Ultimate Guide to International SEO

Search result for ‘impression digital nottingham’ which links to Impression’s homepage, due to this being the main office and default location, and includes the Nottingham knowledge panel.

Considering best practice SEO where optimising for a positive user experience is key, translated content is frowned upon. This is a consideration especially when content is translated more literally, perhaps by a translation tool or a translator who has no understanding of the wider context of the page or brand.

When getting to grips with International SEO, understanding market entry is really important. Market entry and a market entry strategy considers so much more than just SEO. However, it is common, especially in today’s digital age, for business owners and stakeholders to put a lot of pressure on the organic performance of the site. They rely on this performance to succeed in their new country where they launch the site instead of properly understanding the new market and thinking the performance my be different than in their home country.

It is crucial to take a step back before launching a site internationally and think about the shared goal that you have with your client, stakeholders and other agencies, as well as understanding the wider strategy and all other external factors that could be affecting the organic performance of the site.

Often, as SEOs and digital marketers we can get lost in the technical and site intricacies, but to get to the point of advising on relevant and successful SEO strategy, we need to understand the
business’ performance in other markets and the wider strategy.

Understanding the following will be key before getting stuck into an SEO strategy for their growth markets;

• How have you grown your business in your current markets?
• Have you focused on other channels and marketing methods outside of organic?
• Do you have a lot of partnerships, referrals etc. that have led to business critical leads?
• Have you invested in an organic strategy or has it been more holistic?

This is really important and not investigating the overall strategy and marketing plan can often trip up even the most experienced technical SEOs. You should also make sure that you are not isolating your SEO work.

Marketing managers or people that aren’t that familiar with SEO and search engines will often ask you to focus on one site, for one market, and that’s it. However, always thinking bigger than this considering all websites and channels that are affecting your organic performance will make sure you succeed in your international SEO strategy.

This is really important as you can’t assume that you can replicate what you’ve done in your current market with a completely different market; it has to be unique. Things can change.

An example would be if we were a home and garden ecommerce site and were looking at optimising our garden products. We would have to consider the differences between barbecuing and grilling because a grill and grilling means something different in the UK than in the US. It’s making sure that you’re optimizing for those specific terms and ensuring that you are not just duplicating content. This is also why translating keywords does not work without keyword research, search intent analysis and an understanding of the industry and products in that market.

This comes down to understanding the key differences in different markets. For example, is the product range in the US going to be the same as in Australia? Do people even know that this product works? Are there any competitors that are dominating the landscape?

This will then allow you to understand what you need to include in your international SEO strategy. For example, will you need to include more informational content to educate your audience and users? These are the big questions that can be answered through using tools such as Searchmetrics and SEMrush where you can get a really good overview of the competitor landscape.

Even if a business owner or stakeholder says that they have no presence in their new market and have done zero work to have any presence in that market, it does not mean they don’t! Sites can easily gain traffic from many countries unintentionally, in a similar way to how sites can rank for keywords or gain backlinks unintentionally.

If you’re entering a new market, it’s likely, if you’ve got a main site, maybe a .com site, that the site is already ranking in that market already in some way. It’s critical that in your initial audits you are considering this site and understand its performance so that you avoid cannibalisation.

For most SEOs, the objective is normally getting a page ranking instead of making sure the right page ranking. They may not realise that the wrong page is ranking which has a negative impact on traffic and conversions. Therefore is important to check your site on a regular basis especially if it is a global site.

Take the time to see if any non-local pages are ranking or driving traffic/conversions in that market. If so use hreflang to adjust. How can you see what is ranking?

Go to Google Search Console and look at one of your top level pages for a product that you sell around the world, for example the /EN page. In the example we went through in Tea Time SEO and as shown in the image above, the local page which was the /IN page, WAS NOT ranking on page one. There was no signal to tell Google it should use the /IN page over the /EN page. Instead, the NON Local page – the exampleco.com/EN page was shown 3.2 million times in markets where there was an existing local website.

This means there’s something wrong with the international seo implementation. In most cases, this is an HREFLang problem, in other cases it might be a semantic problem. You might have wording on your global page that’s neutral English, and in the other markets it might skew maybe to local English or British English. So this is the first thing you should check is, how big of a problem do we have ? For example, if someone wanted parts for an elevator in London it is most likely the US page would rank for “elevator parts” as the UK page will use the phrase “lift parts”.

One of the things we hear a lot is that, “We did HREFLang and it sort of sucks. It’s complex, it’s too hard.” HREFLang itself is embarrassingly simple. It’s our complex websites that make it a challenge. We see here a case where a site had 7.7 million tags, 580,000 errors. When you have that many errors, it’s your problem, not Google. Google’s told you the problems. The other common mistake is when HREFLang or local market sites aren’t being indexed is a case like at the top; 131,000 pages were valid, but over a million were bad. So you have 10 times more pages that Google’s wasting resources on. So try to fix some of these and specifically focus around the world.

Make sure your canonical tags for local language versions are correct as canonicals can be a big problem. There are many people who manage websites are confused by canonicals, even some celebrity SEOs who write a lot, really don’t understand how this works.  It is pretty obvious when you come into some cases with websites.

Here’s an example,  a site in Lithuanian, but it doesn’t rank in Lithuania.

• English – https://www.mysite.com/lt/home
• Spanish – https://www.mysite.com/lt/home?locale.x=es_LT
• French – https://www.mysite.com/lt/home?locale.x=fr_LT
• Chinese – https://www.mysite.com/lt/home?locale.x=zh_LT
• Lithuanian – https://www.mysite.com/lt/home?locale.x=lt_LT

The core site, the one without any kind of location, the canonical tag incorrectly points to English.

The canonical tag says the following:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://www.mysite.com/lt/home” />.

This is pointing to the English-language version of the site. This means you’re effectively telling Google you don’t want them to use your Lithuanian version. This is totally wrong. In this case, the site owner was trying to get rid of tracking tags and actually got rid of their parameter-based language tags in error.