As a marketer, SEO is the most significant asset that allows you to optimize for featured snippets and every aspect of your site building, thereby increasing both quantity and quality of organic traffic from Google. Entrepreneurs trying to expand their business worldwide and achieve world domination are investing their time, resources, and efforts in an optimum Global SEO Strategy.
What is Global or International SEO?
Global search engine optimization is the practice of optimizing your websites, products, or services to identify, target, and appeal to an international target audience. It offers a cost-effective and scalable approach to expand your business’s web presence at a global scale and reach out to your preferred international target market easily. You can assess your website’s performance and rankings for each country’s search engine and also optimize for content development globally based on various regions.
Creating sites or sub-domains for different regions focused on the needs of potential consumers and planning your resources consistent with the required scope & time is critical for a successful global SEO process. A well-defined global SEO strategy works for various language and optimizes your content for each province’s search engine result pages. Below outlined are some of the best approaches and practices businesses should employ to start an international SEO strategy and achieve productive results.
- Market Analysis, Competition, and Research
You’ve worked hard to be successful in your local market, and now it’s time to take your brand to an international scale. To internationalize your brand and become a global leader, the very first step is to conduct thorough, in-depth research and evaluate the best avenues for international SEO expansion.
Your aim here should be initiating research across different countries to validate the preliminary point and know how consumers from different regions search differently. Doing so will help you measure your current global organic visibility, search traffic, and conversion rate and find countries with the most substantial opportunities. In this manner, you can successfully Identify the potential for each region’s market to prioritize and set your global SEO objectives and invest in appropriate SEO resources.
2. Identify and Set Global SEO Objectives
Once you’ve identified the top current international countries with maximum exposure for your business, you need to set goals and understand what target audience you want to engage. These are critical factors that deduce how your overall global SEO marketing strategies will turn out. Here are two quick steps to catch you up:
- Start with your organization’s objectives and set your digital marketing goals.
- Originate your global search engine optimization goals from your marketing ones.
3. Analyze Your Target Audience
Target audience exploration is an essential ingredient of any digital marketing and search engine optimization strategy. When a marketing campaign is put in place, businesses get stuck dealing with various challenges that occur in the pipeline and then completely forget about what their perspectives actually require. That’s why knowing and analyzing your target audience is crucial when developing an ideal marketing mix that efficiently attracts your prospects.
Additionally, it allows you to define a specific persona for each of them so you can understand their online purchase behavior & needs and engage with them in such a way that inspires them to take prompt action. From advertising to branding, it helps businesses recognize and reach a wide range of marketing areas and create branding that efficiently connects with people on an emotional and logical level. Analyzing your audience enables you to:
- Craft and distribute content that is interactive, engaging, and relevant to your patrons
- Build a functional, responsive website that caters to visitors’ needs competently
- Define the most relevant, ideal target group and learn how they interact with your website, products, and campaigns
- Place and display your ads where you think the potential consumers spend most of their time
- Deliver the information and resources your target audience needs during the onboarding and purchase process
- Establish a clear value of your products or services and increase conversion rate and sales
4. Start with Keyword Research
Now that you’ve analyzed and set up the target audience criteria, it’s time to find out which keywords regarding your niche and brand’s products are being searched in different geographic areas. Searching the current demand for keywords on Google and determining highly competitive keywords will allow you to:
- drive organic, qualified traffic to your site and engage your community
- develop informative content relevant to the keywords and queries performed by users
- find new markets and keep a track of marketing trends and consumer behavior
- increase search rankings, conversions and net profits significantly
In a nutshell, keyword analysis is the most critical and powerful weapon in your arsenal and SEO war. A mobile-friendly, high-functional website with the relevant and most searched keywords can go a really long way in attracting ideal consumers and compelling them to make a purchase.
SEO marketers can use reliable, productive tools like Google Keyword Planner and Bing Keyword Tool to expand their primary list of keywords, discover highly competitive search terms, and determine avg. monthly search volume.
5. Plan the URL Structure
When it comes to a specific country targeting, your website should be ready for international SEO. An unresponsive website signifies that your company might be lacking in some way or your company might not be up to the mark. To avoid such a situation from arising, plan and employ an international-friendly URL structure with language parameter specified to the target region, area, or country. Let’s take a look at some URL structures you can use:
- Country Code Top-Level Domain (ccTLD)
- Subdomain
- Subdirectory or Subfolder
- Generic Top Level Domain (gTLD)
For language targeting, use hreflang attributes intended for informing search engines and their bots about your site’s language so they can efficiently rank your content and context in the rankings. This soft-landing approach is the best way to identify what country engages the most with your site, brand, and products.
6. Optimize for Global Search Engines
If you are not optimizing your website for other search engines besides Google, you are missing out on a vast potential user base and endless business opportunities that are vital to your global SEO success and survival. Since a number of industrialized markets happen to use different search engines, it’s only practical to go beyond Google and set up an account with the search engine used by your target market.
If you are looking for a renowned, cost-effective digital marketing and SEO company to take your brand from the local market to international level and achieve higher rankings, drop us a line.