International SEO and Search Trends – All You Need to Know

Search engine optimization is a process by which you optimize your website for getting better ranking in search engine listings. There are hundreds of techniques that we can apply in SEO but there are only 2 major portions; on-page and off-page SEO. Local SEO refers to the practice of applying optimization techniques on your website for your local community. This way when we talk about international SEO, this is the same SEO practice but for different communities, nationalities and languages around the world. What you used to do for your small local website can’t be done for an international website. Here the approach will completely change along with SEO techniques.

How does international SEO work?

It’s the dream of each company and business to be famous around the world. Who wouldn’t want millions of customers from around the globe but getting to that point is a bit tricky. There is no shortcut or simple way that can take your local business to global market overnight. You need to work on your marketing strategies and define what population you want to target and how you want to approach them. But, the most important of all is building a website that is suitable for international visitors and applying all the right techniques and tricks to get as much traffic as possible.

The basic reason why international SEO is different is that there are too many variables and expandable factors to consider when you want to go global. From different search engines in each country to a different language and a different set of important keywords used by local communities, international SEO is way more than what you can expect.

SEO Tips and Tricks for International Market

1- Consider local search engines

It might be new to you but there are definitely dozens of other search engines that operate around the world. Google is the most important and top-ranked search engine in the world but there are other considerations as well including; Bing, Yahoo and local search engines like Baidu in China. When you are running international SEO on your website, keep these search engines in mind as well. Although the key focus should be on Google still other local search engines are important too. Get some details on how the local search engine works in the country where you want to introduce your website or business and then optimize your website.

2- Using right keywords

A keyword is by far the most important element of search engine optimization whether it’s for local or international SEO. A keyword is something that helps visitors and internet users land on your website. When you are targeting population or audience in a different country, first do some keyword research on how those people search stuff on the internet and what kind of keywords they use more often to match with your business or website. Then the next step would be to include keywords naturally in your website’s on-page and off-page SEO.

3- Domain name and website language

It’s not difficult to understand that when you have a website based in Canada and you are trying to hit the audience in China or Spain, your Canadian website might not be suitable for those people. In order to achieve appropriate results in international SEO, one thing you can do is to operate multiple domain names for your website. When you are using a small business website, you should not invest more money into developing more regional websites because this is a very expensive option. Another way out of this dilemma is to create a subdirectory for your website. This means you can just keep on working on your original website where you also update Google search console about different language versions of your website for various international regions.

4- Content creation

Creating contents i.e. blogs and articles for your local market are very easy but doing the same thing for the international market is a completely different story. This is the reason that online businesses and companies are trying to create localized content for each region of their targeted market. With the new search engine algorithms, you can make sure that when a Chinese person opens your website, the content will show in mandarin not English. With this facility, you can focus on creating customized content for each country or language you want to target.

5- Local backlinks

When you want to build a better reputation of your website for search engine ranking, you add quality backlinks from relevant websites. This is the same practice you need to do on your website for international SEO but here you should add local backlinks of your targeted population. For instance, you have a Germany based website but you also want to approach Canadian customers so what you need to do is to get backlinks from Canadian websites. Keep in mind that these links should be from relevant websites and quality of backlinks is more important than quantity.