When you’re a multinational business, you need a website that can perform and cater to different languages, markets and expectations.
Whether you are building a new international website, branching out an existing website or looking to improve your current international offering, there are a number of key decisions that need to be made.
International SEO is more than just spinning up content in different languages and implementing HREF LANG correctly. It’s about understanding how people search in the different countries and the organic competition.
I have experience working on large, international SEO campaigns for brands selling across Europe and the world. I have also worked with companies based outside of the UK, ranging from the United States to New Zealand, complementing in-house marketing teams or as an independent consultant.
Creating an International friendly site
Decisions include whether or not you’re going to use a different ccTLD, sub-directory or sub-domain to structure your multilingual website.
Off the back of this a database and URL structure can be established and the rest of the international strategy can be put in place, ensuring that the site launches without any technical hiccups and is ready to perform in multiple countries.
I do this by providing feedback and support throughout site development, including health checks once the site has been launched.
International Search Optimisation
It’s also important to understand that there are differences between the ‘Googles’, as Google.co.uk will rank sites differently to Google.fr and Google.de. This is why it is important to conduct keyword research independently for each country, understanding how to optimise each version of the site to best suit its target audience, and understanding how your target audience searches and what they expect of a webpage.
I also have experience working outside of Google and Bing, optimising websites for Baidu (China) and Yandex (Russia).
Baidu best practices aren’t too dissimilar from Google’s, however there are some key differences that need to be catered for. For instance, Baidu tends to penalise sites that include multiple subdomains, so this may be something you want to consider when deciding on how you’re going to structure your site’s URLs and database. It’s also thought that internal and external linking anchor text has more weight in Baidu than it does in Google.com.hk.
Google is the third most popular search engine in China, behind Baidu and Sogou. This is why it is important to consider Baidu SEO consultancy when you are planning on entering the Chinese online market.
Yandex as a search engine tends to favour high quality content more than Google.ru, and this often means that companies who don’t invest enough into good keyword research, content quality and content translation don’t often fare well in Yandex. I am able to offer Yandex SEO consultancy.
The Russian search engine has also been known to exclude websites from its results that are heavily over-optimised or that have ‘keyword stuffed’ content.