Looking for techniques that will help you rank higher for search queries in different languages and countries, such as English and Spanish?
Your site should have an international SEO plan to take advantage of the fact that we live in a globalized world and interact with more people.
What Exactly Is International Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
International SEO means that your website's organic search rankings will be improved across different languages and locations. Instead of merely ranking your material in English, you may also rate your content in Spanish and German, for instance. You might have a site in the same language as your content, but it's geared at distinct geographic regions. Your site may have two English-language versions, one for English speakers in the United States and one for English speakers in the United Kingdom
Find out where your talents lie by trying out in diverse conditions
To get the most out of your time and money, you'll want to make your site available in the languages that bring in the most traffic (ROI).
How do you decide which languages and locations to target for your worldwide SEO strategy?
You'll be able to see exactly where your visitors are coming from at the outset of this process. In order to increase your traffic even further, you may want to establish a local site just for the region where you notice the majority of your visitors coming from. The following reports in Google Analytics can help you determine this: The people who are in attendance Geographical location or language can be used as an alternative (both reports are helpful)
Conduct Keyword Research Abroad
Keyword research is essential if you've previously implemented an SEO strategy in your website's original language. Finding out what people are looking for thorough keyword research will help you improve your content for the most profitable search phrases. You'd be surprised to learn that the same logic applies to your SEO efforts abroad. Keyword research should be done in each language/locale you're targeting to achieve the highest possible return on your investment. As a result, the vast majority of high-quality keyword research tools make it simple to restrict term suggestions and volume according to certain searches. Included are KWFinder, Ahrefs, SEMrush, and other popular search engine optimization tools:
Research Your Competition
Researching what your competition is like in different locations is just as crucial as determining which keywords to target. Whether you're competing with other multilingual SEO-focused sites or just local ones is an important factor to consider. In addition, how competitive is the entire market as it stands today?
For two reasons, understanding competition is critical:
It might assist you in choosing whether or not it's worth your time and effort to target that area.
Knowing how much work it will take to optimize for a specific location will help you plan.
In the same way, you conduct SEO competition research for a single-language site; you can conduct global SEO competitor research. Tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush come in handy to get a head start.
Take into account the preferences of local search engines
As far as many people are concerned, Google is the only search engine that matters for SEO. The fact that Google is the most popular search engine in the world makes this a positive development. However, it isn't the only dominant player anywhere.
It's important to know if Google is the dominant search engine in all of your target markets before you begin establishing an international SEO plan, so you'll need to conduct a little research.
Take Advantage of URL Optimization
We're now going to focus on your foreign SEO approach's "on-page" components. International SEO requires that your site be utterly indexable by Google and other search engines in all of its various languages. As a result, each translation must have its unique URL.
An English-language version of your site can be found at yoursite.com, while an international version can be found at yoursite.com/es
For foreign SEO, three URL formats are commonly used:
For each language, you establish a subfolder, as shown in the sample above. For example, yoursite.com/example-post and yoursite.com/es/example-post would be the English and Spanish versions of the same post.
If you intend to support many languages, each should have its own subdomain. For example, yoursite.com/example-post and es.yoursite.com/example-post are the URLs for the original post and the Spanish-language version, respectively.
A localized domain name is used for each language instead of a single global domain name. Examples of such URLs are yoursite.com/example-post and yoursite.es/example-post for Spanish-language versions of the same piece of content.
Google maintains that all three methods are suitable for international search engine optimization from a global perspective.
The subfolder strategy is a good starting point because it's the simplest to implement and doesn't require domain mapping.
Localize Your Content (More Than Just Translation)
Your biggest challenge when translating your existing content for each language/location you're targeting is translating your material. In addition to solving material, developing a local site involves a lot more than simply translating the content. Rather than solving your content, you should focus on localizing your website to improve your international SEO approach.
In addition to translating your content into multiple languages, below are some instances of additional localization steps that go beyond that:
A user's language should be taken into consideration when deciding which images to show so that each image is displayed in the most appropriate language;
Correcting linguistic and cultural inconsistencies;
Changing the currency to the local one;
For example, using the Metric system instead of Imperial;
Each language's layout and size must be considered while designing your website.
Dates and numbers need to be formatted appropriately to avoid confusion. Consider the comparison between the terms "month/day/year" and "month/day/year".
Include the hreflang Attribute.
When a piece of material is written in a language other than English, search engines are notified. With this tool, you can also ensure that the same version of your material is available in different languages. In many cases, Google can deduce this information on its own. It's possible to add the hreflang property to the URL to ensure that Google receives the correct information about each page's language and location.
Although it's possible to manually add the hreflang property to your site's header by injecting some behind-the-scenes code, it's better to use a multilingual website solution that will do this for you.
URL Slugs should be optimized
In addition to improving your URL structure, you should also consider translating the URL slug, as we discussed earlier. Each content on your site has its URL slug, which serves as a unique identifier. A blog post at yoursite.com/hello-world, for example, would have the URL slug hello-world. The URL slug should always contain your primary keyword as part of good SEO practice. Translation of the URL slug is also necessary for global search engine optimization.
Sometimes, this is just an exact copy of the URL in the source language. You may wish to utilize a whole new URL slug when conducting international keyword research.
English-language translations of SEO Metadata and Social Graph Data
In terms of search engine optimization, a website's title and meta description play a significant impact. SEO for worldwide markets necessitates translating and optimizing your SEO metadata in each language and region in the same manner as you would for the original language. Your title and description should be localized in order to increase your click-through rate (CTR) and incorporate international keywords.
But if you want to succeed in global SEO, you will need to put in some strategy ahead of time. This piece discussed some of the most important research and technical best practices for creating an effective foreign SEO strategy.
