International SEO refers to the techniques and knowledge necessary to improve SEO positioning in different countries, including ours.
Two important aspects of International SEO are:
- Not all countries use the same search engine.
- Google is not the only search engine used within a certain country.
Google is not the only search engine in the world, there are others such as Bing, Yahoo, Baidu or Yandex. Furthermore, the Google search engine is not the same nor does it behave the same in each of the different countries.
Due to the above, before moving on to the following sections, it is necessary that you be clear about what your target audience is and where it is located, taking into account that the more countries we want to cover or the more they deviate from the standard, the more complex the process will become.
Most used search engines in the world
Once we are clear about who our target audience is and where it is located, we will go on to find out which are the most used search engines by country.
This will allow us to adapt our international SEO strategy to the country in question and focus our efforts on the search engines that are most used in said country and not on others.
In this phase we will use web statistics tools such as GS statcounter.
Tips and recommendations for International SEO
When we want to position our website in different countries or even in our own, it is necessary to take into account some recommendations and tips for International SEO positioning or, in other words, know that the Google algorithm takes into account different variables in Intentional SEO, which are:
- IP address or hosting location. Search engines prioritize websites whose IP address or hosting location is in the same country or region as the visitor.
- Domain type. In the same way, search engines give priority to websites whose domain corresponds to that of the visitor’s country.
- Hreflang and html lang tags. These html tags allow us to define in which language our website is located and where the translations are located for the different languages of the visitors to our website if we have a multilingual website. Furthermore, these tags are complemented by indicating the language in the sitemap.
How to create multilingual website for SEO
The simplest scenario is that our website is in a single language, in this way it will be enough to have the website in said language with an IP and domain corresponding to the country in question if what we want is to optimize SEO for a specific country.
However, the most common thing is to have a multilingual website and want to optimize international SEO. In this case it will be necessary to follow the following steps:
- Learn how language and region codes work.
- Define a multilingual strategy. Basically define how we are going to organize the website at the level of content and URLs to be able to manage all the languages. There are three options, geographic top level domains or country code top level domain, subdomains and subdirectories or subfolders.
- Use the hreflang, html lang tags and a multilanguage sitemap to achieve a multilingual website optimized for SEO. These three elements will allow us to tell search engines what language each page is in and where the translations of each of them are located.
Yandex and Baidu
There are exceptional occasions where some parts of the above are not valid. The clearest examples of this are Yandex (Russia) and Baidu (China).
The main problem we have with both search engines is that they give much more SEO priority to local results, from the country itself, than the rest of the search engines.
This means that if we want to focus our international SEO strategy exclusively on one of these countries, the ideal would be:
- The IP address of the website or the hosting location must be in these countries and not in others.
- We must use the geographic top level domain or country code top level corresponding to the country in question, that is, .ru for Russia and .cn for China.
- We must learn how Yandex or Baidu works and how to position ourselves in them since they are not exactly the same as Google, they have their own tools and ways of operating.
Additionally, if we need to implement a multilingual website that includes these countries along with others, a good option would be to have the website replicated several times with their corresponding domains. An example of international SEO optimization, if we wanted to position ourselves in Russia and Spain, would be:
- On the one hand we would have the hosting or the website located in Russia with the .ru domain. We would position this website in Yandex using the tools that it provides us. The website should also be in Russian.
- On the other hand, we would have the hosting or the website in Spain with its .es domain and in the Spanish language. We would position this website in Google and Bing with the techniques that we already know.
- Also, and completely optionally and additionally, we would create a website with a generic domain such as, for example, .com, translated into English and located in the United States.
- We would use a single multi language sitemap to indicate to different search engines that our content is available in three languages and that they are located on three different websites.
- Finally, on each page, we would use the hreflang and html lang tags to indicate what language each specific page is in and where their corresponding translations are located.
With these points we would be able to position ourselves correctly in the three countries and we would obtain traffic from both the Yandex search engine and the Google and Bing search engines, regardless of the location of the visitors.
As you can imagine, carrying out International SEO positioning in these search engines is not a simple task, especially due to the language. Therefore, it is advisable to know the language or have someone we know who can help us in the different phases, such as, for example, how to choose keywords, search engine documentation on how to send the sitemap, check content indexing… etc.
