If you’ve got clients that cater to target audiences in more than one country or multiple languages, you must focus on an international SEO strategy. It can help the business reap many benefits, such as improved user experience leading to organic search growth and successful expansion in local and new markets.
International SEO refers to the optimization of content for search engines in a way that increases the site’s organic traffic from a variety of linguistic groups and geographical regions. It allows for targeting native speakers and international audiences.
You can communicate to Google and other search engines that your client’s website caters to visitors in a certain country or consumers looking for products and services in a specific language.
Statistics reveal over 66% of people today prefer content in their native language. About 43% of them stated they wouldn’t trust websites with content written in languages they don’t understand.
To help the brand’s message resonate with the audiences, make sure the content posted on a client’s website is localized and translated properly. Just when you think you’ve mastered the art of optimization, you’ll realize international SEO is an entirely different ball game.
If you’ve not mastered the skill yet, or want to improve your profits, outsource the job to a reputable white-label digital marketing agency like Rocket Driver. We’ve got the software, expertise, infrastructure, and tools to help get the task done adeptly, and that too, at ultra-low rates!
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International SEO Strategy
A local SEO strategy focuses on target audiences and keywords catering to a narrow geographical area. Meanwhile, an international SEO strategy comprises processes, practices, and policies that optimize search content for audiences across various geographical regions.
It involves focusing on the creation of content and metadata that applies to local markets. You’ll need to develop a website structure that enables search engines to understand and serve the correct web pages to the right searchers at the right time.
However, international SEO can be complex because sometimes, common localization and translation pitfalls can hurt a website’s chance to rank high.
Faux Pas in Translation
Translation miscommunication may be funny or horrifying, depending on various factors. But errors in grammar, phrasing or idiomatic expressions will not help your client’s business succeed internationally.
When it comes to International SEO, you need to translate the web content from one language to another while ensuring you use keywords common among prospects without compromising best SEO practices.
Getting the content translated by not native-equivalent people can sometimes backfire. Being proficient in a language is one thing, but publishing authoritative content requires expertise not commonly found in amateur translators.
While many try to avoid the costs involved in hiring native translators, it’s an important investment for businesses that want to dominate global audiences. Some agencies try to reduce costs by using machine translation.
While machine translations have come a long way, don’t rely on them completely. Always have them reviewed by a native human translator to meet Google’s spam web search policies while removing potential idiomatic and dialectal differences.
Even if the language speakers understand what’s published on a website, it won’t sound natural to them, leading to spoiled trust in the brand’s credibility. Moreover, auto-translating websites can sometimes make the translated content invisible to search engines. This could lead to potential losses in terms of search traffic that the website could’ve gotten if the content was organized along regional and lingual lines.
Don’t Forget the Keywords
Even if users’ search intent remains the same, people from different nativities often don’t search for the same things using the same phrases. Sometimes, translating the keyword from one language to another can be detrimental, especially if the phrase isn’t commonly used by natives in the targeted regions.
Practice keyword localization or invest in multilingual keyword research to identify language-equivalent keywords relevant to the local markets. Moreover, don’t just rely on the search volume.
According to statistics, more than 15% of all searches on Google are unique, meaning they’ve never been done before. So it’s worth optimizing for long-tail keywords that satisfy the user intent even if their search volume is zero.
Localization Pitfalls
Traffic often leaks from one region to another. For instance, when someone who speaks English searches for something in the US, they may end up on a Canadian website if the site outranks the one set up for people in the United States. As soon as they figure it out, they’ll bounce to better alternatives.
Meanwhile, the bounce rates for the Canadian website might be astronomical, but the engagement rate or conversions are likely to be minimal. To solve the problem, implement hreflang for multi-regional and multilingual websites.
The XML sitemap allows specifying which country and language the websites are intended for. The powerful tool helps search engines direct users to the most relevant versions of a website. While meta tags are always helpful, hreflangs are easier to manage because they offload extra lines of code in separate files.
Excel at International SEO with Rocket Driver
With so many things that can impede your international SEO efforts for clients, it’s best to leave the task to specialists at an experienced white-label reseller agency. When you partner with Rocket Driver, you get access to world-class solutions offered at minimal rates.
Most happy clients trust us for our SEO, graphic design, website design, content marketing, copywriting, and listing optimization services. You can connect with us to discuss the best solutions for social media management, SMS marketing, sales funnel marketing, and other marketing solutions.
Watch this video to learn more about the perks your agency can enjoy when you purchase our services. You can also request a demo where our specialists can walk you through the one-of-a-kind solutions we offer to help you and your clients outperform competitors across the globe!