WHAT IS INTERNATIONAL SEO?

International SEO is a strategy to optimize your website for search engines. The purpose: driving organic traffic for multiple countries and strengthening the global impact of your brand by showing search engines which countries and languages you’d like to target. As a matter of fact, focusing on international SEO will unlock your company’s full growth potential, by optimizing your webpage for specific international target markets. When analyzing your global competition, you can find out which markets have the most potential to be entered next.

International SEO gives you endless possibilities in terms of boosting conversion and brand awareness. This guide will take you through an international SEO roadmap, with everything you need to know to start your international journey. We will explain how you can build a strong strategy and what you need to avoid. Furthermore, we will show you what’s important and how your website can reach its potential to the fullest. Excited yet? Yes? Alright then, let’s get started!

BENEFITS OF INTERNATIONAL SEO

Imagine, for a moment, how flourishing your brand could be when going global is your next step. With the implementation of International SEO, your business will evolve, into a business with explosive international growth.

As a result of an increasing number of competitors, it becomes ever more challenging to get a foothold in certain markets. Therefore, international expansion also poses a brilliant opportunity to benefit from a new target market, by finding unsaturated markets, full of untapped potential. Expanding your global impact offers countless possibilities to your business, leveraging the ever-growing digital markets. But as with most innovative developments, this not only affects business in a positive sense; if your company lacks the innovative drive to go with the flow and optimize for future potential, you’ll inevitably start falling behind.

By diversifying your portfolio and focusing on different markets at a time, you will be able to spread the risk of local market fluctuations. This will influence your company’s cash flow and overall financial state. International SEO has great benefits, but one thing to keep in mind is that every country with a unique audience needs a different strategy. Which needs time, effort, focus, and a well-thought-out strategy. The first step that needs to be analyzed is your business’s potential to go global. Let’s see how we’d go about that.

EXPLORE YOUR BUSINESS’S POTENTIAL FOR INTERNATIONAL GROWTH

Does your product or service have the potential to grow globally? Start by doing some research!

  • Observe your international competitors and make sure you know what keywords they use and how your business will ultimately beat them to the punch.
  • Test your product/service carefully, to know if it’s “global ready” or ready to enter a new target market.
  • You need to check how your rankings are doing and how you can work on optimizing your national SEO strategy, while working on international strategies, to retain what you’ve already accomplished.
  • Check out your site’s total and organic traffic from other countries.
  • You also want to know more about your international organic search visibility and discover the extent of your visibility in other countries, to get a good perspective on how your business is doing at the moment (without you even focusing on optimization yet).
  • When entering a new market, you must remember that your content and website must be updated to other languages, which needs to be done by native writers to make a flawless localized impression. It’s essential to consider cultural aspects and thoroughly research your target audience.
  • Keep in mind that finding and working on the right target market for your product or service takes time and needs a dedicated team of experts to help you out. For the purpose of quality and saving time, working with an international agency may help you to work with authoritative specialists around the world and deliver the full package of international service.

STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES

Find strengths for your business in your competitors’ weaknesses. Competitor analysis is also a good way to use their research as valuable information for your international business strategy. When you’ve done some good research, you also want to find out what they need to improve. You can use this to get better positioning.

  • How can you optimize their strategies?
  • Can you give customers a better experience with your website/service or product?
  • Do they focus on search engine optimization?
  • What countries/areas do they neglect to focus on?

YOUR INTERNATIONAL AUDIENCE

To create better experiences for your customers in a new target market, you want to understand your international audience. You want to know more about their characteristics, needs, thinking, behavior, and culture.

To find out more about them, you can do some online research. But it works even better to just ask, or work with people who live or grew up in your target country. They can tell you a lot more detailed information about your audience and usually know exactly what works and what you need to avoid.

This may also lead to building a great network, new partners, joint ventures, or even new products and services that are specialized for your new target market. As a result, it increases your chance of succeeding internationally.

If you want to focus on an international target market, you need to think about how you can create the best impression possible on your audience.

Take the following steps to analyze your audience:

  • Identify your audience and segment them into different groups of interest, needs, behavior, demographic-, psychographic-, technographic-, and geographic information;
  • Does your product/service satisfy the needs of your international audience?
    Use data to get to know more about your audience’s interests and needs;
  • Discover their pain points;
  • Search for customer reviews to find out what their expectations are;
  • Which cultural differences do they have?
  • What things are trending in your target country?
  • When you’ve found out more about your target market, competitors and audience, you’re sure to have found a country
  • that matches your business. The next step: optimizing your website’s structure for international uses.