International SEO for the Global Market

International SEO is generally an untapped area for many businesses. Did you know that 2 out of 3 search engine queries are not in English? Staggering!. Now just imagine the boost you can give your brand visibility and reach by incorporating global SEO strategies into you English site.

I’ll attempt to lay down some tips and strategies for global search engine optimization.

The first step is the most obvious one. Use local domain extensions to complement ‘.com’ extensions. For example, if you are trying to optimize your website for ‘Google France’ you could reach local France audience better by adding in a .fr extension. Google also looks at the IP address of the server before it determines geographical relevance to your website.

Many webmasters do a basic word to word translation using translation software or ‘price’ based translators to cater to a foreign audience. Word to word Google translation will simply not cut it and will in all likelihood read incorrectly to your target market. Anyone who has seen foreign language translations to English will know what I am saying. You may get visitors but the odds of converting a visitor to a customer will be slim. So, if you aim to reach customers speaking foreign languages consider using a translator who is certified in the language pair you are targeting. Additionally, make sure they have relevant industry experience and, of course, understand local SEO algorithms.

For off-page marketing of your multilingual site. The number and quality of incoming links greatly influences your rankings on Google. Google has also put favourable weight towards faster loading sites,  so if your pages are ‘lightweight’ in terms of graphics, images etc and there is diversity in your incoming links and you get placed on foreign websites(.fr, .ca), Google will view your website to be more relevant on those local keywords you are targeting.

Always make sure that the websites you link to are within a related niche, or else it can be counter productive to your rankings. Localize your marketing as much as possible.

To receive location specific results, many users search by appending their country name to the end of the keyword(for ex iphone Canada). So you should consider optimizing some of your web pages with that criteria in mind.

Always consider local keyword competition. It doesn’t make sense to only check on the keywords within US if you are planning to target a foreign langauge audience. Even among English speaking countries there exists some diversity in terms of usage and spellings, not to mention sub language markets. For example in some European and Asian countries the word ’shop’ is widely accepted more often than the word ’store’ (US based).

The internet is a wonderful low-cost advertising and marketing tool. With efficient Multilingual SEO one can reach global audiences. Online marketing can beat most other forms of marketing for value, cost effectiveness and reach and one must take all steps to tap the potential as mature industries certainly need to take explore foreign language channels to diversify it’s customer base.

A final note, Google is the undisputed leader on a global scale but it is not the only search engine and definitely doesn’t enjoy undisputed success in some markets like China. So target other search engines too and give your website traffic a boost.