How to target different countries and languages: Intro to international SEO
International search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website to target specific countries and languages so that you get higher search rankings in those foreign markets and, consequently, improve your business results. It’s essentially the same as geotargeting, but instead of optimizing your website for a city or state, you’re optimizing for different countries and languages.
The process of International SEO optimization involves:
- Determining whether you should target an international audience
- Deciding whether to target specific countries or specific languages, or both
- Re-structuring your website for foreign markets
- Hiring a translation service to convert existing content as well as add appropriate new content in the foreign language.
Determine Your Target International Audience
The best way to determine whether International SEO is appropriate for your business is to look at your website’s existing international organic visitors. Then use Google’s keyword planner to identify the search engine potential of various keywords related to your business in those countries.
If research indicates there is a good amount of organic traffic in your chosen locations for your specific keywords, then you need to decide if you want to target a particular language or a specific country.
Decide to Target Countries or Language or Both
Target a particular language if your products and services do not change based on location or target locations if your services change depending on the country. For example, you may want to target Spain, but not other Spanish-speaking countries because you only have a distributor arrangement in that country. On the other hand, if you are seeing significant organic traffic generated from Mexico and Colombia, you might want to broaden it to Spanish-speaking countries in general and later consider setting up distributor arrangements in those countries should sufficient demand justify it.
It may be the case that you want to do both. For example, you target all Spanish-speaking countries, but because your products are subject to certain restrictions unique to Spain, you would target Spain separately because it is different from other Spanish-speaking countries.
If your services are consistent regardless of country, in most cases, the easiest thing to do is focus on language.
Restructure Your Website for Foreign Markets
Customize your website for your targeted location(s) and language(s). If you’re primarily targeting a language, the best approach may be to create a new URL with a unique top-level domain (TLD). A top-level domain is your site name (e.g., yoursite) plus the domain name (in most cases, .com, although there are other domain names such as .net and .biz, among others). To customize the URL for a specific language, you add a designation at the end of your domain name (e.g., for Spanish, add /es, which stands for Español, so that your new TLD is yoursite.com/es). It’s the same to target a country (e.g., for Mexico, add /mx so that your new TLD is yoursite.com/mx); this is called a country-coded TLD (ccTLD).
An alternate approach is to distinguish using specific directories and subdirectories. Your domain name remains yoursite.com but with different subdirectories (e.g. yoursite.com/es/blog distinguishes blog content written in Spanish from your “other” blog, yoursite.com/blog written in default English).
Which approach is better? Generally speaking, if you are a relatively small business targeting different languages and not countries, it’s probably best to stick with directories and subdirectories differentiated by language. If you are focusing on countries, the ccTLD might be best.
Next, set up a sitemap that lists your website structure. This helps search engines mark your pages for the appropriate international audience.
Equally important is to ensure Google doesn’t treat your translated pages as duplicate content, which penalizes page rank search results. It also helps ensure the right audience lands on the right page appropriate for the language or country (e.g., currency and shipping information). It’s similar to tagging domain and directories. For example, if you’re targeting all Spanish speaking countries, the tag is hrefland= “es”; it would be hreflang=”es-mx” if the page targeted Mexico. Because it is easy to get the hreflang tag wrong, use a tool to generate the code for you or run your code through a validator before putting it on your website.
This is just a brief overview of how to restructure a website for International SEO. There are a number of resources to consult for further details. If you have a complicated website, or you don’t have the time or interest in doing the actual website coding yourself (or don’t have an employee who has), then the best approach is to hire a website developer.
