What is global SEO? Tips for creating a winning strategy for international presence
Understanding the nuances of international SEO and optimizing content and strategy for creating your business’s global footprint.
What is global SEO?
Your business might be ready for the international market, but how do people across the globe get to know about what you have to offer? Your website might be out there but if it does not come up in online searches, it becomes futile. It is important to optimize the website so your brand reaches the first page of search results and slowly is among the top 5 positions for the primary keyword. To achieve this one need to adopt the global Search Engine Optimization SEO best practices and expand one’s ambit beyond the local markets. Adopting an international SEO strategy that takes into account the policies, processes, and practices that apply to other countries helps in your brand visibility. Search engines will identify where your business operations are based and what languages you support.Which businesses are suitable for Global SEO?
Global SEO works best for businesses with a global target audience. For example, beauty products, organic products, educational content, and other products or services need not be of localized interest. People all over the world might be typing in the keywords to get to the best source for their needs. Hence global SEO works very well once you decide who and where your target audience is. If your brand is to rule the global market, international SEO is for you. It also helps in building links with potential distributors and partners of your products in different countries.How does SEO work?
To understand how SEO works we need to understand that google returns a SERP Search engine results page when any user enters a query into the search bar. Google returns a lot many pages one after the other using a complex algorithm that determines the value the page has for the user. SEO makes it easier for visitors and search engines to find your content. Global SEO practices if followed well optimize your website content for the region and language so that it comes up in the search results.How to optimize the website for a better international Presence
- The first step is to list your target countries.
- Understand which search engine is more popular there. It need not necessarily be Google.
- Get to know the country-specific domains of the target search engines.
- Now list out your top three competitors and conduct a competitor analysis.
- Conduct an international keywords analysis.
- Get started with on-page optimization.
- Add fresh content in the desired language.
- Figure out your own site/URL
- Optimize meta tags
- Use keywords in the URL structure.
- Add your site to the search console and analytics Plan a multilingual content strategy
- Content should be optimized for the target region and the local language. The hreflang tag is an HTML attribute that specifies the language and geographic area of a webpage. This prevents from the web page being identified as duplicate content when similar web pages are targeted for niche audiences.
- After creating an SEO-friendly site structure plan global link acquisition strategies.