International SEO: 5 Experts Share Top Tips on International SEO Strategy

You have hit a jackpot in your business.

You powered up your SEO strategy to make your website outperform your competitors’ and it worked. You have been generating interest, and more importantly, leads effortlessly through your website.

But now, you have hit an unexpected snag. You have been focusing on targeting a specific local audience for your products, but your website performance has made you realise that you may actually have a much larger and more profitable market in other parts of the world.

You did not anticipate this and are thus understandably underprepared. But letting go of such a good opportunity is not an option. So, what do you do?

You decide to call up your SEO agency or manager, and they tell you that you need an international SEO strategy. If that is what led you to this blog article, you are about to get all your questions answered, but let us start with the most basic one.

What is International SEO?

International SEO is the process of optimising your website and SEO strategy in a way that search engines are able to recognise the specific locations you are targeting and the languages you should be using for your content. Quite literally, international SEO is leveraged to attract audiences from different countries and languages.

A lot has been said about the importance of being at the right place at the right time. This is somewhat similar to the principle behind International SEO strategies.

Now this can understandably seem like yet another SEO task that you need to add to your checklist — and you are not wrong. But if you have an SEO strategy in place, you may already be halfway through the requirements of International SEO.

Then what exactly is it for, you may ask! Great question.

Say, you have a SaaS business based out of Brisbane, Australia. So far, you have been targeting customers within the country, but in the process, you have created quite a repository of content. So much so, that your website has started getting traction from countries like New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Singapore.

This is great news, right? You can finally get your expansion plans going. After all, all these countries have a majority of English-speaking population, so targeting them should be a breeze. Well, it’s not that easy!

This is the perfect use case for International SEO. International SEO entails optimising your website and content in a way that sends out signals to search engines indicating that your website serves multiple regions and languages. Now, these signals are important for your website to rank for keywords that are valuable to you, in the geographical locations that you are targeting.

But the kind of tasks that you would need to implement for your International SEO will depend on your business, resources, and the locations you are targeting.

The Fundamental Aspects of International SEO

On the same page so far? Awesome!

In a world of permutations and combinations that are specific to businesses in International SEO, there are certain principles that remain constant. It is important to discuss these in detail as these will form the foundation of your SEO strategy.

Here are the international SEO basics, as we say.

Keywords in Different Regions

As always, the journey to any successful SEO strategy starts with keyword research. Only this time, it actually begins with understanding how keywords work in different regions. Let’s revisit the example that we were talking about earlier.

You are ranking for a valuable target keyword in four different regions — Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and the United Kingdom. Now, if you want to really leverage your ranking in Singapore, will just having content in English suffice? Moreover, are you ranking in the same position in Singapore as you are in Australia? 

If you answered no to both these questions, you are right to be reading this guide, because you need International SEO to aid your efforts.

In Singapore, Malay and Mandarin are the most predominant languages. So, it would bode well for you to search what relevant keywords are ranking in the region, and how well the Malay and Mandarin translations of your keyword are ranking. 

Based on the results, you would want to make a decision on the different languages you want your website and content to be in, and the approach you should take to go about it. You will also need to understand the search habits and patterns of the audience you are targeting.

Everything right from the device that your audience is using, to the search engine they are using might completely change the way keywords perform in that region. Not to forget, as the region of your audience changes, so does the way they express, their information needs, and the way they perceive any kind of content.

Getting an understanding of all these aspects, and collating all this information will help you come up with the right set of keywords to target specific audiences across the globe. With this, you have successfully fulfilled the first principle of International SEO.

Consistently Original and Quality Content

After keywords, we talk about yet another constant metric that you will hear SEOs talk about endlessly. You guessed it — quality content.

Indeed, high-quality and original content is the next important principle for International SEO. The more you track the performance of your content and related metrics, the better understanding you will have about what your target readers consider to be quality content. You will need to be ready to optimise your content as much as possible to generate the best results.

One of the key parts of having consistently high-quality content is having content on relevant topics and terms. You can use tools like Google Trends, or Answer The Public to find such topics and figure out the kind of content your competitors are posting on these topics. All in all, you will be putting in a lot of hard work even before you begin the actual process of writing content.

