4 SEO Tips to Know When Going International

So, you’ve made it to the big leagues and decided it’s time for an international expansion. You’re now faced with something more complex and intimidating than anything you’ve ever seen—international SEO.

When it comes to your marketing strategy, you’re essentially starting from scratch. Your international audience is a different group of people altogether, and what worked for your local audience might not work for them. Even your keywords will need to be adjusted—you need to come up with country-specific keywords that will rank you higher on their search engines rather than yours.

So, without further ado, here is a foundational crash course on international SEO from an SEO company in Los Angeles. 

1. Change Your URL Structure for International Pages

The first thing you need to think about when going international is establishing the right URL structure. This is so you can develop a landing page that’s optimized for your international users and signify that the content is for them too.

There are several ways to get a country-specific URL. Let’s use Canada as an example.

• Country code top-level domain (ccTLD): www.website.com.ca
• Country-coded subdomain: ca.website.com
• Subfolder: www.website.com/ca
• New domain: www.cawebsite.com

While most websites use ccTLD, ultimately, the decision is yours. Choose whatever is comfortable, but make sure you tell search engines which version to use when indexing your country-specific website.

2. Think About Your International User’s Experience

Once you’ve established your country-specific domain, it’s time to make sure your content is optimized for your target audience.

Now I know what you might be thinking—what would be the point of this? Surely targeting your international customers won’t be much different from targeting customers in the same country. But, there are a lot of things you need to consider.

For one thing, you need to think of the language you use. For example, while English is the most widely spoken language in the world, not everybody is fluent or comfortable speaking it. A typical Chinese person would probably know enough English to show you where the bathroom is but not enough to navigate through your website.

There’s also currency to think about. Sure, the US dollar is the currency of the globe, but not everybody uses it daily. Your customers will have to convert your dollar prices to their local currency every time they visit your website, and nobody has time for that.

And these are just two examples!

So, yes: always think about your target audience and what they need for a great user experience.

3. Know Your International Keywords

Just like how user experience differs by country, so do keywords. When you’re optimizing your content, you need to make sure the keywords you use are keywords your international users would actually search.

For example, aside from language, people could have different dialects or just call things different names. New Zealanders call bell peppers ‘capsicum’ while the British call elevators ‘lifts’. Another difference could be the climate—not a lot of people in tropical countries would search for heavy winter clothes.

As such, you need to do keyword research before developing your international website. That way, you can have a nice, long list of plausible keywords to refer to when you start expanding your business. Use tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Google Trends to find out trending searches in a particular country.

4. Build Links with Country-Specific Websites

Backlinks are super important for your SEO strategy. According to Los Angeles SEO experts, backlinking serves five purposes: they improve brand authority, drives external traffic to your website, serves as resource links, establishes relationships with other brands, and gets your name out there.

So, when you’re starting to build links for your international website, it’s important to build links with local websites that will help drive their traffic to your site and improve your visibility in the local area.

Additionally, it’s just a matter of consistency—if a French person looked through your site, clicked on your backlinks, and then is faced with English websites, then your backlinking was pretty useless.

You need to remember your target audience, what websites they’re coming from, what information they’ll want to read, what other websites they’ll want to visit, and much more.

Conclusion

Going international is a large and difficult endeavor, but it will be all worth it in the end. You’re exposing yourself to a larger audience and finding new opportunities to expand your business! At the end of the day, just remember the basic principles of marketing—know your target audience and aim to give them the best user experience possible.