How To Handle International SEO

 A number of people that create a website have dreams of it becoming a major success around the world, but of course very few manage to achieve this unless they have huge sums of money and strike it lucky. The thing is, there is more to getting success outwith your current location than you think and it all comes down to the way in which you carry out SEO.

Thinking Outside Your Boundaries

So, let’s assume that you do indeed have a website that is going to be of interest to people outwith your country of origin. Now, just as with any website the key is in making sure that people know that you exist and everybody knows about the importance of SEO when it comes to getting yourself noticed.

There are of course a number of reasons as to why you would want to target other countries. Perhaps you feel that what you have to offer fits in with the market? Perhaps information that you have on your website is going to be useful to people in those countries? Perhaps you just feel that it is worth investing the time and effort in these markets because you know that you are going to make some money at some point?

However, things are slightly different when you are trying to aim at different countries and there are several important steps that you need to take in order to increase your chances of success.

Starting Off With The Domain Name

Now, if you have a .com domain name, then that is great, but the first piece of advice is for you to think about also getting the country specific domain name for where you wish to target. Say for example you would like to rank highly on the UK version of Google. In order to do so, you should really think about buying the .co.uk domain name as that will be appreciated by Google as they do love location specific domains.

This can get expensive, but it is worth doing.

Think About The Language

If you are aiming at markets where English is not the primary language, then think about getting your website translated into the appropriate language. Once again Google loves this approach as they are going to place the most relevant websites at the top of the search engines and all of those sites that do not use the local language will be pushed down the results page.

Think About The Links

Even though having a huge number of backlinks is frowned upon, they do still have a role to play in SEO although you do need to be careful that you only use quality links rather than going for quantity. In this instance, you should aim for country specific backlinks in order to boost your ranking because, just as with everything else, Google is going to love you for it and they will then push you up those results pages like never before.

Allow Google To Help You

Google also have some tools to help you with this and you need to log into your webmasters account and make sure that you have set it up to appear in universal search results. This just means that they will make sure that you do appear in those results pages rather than you doing everything individually and clearly this is going to be a huge time saver.

So what is the result of doing all of this?

Well, if you have a website where you want to target the German market, it is crazy to think that they are going to put a website from the US above their own local German websites that deal with the same things. However, if you make your content and website country specific and make it appear as if you are giving local knowledge, then they will always look favorably on you.

The good news is that this approach does indeed work, but in all honesty it is always going to be best if you can use a company that is an expert in dealing with SEO and who understands the intricacies of trying to get your website noticed abroad. The difference that this can make to the number of hits you receive internationally is huge even though we all understand how English is spoken by so many people.

You just have to remember that people will also appreciate that you have put in the effort to talk to them in their own way even if it is just a case of changing from US English to UK English. It always reflects well that you have gone that extra mile as it shows that you value them as people and potential customers and that can only be a good thing for your turnover.

Do yourself and your website a huge favor and look at changing your approach to SEO if you are indeed wanting to target foreign countries. Local SEO is a huge thing, but so is country specific SEO and if you are not doing it, then you are missing out and who wants that to happen?