By making your website global and implementing international SEO, you can extend your reach. By doing international search engine optimisation, you have the power to drive traffic from other countries. It involves creating content for users in different areas and time zones. So, this post will highlight the best techniques for international SEO.
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Companies looking to expand to a global market and/or those who have worldwide consumer base has to essentially do international SEO. It is also beneficial to optimise for international audience if a significant amount of your customers speak a language other than English. A good strategy involves using right URL structure and targeting. Also, read our blog on MOST EFFECTIVE LEAD GENERATION TACTICS USING DIGITAL MARKETING to understand the general tactics that reap effective results regardless of the locale.
International SEO: Country-coded top-level domains (CCTLD)
A CCTLD is a country-based top-level domain which is reserved for a country. These are usually two letter long top level domains. CCTLD is the best way to signal search engines about the country in which you do business. For example:
- example.co.in
- example.co.uk
Subdomains for International SEO
SEO involves subdomains when a business has unique entities or products. You can create a web address for unique areas of a website using subdomains. For example:
- india.example.com
- uk.example.com
Subdirectories
Data is stored in directories, and a directory within a directory is referred to as a subdirectory. In international SEO specifically, a business uses sub directories when it has limited resources or content. When using it, the domain authority is maintained and the execution is simple. For example:
- example.com/india
- example.com/uk
Hreflang tag for International SEO
The hreflang tag tells search engines about the language being used on a particular webpage. It allows you to serve the right content for the right users based on a user’s location and preferred language. For example:
- example.com/en/
- example.com/jp/
You may also like to visit and check our blog on A BEGINNER’S GUIDE ON HOW TO ATTRACT NEW CUSTOMERS TO BUSINESS to get helpful insights of attracting new customers to your business.
Keyword research to do International SEO
Identify the top keywords that competitors rank for in the target countries. To optimise for targeted audience, use keyword research tools to find long tail keywords in the target languages.
Read more about HOW TO DO A KEYWORD RESEARCH ON GOOGLE ADS (ADWORDS) USING KEYWORD PLANNER FOR SEO BASED CONTENT to learn how handy these keyword research tools are while looking for the right keywords.
Schema markup
Schema markup is an essential component that tells the search engine what the content of the webpage is about. You can add schema markup to sub-directories, subdomains and cctlds via Google tag manager. Follow this procedure to know HOW TO USE SCHEMA MARKUP TO BOOST SEO ACTIVITIES.
Using xdefault tag in International SEO
The xdefault tag allows you to provide users with a default version of the website. We use it when the language or location of the users doesn’t match the available ones.
In brief, SEO requires long term strategy and is time consuming. Therefore, for international SEO, it is important that each country must have its own unique strategy. Most importantly, you should try reading this case study of an international school that’s managing its International SEO successfully.
Do research and build your own strategy based on what country and the type of audiences you’re targeting. However, it’s equally important for a business to know how to boost local SEO as well.
