Have you seen high visitation to your website from other countries? Have you created international partnerships and now need to update your website to support your expansion? Are you looking to tap into a secondary language within your country? Global, multilingual, or international SEO can be a key to unlocking new and exciting markets for your products and services.
What is International SEO?
Global or international SEO is the art and science of getting your website to rank highly in search engines in different countries. Multilingual SEO is getting your site to rank in different languages, but the terms are often used interchangeably. Whichever term you use, the core concept is still the same: write content users want, leveraging terms they already use, and promote it to get links back, bringing users and signaling to search engines that your content is worthwhile. Most of the strategies you use for SEO with your current audience, you can use for an international audience as well: schema markups, internal linking strategies, pillar content are all still important, if not moreso.
The difference is that you’re going after international markets, which may require adjustments to your technology setup for different languages, market landscapes, and user needs. We’ll get into some of the differences later in this article.
Who Needs It?
You may need international SEO if you:
- Get significant traffic from other countries, but aren’t seeing high conversions from those specific countries
- Have international distributorships or partnerships that request localized content for specific regions, countries or languages
- Want to capture first-mover potential in global markets for a product, service, or content that currently is only available locally
You may want to focus on multilingual SEO if you:
- Want to capitalize on significant language markets within your current country.
- Need to differentiate in highly competitive local SEO for cities/areas with a variety of languages spoken in that area. SEO professionals for lawyers, dentists, or real estate agents in California, Florida, and Nevada may want to offer Spanish content.
Developing an International SEO Plan
The first step in starting international SEO is to plan wisely. Creating a good plan from the get-go means that you don’t miss any steps, and you can build in checks as you implement each step. We strongly suggest starting with just one new target market. Going through the process with one market means that any issues are limited in scope. You’ll also learn things about your target markets that you can implement in your next deployment, reducing time to market for any future expansions.
- Determine your target audience, including geography, language, and demographics
- Decide on international site structure – whether you’ll need a new domain name, or how you plan your international URL structure on your existing domain
- Create a keyword list based on your product offering as well as issues local to your unique markets
- Draft content based on the target keywords
- Publish and interlink content, ensuring that international technical SEO aspects, like hreflang tags, are clear
- Promote and drive backlinks to the new content, with a focus on links from country-specific TLDs or content written in the target language
Determining Your First Target Country
From your current market position, follow your data to see what markets make sense. Sometimes, your concept will feel very strong, like the case for Spanish in the US. However, still run some numbers to confirm your initial hunch. Check the percentage of Spanish speakers in different regions of the targeted area as well as keyword volumes and competition. Google Analytics and Google Search Console can give you a wealth of data on where your visitors are coming from as well as their local language as indicated by their browser.
On top of your specific user data, you should include deep market research, including topics like:
- General population, demographics, purchasing power
- In-country competition, both local and multinational
- Web standards, including browsers, whether sites should be hosted in-country, accessibility rules, privacy standards
- Standards of doing business, including taxation, shipping, whether an in-country office or phone numbers are required
- Attitudes of your target market towards your industry, product, and brand
Using a Country Matrix For Decision-Making
In the case of multiple potential first markets, consider the advice of Aleyda Solis from Orainti. Make a matrix of the country, language, business capacity, competition, and the prospective size of the market. We also include the estimated effort of localization.
Business capacity is how easy it will be for you to do business in that country. Will you need an office or bank accounts there, special licenses, etc. Localization costs may include translation and content optimization costs as well as costs for supporting additional currencies, tax structures, data privacy disclaimers, and more.
| Country | Language | Business Capacity | Competition | Search Volume | Localization Effort |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US (Current) | English | High | High | 10 M | N/A |
| US | Spanish | High | Low | 1 M | Medium |
| Mexico | Spanish | Medium | Medium | 5 M | High |
| Canada | English | Medium | Medium | 7 M | Low |
This company’s effort to expand to the new markets of Mexico and Canada would be higher. Their business capacity in both Mexico and Canada is smaller than in the US. From a localization standpoint, not only do they have to create the content, but they also need to take local currencies and taxes into account. They’re looking at entering Canada in English. Here, there may be some light language work, but the majority of the changes will be in adding international currency, shipping, and billing options.
In this example, the business is looking at expanding to Spanish within the United States, as well as expansion into Mexico and Canada. Their business capacity is high in the US, as they already have all the infrastructure they need to do business there. The localization work is medium, as the content needs to be localized into Spanish, but no additional currencies, shipping costs, or tax rates are necessary.
We recommend starting with just one new target market at a time. You’ll learn a lot from your first round of international SEO work, and you’ll be able to apply those lessons to additional foreign markets. However, if you take on multiple markets at once, you may have a the problem crop up in multiple markets, holding up all of your targets. For example, if you decide to enter French, Italian and German markets all at once, but you don’t have GDPR compliance sorted out, all three of those projects will be stuck until GDPR is resolved.
Multilingual Keyword Research
Keyword research for international search engine optimization follows the same best practices as single-language keyword research. You enter terms, look at volume and competition, review the current SERP and keyword intent, and choose your terms from the best options available. Keyword research in another language is the cornerstone of effective international SEO strategy and requires a few additional considerations.
The best way to ensure that your keyword list makes sense is to include a native or near-native speaker on your keyword research and content marketing teams. Someone who understands the local markets and their language will give insight not only into the right keywords for your site, but also help guide the content creation process to deliver content that adds value to your users.
International SEO Content Creation
Website content is where the magic happens, whether in English or in another language. Content should deliver quality information to users. For most countries, adherence to Google’s guidelines and E-E-A-T principles will still be important. Some notable exceptions are Russia and China, where Yandex and Baidu are the respective leaders in search engine share. Optimizing for these countries may take different strategies, but content should still be helpful and pertinent to user queries.
It’s helpful to start by working out a content brief for each piece of content. Yes, it’s more work. But it gives the writer or editor a better idea of what spin you’re taking on the subject, reducing revisions and increasing quality.
You can generate content in a foreign language in 3 ways:
AI in International Content Creation
AI can be a helpful tool to cut the time and cost of localization. The translation industry has been using machine translation for decades before the AI explosion, but AI translation tools are still not perfect. Programs like DeepL or Weglot can be a great basis for your new content, but we highly recommend retaining a native speaker for content creation and editing. The human touch will ensure that you’ve got all your t’s crossed and i’s dotted. Native writing professionals will ensure that:
- Proper formality is used consistently (many LLMs have a problem with a formal and informal second person)
- Formulaic expressions are avoided or eliminated
- Verbs are conjugated correctly
- Articles and adjectives are declined correctly
- General sentence structure makes sense and is engaging to the reader
- Topic is pertinent and accurate to the local market
Leveraging native speakers as proofreaders is a cost-efficient option to upgrade and refine any machine-translated or AI -generated content, as well as a way to ensure cultural content fit.
Publishing and Internal Linking For International SEO
Publishing your international content has a few caveats. The first is to check that your content is in the right place in your site structure.
ccTLD Checklist
Subdomain Checklist
Subfolder Checklist
Href lang tags are tags that tell search engines what language the content on the page is in. Hreflang tags consist of two components: a two-letter language code and a two-letter country code. Content created for English speakers in the US should be coded en-US. Content created for Spanish speakers in the US should be coded es-US.
Go Global The Smart Way
We helped an affiliate marketing firm with a large variety of languages focus on what was performing, and then streamlined content creation to maximize impact. Download our international SEO case study to find out how.