What’s more, all of this is just for one region. You will need to repeat and apply this process for all the regions that you want to target with the help of your content. International SEO plays a major role in translating all of these efforts into results. It will help you get the best from your content in all the regions you aim to target with your SEO strategy.

Leveraging Hreflang Attribute

We can practically hear you thinking at this point — what we have talked about till now does not seem to be unique to just International SEO. But the point that we are discussing now will tell you otherwise.

Hreflang is an HTML attribute that you use to specify a webpage’s language and targeted geographical location. So, if you are one of those companies that target many different countries through a single website, the hreflang attribute is your best friend.

But you must focus on getting it right, as hreflang can be complex at times. You will need to be unambiguous about the version of the webpage that should be displayed when a user from a specific region clicks on your website.

By adding this attribute to your website, you can tell search engines like Google about the multilingual variations of the same webpage. Doing so will help the search engines produce the correct version of the webpage depending on the location of the user who clicks on it on the SERPs.

Monitoring and Measurement of Results

You can create and implement different kinds of SEO strategies and tasks, but they would be of no use if you do not actively monitor and measure your results. When it comes to international SEO, there are many reasons and aspects that can potentially impact your performance on SERPs.

By now, you would have understood that international SEO is so much more than just translating your content for specifically targeted regions. But to truly understand the impact of your international SEO strategy, use several metrics and consistently measure its impact on your website performance.

This process of constant monitoring will enable you to measure, change and improve any parameters that are crucial to the SEO performance of your website.

Common Barriers to International SEO

Now that you know about the fundamental principles associated with international SEO, it is time to delve deeper into the subject.

International SEO seems quite simple and uncomplicated so far, doesn’t it? It actually is that simple. The complexity of the strategy lies only in having the ability to tie in your international SEO efforts with other facets of your SEO strategy.

With that in mind, let us talk about the common barriers that you are likely to encounter in the process of building a strong international SEO strategy.

Challenges Associated with Language

The primary barrier to your international SEO strategy that you will be faced with immediately are challenges associated with languages. This is the most common among all the international SEO issues you will ever come across.

Let us understand this in the context of the example that we were discussing earlier. Now, if your company wants to start selling the same products in Singapore, and actually leverage your website to generate demand for your products, you will want the same content in local languages, right?

This will not just entail translation, but also extensive efforts to ensure that the semantics of vocabulary pertaining to the local language reflects on your website. It is quite easy to understand this when we talk about having the content in a different language.

However, this aspect is crucial even for businesses that target multiple regions having the same language with differences in verbiage and vocabulary. Here, you will need to still redirect your efforts to make your content more relevant to the local audiences.

Remember that the key aspect here is for the business to focus on the same product or service for a long time. As long as that remains the same across regions, the country you want to target will not matter as much to international SEO, as much as the languages your website is able to communicate in.

Challenges Associated with Country

Say, your SaaS business wants to capture customers in the Singapore market, however, with a different product. Through your research, you realised that you will need several additional features in your product to perform well in Singapore. So you made the necessary upgrades and created a more powerful product to be launched in the Singapore market.

This changes things a little, doesn’t it?

You are dealing with a different product now, so you will need to have different content that will appeal to your audience in Singapore. This goal here could be more challenging than tackling a simple change in language.

To understand how to do this effectively, you will need to narrow down your business goals with this expansion. Are you talking to an English-speaking audience in the country? Do you want to promote your new product to the overall population of the country?

Depending on the goal you choose, you will need to deal with changing languages, content, and approach towards targeting your potential customers in a different country.

Both these sets of challenges can be easily mitigated if you have a highly focused international SEO strategy aimed at generating results for your business in a different country.

Top Tips to Ace Your International SEO Strategy

On the same page so far? Great!

We will now discuss some of the top international SEO tips that experts recommend to businesses when they are navigating their own strategy. Let’s get right into it.

Localise Your Content

One aspect that we have stressed across all our blogs is the importance of tailoring your content to your target audience. So, if you are an Australian business based in Perth, targeting customers in Spain, you better believe that you are going to need some heavy localisation.

