International SEO and getting it right
The way consumers and suppliers are using the internet has been changing over the past few years. One of the biggest changes has been that companies are now looking outside their own market to international markets.
This has meant that customers are being more proactive with their websites to try and break into the international market. However, breaking into another market is not an easy thing to do, and you must perform a number of different tasks to make sure that you have the right approach. This involves ensuring that you have completed a keyword research on the search terms used in that country as the words you use in your current market may not be said in the same way in Spain or France for example.
As well as performing a full keyword research, you need to ensure your site is set up to handle foreign currency, as people abroad are more likely to buy from a website that uses their own currency, rather than that of another country. Make sure you have looked at all the key areas of attacking the global market and that you are translated into the language of the country you are expanding into, as this will help your ranking in the search results for that country. This is because there is not only one version of Google, and it is broken up to into countries to improve the user search experience, examples being google.fr and google.au.
Traditionally the approach was to buy your website domain for that country, and that would allow you break into the international market with a small amount of cost to your business. This is no longer the preferred approach when trying to break into the international market as you basically are building a website from scratch with no history or authority so it may be difficult for you to appear that country for your target keywords.
Six months ago Google released an update to webmaster tools that allows users to created multiply websites from their main .com domain. This is possible as you can register your international domains in Google without buying a sub domain, due to webmaster tools allowing you create internal websites within your own site. Although this sounds easy, you need to make sure that each site has its own domain and sitemaps to ensure Google sees the international pages as a separate website in webmaster tools. If your international campaign is not set up correctly it will be classed as duplicated and affect your website rankings in your own country. So when looking at the international market make sure you do your research and everything is set up correctly as if you get this wrong it could have a massive effect on your website visibility.
With these changes it means that there is no reason your company cannot set up www.exmple.com/au or www.exmaple.com/ca tomorrow for small set up investment. By setting up your international site like this, any authority your main site may have built up will be passed down along the other country websites, meaning you are more likely to appear in the natural search results in your target country. It has never been easier to put an international strategy in place online, you just need to make sure that you get it right or risk affecting long term objectives.
The best SEO agencies will know how to launch an international campaign for companies looking to expand into other markets, but you should still make sure that your website design company gets it right at the point of build, or you risk affecting long term objectives.
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