As a business, you may rely on incoming traffic to your website to create leads and get new clients or customers on board. If this is the case, it’s likely you’ll have some kind of an SEO strategy to help achieve this. If you don’t, don’t panic! We have some helpful hints and tips to help you get started on your website’s SEO journey.
Why should you focus on SEO?
When a business is getting started, SEO can often be a forgotten part of a marketing plan. Whether your initial focus is getting emails created and sent off to prospective clients or you’re concentrating on a big social media push, it’s important to remember just how important your SEO is.
International SEO is essentially the process of optimising your website so that search engines, like Google, can easily understand which countries you want to target with your content, as well as which languages you use for business. If you know from looking at your analytics or from market research that a good percentage of visitors to your website come from a different country, it may be an idea to further optimise your website to maximise on this opportunity.
The importance of having a strong international site
At the end of the day, the goal of your international SEO strategy is to improve the overall user experience by making sure the people who are coming to your website have an effortless journey from the moment they search for you, to the moment they land on your site. Having a strong international site will help to prevent users landing on the wrong country or language variation of your website.
Start by looking at whether or not you’ll need your existing content translated into another language. You’ll find a number of native speaking content experts on the web; so whether you’re wanting to hire someone permanently or on a freelance basis, you’ll be able to get the job done. You’ll also need to make sure your domain and URL structures are on point too. You can adopt a regional domain strategy (for example using website.co.uk and website.de etc) or create subdomains or subdirectories or a generic TLD (such as a .com).
Ultimately, a strong international site will help ensure your busines meets its audience’s expectations in whatever region they’re based in, thus avoiding any lost opportunities. Your international SEO strategy can also help you to create a much friendlier user journey from when users search, to landing on your website.
Developing an SEO strategy
If you’ve never developed an SEO strategy before it can be difficult to know where to start. With so many factors to consider it can often feel like you have a mountain to climb! It may be worth reaching out to an experienced international SEO agency for help, as they will have the existing teams, tools and knowledge to be able to help launch your international presence.
They may be able to help you establish a solid international outreach strategy to achieve external links to your website, thus helping with domain authority, as well as other elements like international keyword research, PR campaigns with local media and social media strategies that cover multiple territories.
No matter if you establish an international SEO strategy with your existing internal teams or you look to outsource the work, in today’s fast-paced environment it’s better to be ahead of the game rather than getting left behind.