Simple translations of web pages will not get you very far when you are dealing with regions that are so culturally distinct. This is where you need to understand a key thing about international SEO. In such cases, you will need to focus on localising your content as much as you do on translating your content.

Here using the local language in your content, and adding the local currency and time zones to your websites are all strong signals indicating that you are targeting that specific region. You will also need to narrow down on nuances such as humour, reactions to colours and layouts to get your content completely ready for that region.

What you are doing here is basically ensuring that users from your targeted regions have a seamless user experience. To take this a step further, you can also consider using external links to local resources and hosting your website on a local IP (if that is a reasonable option for your business).

Know Your Market Very Well

This goes without saying and does not only apply to international SEO but is nevertheless an important consideration to be kept in mind. When you are targeting multiple countries through your website, you will need to have an adept understanding of your audience’s preferences, culture, and behaviour, among other things that will impact their decision-making.

Once you have a good knowledge of your market, you will be able to produce highly effective content and create actionable copies that will resonate with your target audience.

Also keep in mind that even if your product has the potential to make you a major player in the international market, competition still exists. You must research the existing companies that are in the market and competing for the same target audience as yours.

Leverage Google Business Profile

Google Business Profile is one of those prominent hints that you can give to a search engine when you want to strengthen your presence in a particular geographical region. It is only an additional benefit that Google Business Profile (GBP) is one of the most powerful tools for any business looking for some local exposure.

When used correctly, you can leverage GBP to boost local search engine rankings and visibility across various countries and regions.

Having a complete and accurate Google Business Profile will ensure that you get a good headstart in setting up a strong local presence for your business.

Utilise hreflang Attribute Effectively

More than anything else, the hreflang attribute is necessary to ensure that your website is able to cater to a multilingual audience. Your international SEO strategy has already succeeded if you ensure that the correct country or language version of your webpage is displayed when a relevant user lands on your website.

Accurate hreflang annotations cross-reference webpages and indicate to search engines that these webpages are similar in content, but have a different target audience. On the other hand, when done wrong, hreflang can ruin your website rankings, and the overall user experience that your users are likely to have.

Get the Technical and Other Basic Requirements Right

When all is said and done, you cannot do away with the technical part of any SEO strategy that you decide to implement for your website. When it comes to international SEO, you need to get a few technical aspects out of the way to ensure that you are on the right track.

Implementing hreflang attribute correctly within your content is of course one of the primary aspects you need to keep in mind. But right from the basics to aspects specific to strengthening your international SEO performance, you will need to take care of quite a few things. Keywords and international SEO URL structures are only the beginning.

To add to this, Andreas Karle points out that domain planning is yet another important technical requirement that can also become a barrier to your international SEO strategy.

He says, “You need to get this right from the start ideally. Meaning: do you use several country-specific domains or do you go for only one (for example a .com). Both have their pros and cons. These things should be discussed before they are implemented. It could cost a lot of time to later change this.”

It is crucial for websites to keep all these points in mind while creating an international SEO strategy so that they can target customers globally. Remember to conduct regular SEO audits to ensure that all the technical aspects are figured out.

Take E-E-A-T Seriously

You may have heard a lot about following E-A-T for your website content. Now, EAT recently became EEAT and has sparked debates in the global community.

For one, it has legitimate implications on the performance of content and websites, as well as their credibility. One thing is for sure — as someone who is just learning how to do international SEO strategy for their business, you should definitely make this a priority.

The recently added ‘E’ stands for experience. More specifically, it stands for first-hand experience. So, if you are able to complement your content with credible content from someone who has firsthand experience in the domain, it can impact your ranking and your online reputation. This matters a lot when you are trying to attract global customers.

So, if you are just unravelling your international SEO strategy, it is a good idea to get the basics of your content sorted by taking EEAT seriously.

Plan Your Link-Building Efforts Smartly

Lastly, there is a lot of merit in talking and understanding about the role of link-building and backlinks in your international SEO strategy. While there are a few differences between the link building that you do for your website now, and the one you will do for your international SEO strategy, the role of link building can not be ignored.

