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International SEO is the strategy that allows you to attract more qualified traffic to your website, thereby increasing the visibility of your brand and its rankings in different countries and languages defined as targets.
The main objective of this strategy is to obtain a greater number of qualified leads through various search engines in different countries around the world. We could consider international SEO as a form of geotargeting, although in this case, you optimize your website for various countries and languages.
Let’s see everything you need to know about this topic.
International SEO is often multilingual, although sometimes it is possible to implement international SEO actions on monolingual websites. In fact, even if some companies decide to be active internationally, they choose to target only those users who speak a particular language.
For a simple example, a UK-based company may decide to target customers living in the United States. However, even in this case, considering the differences between British English and American English, SEO plays a crucial role for those who want to sell those pants in both countries.
This is why translation and localization are crucial, but not sufficient. To grow in a foreign market, you need to fully meet the linguistic differences to ensure the dissemination of clear messages tailored to the target audience for the content.
Additionally, international SEO involves optimizing websites for different search engines. While Google is the most widely used worldwide, in some countries, it may not be accessible, or its usage may be limited, and alternative solutions such as Baidu in China or Yandex in Russia are relied upon.
Furthermore, we should not underestimate the technical aspect of SEO, especially in this context, as it represents one of the most important factors for achieving the desired success globally.
International keyword research involves finding the most suitable keywords to optimize the content on your website for the geographic areas and languages in which you have decided your online business should be visible. To create digital marketing content for people who speak another language, it may seem natural to start by translating the keywords already used in the original language of your website.
However, implementing an international keyword research strategy is a much more complex process. Simply translating keywords used in one language is not enough, and it is always advisable to rely on professional SEO tools such as Google Keyword Planner, SEMRush, or similar tools to identify the most searched keywords in each specific market and language. By simply translating keywords, you could rank your site for keywords that are not truly popular in the local market, resulting in less traffic and leads. Localization helps in finding the most commonly used keywords in a particular language across different countries. For example, in Spanish, it is common to call an automobile “coche” in Spain, while in Latin America, the term “carro” is more widely used.
Through an international SEO audit, you have the opportunity to discover the strengths and areas for improvement of your website, both in terms of on-page technical aspects and off-page popularity (identifying the number and quality of backlinks from other websites). The goal is to make the necessary corrections and develop an ideal on-page and off-page SEO strategy to gradually increase organic SEO traffic (non-paid traffic through Google Ads) from search engines.
Let’s look at the key technical factors that help optimize SEO positioning internationally:
These and other factors can be analysed in an international SEO audit by your consultant or SEO agency using technical SEO tools such as Screamingfrog, Botify, Lumar.io (Ex. Deepcrawl) or similar ones, identifying priorities and proposing the necessary solutions to implement.
Are you working for a digital marketing agency or an e-commerce business considering expanding your business abroad to countries such as Spain, France, Italy or others? If you want to obtain professional international SEO consultation, you can rely on the decade-long experience of Daniele Calorio. After gaining experience as a Quality Rater at Google, he has been involved in marketing and SEO at the European and global level since 2009, thanks to strong technical and linguistic expertise.
His fluent knowledge of Italian, French, English, and Spanish, combined with his extensive experience in the field of digital marketing, ensures SEO support that goes beyond simple text translations. It encompasses a multi-country management approach starting with market analysis, followed by in-depth keyword research, leading to a comprehensive optimization proposal for your website’s content, technical factors, and off-page factors in the target markets.”
Please send me a detailed brief about your international SEO project, I will be happy to discuss it with you in an introductory call and then provide you a quote. Thanks!