We’ve spoken a lot in the past about how to target SEO on a local scale. But what about companies that operate on a global scale?
When you’re looking to improve your visibility across different countries, you face a whole different set of SEO challenges. Let’s look at what you need to consider.
Website Structure
Before we begin looking at keywords and how to target your content, it’s vital to ensure your website is well optimised and easy to navigate, regardless of which country you’re coming from.
Of course, a big part of this will involve choosing whether to have one global domain (such as .com or .org) or a series of national domains (such as .co.uk). Generally, the former is easier to improve through SEO, since all the link equity goes into one domain, but there may be times when the latter is vital. For instance, if you sell different products or services in each country, you might need more specialised websites for each.
Yet all of this really depends on the unique nature of your business and your ultimate end goal. This is one area where it’s worth speaking to the experts within your SEO agency to get the best recommendations.
Languages
Multiple countries also means multiple languages and, again, how you structure your website will prove crucial. Using href lang tags, for instance, you can mark your content in the relevant language. This way, search engines like Google will be able to deliver it to results pages of the appropriate language.
Yet it isn’t always so simple. If you have multiple countries to target, you need to consider all the languages that will be spoken, ensuring content is available for all with the appropriate tags. Someone searching for a specific topic in Spanish doesn’t want to be linked to that page in English, for instance, and vice versa.
Backlinks and Outreach
When it comes to creating great content – whether its internally or externally – you need to consider the different countries you are targeting. Sometimes, you might be able to have a small set of articles or pages cater to a broad part of your audience – for example, if its in the most spoken language that covers numerous areas. However, you might find there are cultural or linguistic differences.
During your keyword assessment, you might find that different countries favour different keywords, or that your visibility changes between these countries when using alternative search queries. When dealing with local directories and websites, don’t be afraid to apply these keywords to your benefit.
Always Check Your Crawling Results
As you may have noticed, there’s a lot to check with these large scale websites. Because of this, it’s worth keeping a very regular eye on the crawling budget. With different languages and sub-domains, you might find Google-bots aren’t able to reach all of it, which could hinder results in certain areas. This is something that can be fixed with better navigation, streamlining content to avoid duplication and otherwise better optimising the website – such as through the robots.txt file. Yet you should take the time to run crawler bots across your server to give you the best impression – you need to know which areas aren’t being indexed.