Mert Erkal, International SEO Expert and Founder at Stradiji Digital, emphasises the following best practices for companies looking to boost their link-building efforts for international SEO:

Apart from these points, he also stresses the importance of online PR activities to acquire backlinks, and of measuring these results using an effective SEO tool.

Which is The Best Platform for International SEO?

You may be doing everything right and still be disappointed to see that your international SEO stats are not exactly ideal. The reason? Well, not all CMSs are made equal — some of them are just better when you want to compete and acquire customers on an international level.

For the longest time, people have believed that they are gaining a significant SEO advantage if they chose WordPress as their CMS. In an Ask Googlebot series video, John Mueller put all these rumours to rest by saying, “Google systems don’t focus on how the page was created. Instead, they focus on the final result. Hand-created web pages can be just as good as those generated by WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, or similar.”

So, that’s about that for SEO in general, but let us narrow down our question. Does your choice of CMS impact your international SEO performance?

Well, you know by now that international SEO enters the picture when you have a large target audience in various regions around the world, or when you are thinking of expanding. This means that you will anyway need to choose a CMS that supports and adapts to your requirements while your business scales.

What’s more, even if WordPress does not exactly give you an SEO advantage, there is no doubt that it offers some powerful SEO features. WordPress SEO provides you with highly responsive themes and powerful features that can elevate the performance of your website in the eyes of search engines — a major advantage.

More importantly, you will need to ensure that you have chosen a multilingual CMS for your website when you are embarking on an international SEO strategy. But you will need to focus on what will work best for your website.

For instance, Wix SEO Wiz, the knowledge database for Wix website owners to level up their SEO may be a great source of information. However, the capabilities of the CMS ensures that you can use it only if your website is small with no plans for any major scaling efforts.

If you have a Shopify website and are looking to explore everything that Shopify SEO offers, we have good and bad news for you. The good news is that Shopify does enough to ensure that you follow SEO best practices and perform well on SERPs. The bad news is that a lot of tasks that make SEO such a customised strategy are either paid or unavailable in Shopify.

International SEO Tools

By now, you would surely have a good understanding of what international SEO entails, and some of the best practices you can follow to have a winning international SEO strategy. But it would be ineffective to go about a great international SEO strategy without a strong tool that can enable your strategy and measure the results you generate.

With that in mind, here are some of the tools that you want in your international SEO strategy arsenal.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs provides a comprehensive tool offering features that will enable all your SEO efforts — international or not. Ahrefs promotes itself as the ultimate SEO toolkit with features that will help you conduct keyword research, analysis of competitors, site audits and more. 

It can be a great addition to your international SEO strategy by aiding your link-building efforts. Ahrefs will help you check out the kind of backlinks that your competitors have been able to acquire whereas you have not.

Surfer SEO

Like Ahrefs, Surfer SEO provides users with a comprehensive set of tools to navigate any SEO task that you can think of. When you are operating at a global level, you want to have content that performs outperforms on the SERPs.

As a rule of thumb, you want tools like Ahrefs, Surfer SEO, Moz, and SEMrush that you can absolutely rely on when you are navigating an international SEO strategy for your business.

Erudite Hreflang Sitemap Tool

Establishing a global presence online is a gargantuan task. While you have a lot of marketing and operations to focus on in the process, it helps to have a tool that will keep a part of your international SEO sorted.

With Erudite Hreflang Sitemap Tool, you can automate your hreflang markup to a large extent. If you have a global eCommerce website with tons of pages, this tool is especially useful. 

All  you need to do is upload an Excel file containing all the URLs on your website, and the tool will generate XML sitemaps containing the hreflang markup for you.

Get Your International SEO Strategy Right

International SEO as a term, might seem daunting and extravagant to you, but it really is not. It is what your business requires if your business is targeting audiences in different parts of the world. As a business that is looking to grow or scale up, it is always a good idea to go for a CMS that supports you while you scale and go international.

More than that, you will need a stellar international SEO strategy to support the rest of your marketing efforts. Choose the right tools, and follow the international SEO best practices that we have discussed in this blog to get your strategy right from the start.

If you run into any problems or are wondering how to implement an international SEO strategy for your website though, feel free to get in touch with us.