I thought I would share some of the main pillars of recommendations from working with an international brand in 26 major countries, whilst expanding on one grey area in particular.
The brand needed to competitively target searches for multiple international locations from each country, which was a great opportunity to dig deep into International SEO as well ensuring a thorough strategy per country.
Important factors to International SEO
- Domain level strategy.
- High quality language specific content.
- International On page SEO.
- Crawlable text based navigation to all countries – great link architecture.
- Location targeting.
- Country specific back linking.
- Effective crawling and indexing of pages.
It goes without saying that every client is different, from large ecommerce sites with products displayed in multiple languages and currencies to a simple booking process with one product per purchase. Variations in business models lead to different international SEO solutions all targeted toward the same end goal; for example recommending country coded Top Level Domains over subdomain/subfolders for a big brand with lots of resource and budget versus a small independent who needs to piggy back off the strength of an existing domain.
Every scenario is different but it’s worth noting that there is little difference between On page International SEO and On Page SEO in core practice, as each site/subfolder/subdomain/country specific content will require the same high level targeting and optimisation i.e. on page content, meta descriptions etc. per target country. It is vital to view all content as unique to the target country not only from a search engine perspective but also for the end user and conversion optimisation.
Tip: Ensure that the URL, subfolders and page names etc. are in the language you are targeting i.e. for UK www.yourdomain.co.uk/keyterm/londonpage.html vs France www.youdomain.fr/mot-cle/londres.html and that were accents are present i.e. mot-clé that this is removed from the URL “e” instead of “é”.
TLD or Sub?
At the very start of defining your International SEO Strategy the first step needs to be considering the business model, complexity of the site, target market and how competitive the market is. How much resource and budget you have to play with along with the ease of translations /copy creation.
Site/Network Structure
- Country level Domain name www.yourdomain.com (.co.uk / .fr / .de )
- Country based Subdomain uk.yourdomain.com (us.yourdomain.com)
- Country based Sub Folder www.yourdomain.com/uk/ (.com/us/ )
There are other approaches such as language based subdomains and subfolders etc.
In this example I recommended country level TLD’s, which was largely based on the availability of a healthy budget per country, internal resource, marketing support and strong requirement to competitively compete within the marketplace for each country.
We were able to create quality content which would be carefully translated/ trans-created with mother tongue speakers who were aware of the keyword requirements per country, targeting multiple locations within each country. There is great value in translating / trans-creating content. It’s not a simple job – nowhere close to Google translate and much nearer mother tongue copy writing. The resource and budget required for this approach is intensive, as each page was search optimised within the local language, currency, phone numbers and the level of activity both on and off site had to shout authority within a very competitive marketplace.
Location Targeting
As we were using a ccTLD we were already associated with a geographical location, therefore it’s not a requirement to specify a target location within Google Webmaster tools apart from for good practice. However for sites using a global domain such as .com / .org etc. with either subdomains/subfolders, Google is then reliant on other signals to determine the target location such as location information on page, links to the site, IP address etc. This is when setting the target location in GWT is very important. All of the other usual language best practices still apply to help Google serve the correct language or regional URL for the content, for example xml:lang=”en” lang=”en” within the HTML link element and rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x” within one of the following: HTML link element, http header or sitemap.
Many large brands which have an international presence and set up, do not have or want to have their sites hosted in multiple locations, with a ccTLD the location of the hosting server plays little part in the equation as the target location is predominantly concluded from the ccTLD, content and back links – this was one of the factors in our consideration of ccTLD vs Subs.
Which leads me onto the value of building links from the target location. In all cases building country specific content that will naturally generate links within that country is the goal i.e. .co.uk links going to a .co.uk site or .co.uk links going to a uk.domain subdomain or /uk subfolder instead of .com links going to a .co.uk site etc. Its value is high and a staple ingredient to a successful International SEO campaign.
Crawlable Navigation
The internal navigation was a big area of consideration as each country had to position itself competitively for hundreds of international locations for search within the home country. It was therefore essential that we were able to pass enough authority from the homepage to the location pages. It is however important in all scenarios to ensure a crawlable country navigation. This can be achieved by creating a text link-based navigation system to allow the search engines the ability to crawl all of the countries content with cookies, JavaScript and CSS disabled. Obviously html and XML sitemaps per subfolder/subdomain/TLD where applicable are required.
Potential Issues with International Site – IP detection, Crawling and indexation
Dependent on the site set up and how users are handled once they arrive at the site there can be issues if the search engines are not considered from the start.
Example issue: An international website with subdomains targeting country specific content www.yourdomain.com displaying content for the UK market with UK phone number, currency and products, with http://us.yourdomain.com displaying content for the US market presented in dollars, different products and contact details.
IP detection is set up to redirect users to their relevant country content i.e. you visit the site from the UK nothing happens, you visit the site from the USA and you get redirected to the us.yourdomain.com site.
Potential issues: In this scenario the main business market is the UK. However the site is not getting indexed in the UK, therefore not ranking and gaining relevant traffic.
The problem in this instance is that Google bot’s crawl from a US IP and therefore will be redirected to the US site. There are a few solutions some less ideal and risky than others however the following I feel is a good solution when there is a requirement to redirect based on the users IP.
Solution
Maintain the IP detection but remove the redirect. If a user visits from the UK, the IP is detected and nothing happens. If the user visits from the US the IP is detected and an overlay is presented covering the screen and presenting options to click through to the relevant countries. A small and non-obvious option to close the overlay is available which will take users back to the UK site should no relevant option be presented. The overlay is triggered through JavaScript based on their IP and as such the Google bot will be able to crawl the UK site in order to index it.
