SEO goals
Setting clear goals is essential for any SEO strategy, and international SEO is no exception. Having specific goals will provide direction and allow you to measure progress in improving your international SEO results:

-Increase website traffic: International SEO can help search engines find your website in various countries and understand its value for users.
-Generate leads: Attract qualified leads by following best practices for international SEO in content, website copy, website design, and every other aspect of your localized website.
-Increase sales: Effectively targeting your website through international SEO can help you reach potential customers and clients. Ultimately, utilizing international SEO naturally tends to increase sales over time.

Conduct market and competitor analysis
With your international SEO goals in mind, you can conduct thorough market research and monitor your competitors. Market research will reveal the preferences and behavior of your target audience in different countries or regions. Analyzing the SEO strategies of your competitors can help you differentiate yourself in each target market.

-Check your website’s current organic traffic from different countries and languages. Use tools like Google Analytics to analyze the volume and trends of traffic and conversions by country and language.
-Evaluate your website’s organic search visibility in other countries. Google Webmaster Tools or dedicated SEO platforms can help you identify the most popular queries and pages that might appear in search results in the countries you’ve previously identified.

Conduct keyword research for each target market
Keywords are a crucial component of any SEO strategy, and this also applies to international SEO. To effectively reach your target audience in different markets, you need to conduct separate keyword research for each market.

Keyword research will help you find the appropriate terms and phrases that customers in each market use when searching for products or services like yours. With this information, you can begin to create content and pages that are optimized for those keywords in the corresponding language.

Keywords should be translated—not just translated
Some keywords will be difficult to translate while others can be left as is and translated directly. Some international industries like medicine or IT, for example, commonly use English terms even if English is not the official language of that country, so translating these keywords would be pointless.

Understand what local users are searching for and adapt your keywords to fit local search patterns. For example, Mother’s Day in the US takes place on a completely different day than Mother’s Day in the UK. This means that users in both countries will be searching for Mother’s Day gifts in different months of the year.

Use tools like Google Ads Keyword Planner to learn the monthly search volume of keywords in relevant markets and incorporate the most relevant keywords into your international SEO strategy.

Decide between language or country targeting
No two international SEO approaches are the same. The approach you should adopt will heavily depend on your business goals, target customers, and resources.

When targeting an international audience, you have two options: language targeting or country targeting:

-Language targeting: If your target audience speaks the same language in multiple different countries, then language targeting is appropriate. This allows you to create content in one language to serve multiple markets.
-Country targeting: If each country or region has its own language, then country targeting is more appropriate. You’ll need dedicated country-specific websites and localized content for each country.

For example, content in Spanish can be used to target international Spanish-speaking audiences across different countries and regions.

You can use language targeting to reach Spanish speakers in general and use country targeting for Spain, where the dialect is different from the Spanish spoken in Latin America.

Similarly, if you want to target Portuguese speakers, you could decide to use country-specific targeting for Brazil or Portugal.

You could create separate content in Portuguese and Spanish, using international SEO to help search engines direct users to the right version of your website.

Tip: In an ideal strategy, you’ll target each country individually to make the biggest possible impact with your target audience. However, the feasibility of such a comprehensive strategy will heavily depend on your financial resources and technical capabilities.

Choose the right URL structure for your international website
Ideally, you should use dedicated URLs to avoid confusion between the original and localized content. Each URL links to a specific content page with content tailored to a specific language. Webmasters use a number of different URL structures to target specific markets and languages.

Let’s review the most common URL structures:

Country-Code Top-Level Domains (ccTLDs)
If you need websites designated for specific countries, having country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) might be the best solution. Domains such as example.es and example.fr send signals to search engines that these websites should be served to users in Spain and France.

However, since ccTLDs are separate domains, this strategy is often the most expensive and time-consuming. Each ccTLD domain needs its own digital PR, content marketing, and link building strategy. You also won’t be able to transfer any link acquisition efforts or domain authority gained from off-site activity on other websites.

Global Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) combined with subdomains
Global top-level domains (gTLDs) combined with subdomains like de.example.com allow for improved geographic targeting and boost brand recognition in each targeted market. However, challenges arise from technical setup and maintenance complexity, as well as potential SEO linking issues with subdomains.

gTLDs combined with subfolders
If your target audience’s location doesn’t affect your products and services, you can use one single domain and leverage subfolders (directories) to host your language-or country-specific pages: example.com/es/.

These strategies are often used by businesses that want to target users in a single market that uses multiple languages. They are also applied to geographic areas encompassing 2 or more countries speaking the same language, for example, Spanish-speaking Latin America.

gTLDs with a combination of subdomains and subfolders
gTLDs combined with subdomains and subfolders ( es.example.com/es-mx/) allow for flexible website organization: While subdomains enable more granular region targeting, subfolders organize content within the main domain.

Benefits include enhanced targeted marketing and streamlined navigation, making websites more relevant to specific audiences. However, they are quite complex to handle and have drawbacks to consider: cookie sharing, significant server resources, long URLs, and potentially diluted SEO.

With the advantages and disadvantages of each type of URL structure, you will want to carefully consider your business needs and projected growth into new markets when making your decision.

Using the hreflang attribute
The hreflang attribute tells the search engine what language your content is in and what geographic region it’s intended for. The hreflang attribute also helps you to avoid content duplication issues across different language versions of your website, i.e., for English pages designated for the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, used to target various locations.

