One of the key goals for International or multilingual SEO is to make each of your global website as local as possible. Below are well known Experts who contributed their tips for this week’s article:
Elena Lockett, FM Outsource
I have some tips regarding SEO for businesses looking to expand into international waters:
Localized content: making sure your content and the products/services you mention are in the local language is crucial. conduct keyword research for each country you intend to branch out to and use those for the websites specific to each country
Geo target settings: some websites have one international website with each separate country’s content placed under a different directory e.g ‘www.domain.com/uk/’ for the UK site, you can set up geo targeting for your content by placing profiles by directory and specifying the target country for each directory.
Link building from local websites in the local language as often international websites tend to have fewer inbound links from international websites compared to their home website
Katrina Reger, Blue Compass
What are your best SEO tips and tricks for businesses looking to expand to international clients and customers?
When a company expands into International markets, it must consider the end users’ language. This goes far beyond relying on Google Translate. Hire a professional translator to make sure the site’s SEO elements (content, meta description tags, and title tags) “speak” to its targeted users.
Also, a website targeting international users should use images that reflect those users. The site images should also account for cultural nuances.
Matthew Mercuri, Dupray
Interact with people who you have already done business with. When your clients and customers get a follow on Twitter, they’re significantly more likely to follow you back. Moreover, you need to narrow down and eliminate the people most likely to ignore you on Social Media. Ashton Kutcher will not be your friend online, nor will Kim Kardashian. BUT, the local bakery owner will. Your sister, best friend and family will. So will your German clients. You need to do whatever its takes to get a base. This base will allow you to successfully publish content while tapping into the networks of that base.
Alex Reichmann, iTestCash
A useful SEO strategy for international businesses is to pitch article topics to websites relating to your industry. To do this you can simply search and read about websites relating to your business and think of a topic to write for them that displays your expertise and provides original and useful information for their readers.
The SEO benefits of doing this are that Google will see after a while that you are getting linked to from international websites which boosts your credibility for search engines. Another benefit of this strategy is that you will also get your brand in front of other customers from around the globe.
