5 Dos and Don’ts of International SEO – Whiteboard Friday

Hello Moz fans. It’s a pleasure to be here today. I am here to talk a little about international SEO, five dos and don’ts that I see happening all the time. I would like to share them with you as an extension of my MozCon presentation about this topic.

The first one is to identify all the resources for your international SEO process from the beginning. This is very, very important that you advise your client, even if it’s not a pure SEO type of thing to do, or maybe some of the aspects that they need to take into consideration, not necessarily from an SEO perspective, it is important that you are a consultant for him. You say, “Hey, please be aware that in order to go international, at some point you will need native support. You will need to reply to your clients in the appropriate language. You will also need to be mindful about international deliveries if these are tangible products to be sent; the pricing, the currency, language, cultural factors, regionality factors. If it is language targeting, country targeting… all of these aspects are very, very important. Make sure that these are aligned with the website goal, and if at some point growth is needed, how this is going to grow.

All of these alternative and additional aspects that are not necessarily purely SEO, it’s very, very important that you advise your client so he is aware, because at the end, these can also be factors that might affect your work. You want this to be successful of course.

The second one is to plan the growth of your international web presence from the start. Again, it is very important that you identify where your profitable markets would be at the beginning, and where it’s better to start from a profit perspective. If you are going to target a specific country because there is enough search volume going on there about your services or products, or if there are not enough, then you will first target all of the language, which is specific landing pages maybe for some countries to test a little bit the market, but not with a full international website version for each one of the countries.

It is very important that you set this very well from the beginning and you are also aware of how you are going to evolve and migrate from one to another. Take into consideration also the pros and cons and the different alternatives from international web structure that I shared through my MozCon presentation. You can check on my slides, and I have also written about them before. You can see I have international SEO checklist that I published in the Moz Blog. You can also check out also in the SEER blog I have already written about international SEO strategy.

You can check the pros and cons of these different alternatives, like ccTLDs, subdirectories, subdomains. Verify if it is not possible, for example, to start with a ccTLD for a specific country, you need to start with a subdirectory, and then see how you are going to evolve from one to the other and how we are going to treat each language or each country so that they can coexist very well, if at some point you are country targeting and language targeting at the same time. These types of things are little things, but they are things that will keep your international web structure clean, consistent, and you will not face issues to growth in the future.

The third one is do not assume the behavior and preferences of your international markets and audience in general. Seasons can be different, the seasonality, the behavior of the users. Do not assume that the top products that you have for your current markets are going to be the top products necessarily for these other markets. Do full keyword research and behavior research. Research your competitors. Research how your audience behaves and what are the types of content that they most like, the formats they consume, the top media. All of these different aspects are going to affect, at the end, your operations and how you are going to promote and publish your content there and connect with this audience. At the end this is what you want. The final goal is to connect, to convert, to get benefits of course. Please be mindful of this. Do not assume anything. Never assume, even if it is an audience that speaks your same language, we wrongly assume that they will behave the same. No, no. Please verify this with all the trends, seasonality specifically, pricing models. All of this very important.

Also, avoid automatic content translations and redirects. If someone comes from Spain, do not automatically redirect the user to your Spanish version, for example. It is better to suggest. Suggest and tell them, “Hey, we have a version that might be more suitable for you.” Do not do it in an interstitial or an intrusive way, but in a friendly way. Take a look at how Amazon does it. I also shared an example in my MozCon presentation. In a very friendly way you can alert your user that there might be a better suited version for them. You are friendly with your users and friendly with search engines. You also promote your international versions, because at the end you also want to make the most out of them if you have them, of course.

The same with content. I have seen too many websites where they have just gone to Google and translated, copied and pasted the content and published it on their website. This needs to be done by a real person, a translator, a native person. You can say, “Okay, this costs too much. I am not able to do this.” If you start little by little and if you focus on the markets and the products, the most important ones and prioritize them, you do not need to go with an international web version that is a million pages at the beginning. You want to start little by little. It is better that you start and prioritize your international web version little by little, not with a huge amount of content, but good quality, localized content that really connects with the right audience.

The fifth one is measure each international web presence independently, but understand the interaction of each one of them. This is very, very important because you want to set an independent profile from Google Webmaster Tools or the other tools, the search engine that you are targeting and you are working with for the country that you are targeting. So from Webmaster Tools presence, each version should have their own profile there. Also with Google Analytics or your analytical software, each presence needs to have their own profile, again if you are tracking rankings of course.

So it is good that you segment a lot so you are able to verify and validate what the behavior of your international users is per presence and to be able to make the appropriate decisions and validate much better. But at the same time it is good if you can keep also web analytics an overall profile. You can also set the multi-domain tracking so that you can see what the behavior is from one presence to another. If at some point, one user arrived to another and ended up in another version, you can also see this and you can understand these are not two independent visits, but really one visitor going from one site to another.

All of this information I am pretty sure will be valuable. If there’s any other type of question that you have about international SEO, please let me know. Please leave a comment. I would love to be able to help. Also, take a look at the InternationalSEOmap.com website that I published from my MozCon presentation. Take a look at the slides and please let me know if you have any questions. Muchas gracias.