Introduction

Expanding a website’s reach to non-English speaking audiences through international SEO is no longer a luxury, but a strategic necessity. As businesses increasingly operate globally, optimizing content for multiple languages and regions can significantly boost visibility, user engagement, and revenue streams. 

What is international SEO?

When you target more than one country/language with a website, you're doing international SEO.

Sometimes, this might be rather easy—for example, targeting different communities in the USA who use different languages—but at times, it might be difficult—entering markets with a very different culture.

Why consider doing international SEO?

The most important reasons to use international SEO should be business-driven. Why not use your online presence to increase revenue by targeting multiple countries?

There are some practical economic reasons for going international - you could reduce costs by increasing the volume of sales and become a more resilient company by constantly adapting to new markets and lowering the risks you get from being on a single market.

As you grow your brand will become better known internationally.

You might have emotional reasons for expanding, like a wish to grow and develop constantly.

For SEO purposes, if a website can be accessed from multiple countries in multiple languages, this is an obvious improvement in the user experience.

What are some international SEO best practices?

#1 Do market research

The first thing to do is understand the markets you want to operate in.

Know your audience, create buyer personas, try to see what your audience is like.

As a tip, if more than one language is spoken in a particular country, use this to your advantage. Try to understand them all, and do your market research in all the relevant languages right from the beginning.

#2 How should your domain name be?

There are multiple options for choosing a domain name.

a. ccTLD

ccTLD refers to "country code top-level domains." If you are in France, you could use mysite.fr. If you are in Spain, the domain would change to mysite.es. International markets (not just the US) sometimes focus on having mysite.com. You get the picture—the last part of the domain specifies which country a domain is focused on.

As a note, if you are present in a huge number of countries, the cost of owning domain names will also be a factor to take into account.

b. gTLD with subdomains/subfolders

gTLD, a short form for "global top-level domains." In this case, you have a single, "global" website with content in different languages/for other countries on that domain.

You can have either subdomains:

es.mysite.com

fr.mysite.com

en.mysite.com

or you can have subfolders:

mysite.com/es

mysite.com/fr

mysite.com/en

These can be easier to set up than ccTLDs, but visitors might have difficulties determining the language of a page by just looking at its URL.

c. gTLD with language parameters

For example, you can have:

mysite.com?lang=es

mysite.com?lang=fr

mysite.com?lang=en

Search engines like Google can perfectly understand this from a technical point of view, but you have to pay attention to avoid making any technical mistakes. It's easy to miss something important with this kind of implementation. Also, visitors might not be aware of a page's language.

It's safe to use this method from a technical perspective; just be aware that you'll always need to test the website thoroughly for errors, and other methods might prove better.

Tip on organizing language settings from a technical perspective: avoid mixing subfolders with parameters and mixing subdomains with ccTLDs. Choose only one.

#3 Different results for different countries

If you Google the same thing from different locations. If you travel, the search "restaurants near me" changes based on your city.

The same is true for countries—if you Google the same thing from various countries, you'll get different results.

This is important to remember when optimizing for local searches - expect to get different results.

#4 Different search habits

Various cultures search for things differently.

When optimizing a website for local searches, it's essential to know what people in a specific location search like. What words do they use, if they use short tail (high volume searches, generally with few words in the query) or long tail (generally low volume searches, with more keywords in the query).

#5 Different devices^^, different results

Some people search while on the go. Mobil traffic generally has a large proportion of Internet traffic.

For this kind of searcher, it might be a good idea to improve your website speed with lazy loading techniques to ensure it loads quickly.

This will help Google favor your website over slower-loading competitors.

#6 Do keyword research

After you covered the basics, it's time for the next step - keyword research.

Ensure you understand the local market - we can't stress this enough.

Then, use keyword research tools.

They include: Ahrefs, Semrush, and Google's Keyword Planner. Another option is AnswerThePublic - the tool can give you insights into the questions people use when searching for things related to a topic.

Of course, you can always visit the Slicedbread Agency homepage to learn more about how we can assist with keyword research.

#7 Create the content

We think there are some prior steps to writing content, and we presented them above.

Now, it is time to actually create content. Of course, it needs to be unique; don't copy it from somewhere else. Also, focus on quality instead of quantity. Rather than investing in creating three low-quality articles, make a single one, but make it top-notch.

As you can imagine, translating an article into a different language is not enough. Local culture is very important, as well. You need to do more than simply translate—you need to adapt the content to a local language.

Note - one article, one language. Create an article targeting only one language. Both search engines and users will surely need clarification on this.

Of course, we don't need to mention that you should avoid duplicate content as much as possible.

#8 Adapt other things than the text

If you translate (and adapt) an article's title and body text, it's all you need to do.

Try to adapt the images to the local market, then, change their filenames, ALT texts, and captions to reflect the new language.

Also, think of things like the URLs of the articles, meta tags, and Schema.org—they all need to be localized.

Of course, when you publish an article, publish it in a local timezone. Creating an article and publishing it at 3 AM would be strange.

#9 Local hosting

Your local website must be hosted on a local server with a local IP address.

It will help with speed, and search engines will view this local IP as a positive sign.

It might be helpful to use a CDN (content delivery network) to handle a lot of websites. It helps serve local resources faster and might be easier to handle globally.

#10 A special note on laws

After translating content and adapting it to a new language, have a local person read the text and ensure you keep all local customs. It is essential to ensure you don't break local laws.

#11 Hreflang attribute

This is an important aspect - make sure your website uses Hreflang.

See Google's view on the topic.

While Google likes hreflang tags, search engines like Bing might use this tag (an example for English):

<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us">

Those letters "en-us" must be adapted for each country/language—more on this.

You shouldn't redirect users based on their IP or via cookies.

#12 Promote the article

After you write an article, promote it on social media, write to some local key players (influencers, local media) to get their attention, and try to get local reviews of your article.

If applicable, you should link from the article to other content on the local market. Make it a hub of relevant local resources.

If you link to other parts of your website (such as internal pages), make sure that they are in the same language.

#13 Audit your website from time to time

To make sure everything works as planned, you audit your website from time to time.

#14 Monitor results

You should use Analytics software such as Google Analytics and tools like Google Search Console to analyze the performance of your website. 

Make sure you create action plans based on the results.

Also, take a look at the competition.

Conclusion

Mastering international SEO is a multifaceted endeavor that requires meticulous planning, cultural sensitivity, and continuous monitoring. As the digital marketplace becomes more interconnected, adopting a robust international SEO strategy will be pivotal in staying competitive and achieving long-term success.