Here are some simple tips to get the most from your international SEO and help you boost your international traffic.
You’ve done your research and you can see that customers are already visiting your website from other countries. So, if you have the capacity and resources to sell abroad, what are the next steps?
Specific Landing Pages
International SEO starts with creating specific landing pages on your website that your international visitors can be automatically directed to.
This will allow you to provide information specific to them, such as postage costs and legal information.
These pages will then provide the visitor with all the information they need and, before long, you’ll start to see conversions from these pages.
Subdirectories
For the best SEO results, you might want to consider setting up subdirectories (AKA subfolders) to target specific countries with international SEO.
By keeping your root domain the same but adding on a subdirectory, search engines can see that these pages are still part of your main website domain. This will help the overall site’s ranking performance.
You could also use subdomains as an alternative, but be aware that subdomains will be read by search engines as completely different sites and won’t help your main domains overall ranking.
Hosting
Once you’ve created these subdirectories, they would then ideally need to be hosted in the country they are targeting.
The geographic position of the hosting address is important because search engines want to return relevant local search results. However, it’s important to note that this isn’t essential, it’s more of a ‘good if you can’.
Localise Your Site
As well as being hosted in the country you are targeting, a key aspect of international SEO is localising your website.
For countries with a different language, naturally you’ll need to change the language on these pages. Don’t forget to make changes to any region specific colloquialisms, references and differences between the same languages too.
Think of the differences between UK English and US English. Whilst on the UK site you might make a reference to football, the US site would have to be changed to soccer.
Products or services may even have different names in one country compared to another making keyword research vitally important for each region.
A great tip is to run a region specific PPC campaign first to try out your keywords before committing to the SEO.
Region Specific Linking
Securing links from websites based in the region you want to target is important because it tells search engines that your website has information relevant to these regions.
For example, if the page content is aimed at a German market but all the links are from UK websites, the German based search engines will perceive the site to be not as relevant.
International Currency and Postage Details
Update the currency and postage details, or add a currency convertor, to match each region on your website too. You want to make the customer journey as simple as possible for each visitor.
Don’t forget to change the phone number and address as well. Just imagine, if you’re ordering online from the UK and you had to call a number in the US. Firstly, it would look a bit strange seeing a US number and secondly, you’d be put off by having to make an international call.
Find out More about International SEO
If you want to learn more about international SEO for your business and how Miromedia can help you, feel free to get in touch via email or phone us on 01926 358 200
