There are certain factors that affect international SEO positioning or, in other words, our positioning in the specific search engines of a country will depend on a series of variables. That is why below we will list a series of recommendations and tips for international SEO.
We have the clearest example in Google. As we mentioned previously, Google does not behave in the same way in different countries. This means that Google’s algorithm is different for each country.
We can check this by searching Google.es and Google.fr for the same term, for example, “usb 64gb”, and we will see that the results are not the same.
This is due, in short, to the fact that the specific search engines of each country prioritize national websites. In a little more detail, the recommendations and tips for international SEO are:
Web IP address and hosting location
Through the IP address of a website or hosting, search engines know where it is located. As a consequence, search engines in each country will give priority in the search results to websites hosted in that country.
For example, a website hosted in France will be prioritized in Google.fr results while it will be penalized in Google.es results.
Ideally, the hosting or website is hosted in the main country of our target audience.
Web domain type
The type of domain or domain ending, such as .com, .es, .fr, etc, allows search engines in each country to give priority in searches to their specific domain.
For example, a website whose domain is .fr will be prioritized on Google.fr while it will be penalized in the results on Google.es.
Ideally, again, the domain type corresponds to that of the main country of our target audience.
All of this is not applicable when we have generic domains, such as .com or .net. In this case, Google knows the language through the hreflang and html lang tags and, if these do not exist, it tries to guess the language through its algorithm.
Hreflang and html lang tags
The hreflang and html lang tags allow you to define the language of a website and the location of the different translations. These tags are complemented by indicating the language in the sitemap.
They will only be necessary in the case that we have a multilingual website or the IP address of the hosting and/or the type of domain do not match the language or region of the audience we are targeting.
As a consequence of the above and, in a scenario where our market strategy is focused on a single country, the ideal is to have the website hosted and use the domain of said country. For example, if our target audience is French, the ideal is that we hire French hosting and use the .fr domain.