You can implement the hreflang attribute by including it in any of the following:

-Your HTML
-Your XML sitemap
-Your HTTP headers

When using the hreflang attribute, adhere to the following best practices:

-Refer to both that page and its translations
-Use bi-directional hreflang references
-Accurately define the language and region combinations
-Always include hreflang=”x-default”
-Be consistent with the hreflang attribute and canonical URL
-Use absolute URLs when defining hreflang attributes
-Only apply one implementation method for the hreflang attribute

Include navigation menus and language switcher tools

Your international website should ideally have a navigation menu that lets users easily switch between languages when needed. Use clear and descriptive labels for each language and avoid using flags, especially in cases like Spanish, which is spoken in several countries with regional variations that a flag may not accurately reflect.

Avoid automatically redirecting users to a different language based on their location
While this may seem like the perfect solution, automatically redirecting visitors and/or search engines based on their IP address or browser settings can be annoying to users. It can also confuse search engines. In fact, it can lead to visitors and search engines never finding certain content.

Instead, let visitors and search engines know about the alternate version of your page by displaying a banner at the top or bottom of the page with a message and links to the suggested page.

Adapt your content to suit the local culture and preferences of the region
Your goal is to ensure that the content published on your country-specific pages is relevant to the local target audience. For example, content discussing winter fashion trends in Norway might not be relevant to website visitors from the Dominican Republic. That’s why it’s important to have truly customized content that benefits readers in each country.

This process of adaptation is called localization and there are several ways to do it. One option is to hire content creators in the corresponding language. However, this approach can be quite expensive. Another method involves professional linguists localizing your original content with the help of cloud-based translation technology.

For example, a translation management system streamlines the translation and localization process through intelligent automation, reducing manual or repetitive tasks. It can also seamlessly integrate into your digital ecosystem, ensuring a smooth workflow across your preferred software tools. TMS empowers you to own the process from start to finish, providing unmatched speed and control for the highest possible content translation quality.

Use a Content Delivery Network
Website speed is a crucial ranking factor for search engines like Google. To boost your search ranking in different countries, make sure your website loads fast from anywhere in the world.

By using a content delivery network (CDN), you can serve content faster and provide a seamless user experience, regardless of whether your user is in Shanghai or San Francisco. CDNs distribute website content from servers closer to users geographically, reducing latency and improving loading times.

Build Local Links to Your Website
Building local links in each of your target markets can help improve your website’s domain authority and website visibility in search results across markets. Collaborating with local influencers, writing guest posts on relevant websites, and participating in local directories are some effective ways to build local links.

For instance, if your website receives many backlinks from URLs ending with ".de," it signals to Google that your website is relevant to an audience in Germany. As a result, Google may rank your page accordingly on those local search results. Local links will have the biggest impact on search results, so you should take the time to build a strong link-building strategy for each page.

Leverage Social Media and User Reviews
Social media and user reviews can significantly impact your international SEO efforts. Not only can they strengthen your online reputation but also establish your brand as a trustworthy and reliable choice for international consumers.

Social media serves as a global hub for digital interactions, and engaging with your audience on platforms like Facebook, X, or Instagram in your target regions can amplify your online presence. You can expand your social reach by creating and scheduling social media posts, publishing fresh content, hosting online events, and more. It’s not just about name recognition but also about creating a personal connection with potential customers.

On the other hand, user reviews are like a universal language. Just like you might read product reviews before making a purchase, people all over the world do the same. Encouraging your customers to share their experiences can be incredibly valuable. These reviews act as trusted testimonials, building your credibility and creating trust for potential customers.

Tip: Make sure to use locally relevant social media channels in each target market: For example, Facebook and X are popular with consumers in the United States, while WeChat reigns supreme as the primary social media platform in China.

How to Measure Your International SEO Performance
After implementing your international SEO strategy, it is crucial to measure progress and evaluate the performance of your international SEO efforts. This will allow you to identify areas for improvement and further optimize your strategy.

Key Metrics to Consider When Measuring International SEO Performance
-Organic traffic: Track the number of organic visits from specific countries over a set period using tools like Google Analytics or other SEO analytics platforms.
-Country-specific keyword rankings: Monitor the ranking of your target keywords on popular search engines in each country to further optimize your localized content.
-Backlink analysis: Evaluate the quantity and quality of backlinks from domains across various countries and check their relevance and authority to assess the overall strength of your website.
-Localization: Assess what types of localized content users in each country engage with the most, and evaluate the effectiveness of language tags and hreflang attributes for accurate targeting.
-Competitor analysis: Compare your performance against competitors in every country by evaluating their keyword rankings, backlink profiles, and overall organic traffic to identify strengths and weaknesses.
-Bounce rate and time on site: Track how many visitors leave your website after viewing only one page and how long they stay on your website in each country.
-Conversion rate: Measure the percentage of visitors from different countries who perform a desired action (making a purchase, filling out a form, or similar).

By regularly monitoring and analyzing these metrics, you can gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of your international SEO strategy and make informed decisions to optimize your website for global success.

Expand your reach with international SEO
Optimizing your website for international SEO is essential to expanding your global reach. By understanding the nuances of your target markets and implementing effective international SEO strategies, you can attract a wider audience, increase traffic, and improve conversions.

Tailoring the user experience to the cultural and linguistic differences in your target markets and continuously analyzing performance will help you refine your international SEO strategy over the long term. With international SEO, your business will be better equipped to capture global opportunities.