Search Engine Optimisation, commonly abbreviated as SEO, is one of the most powerful tools e-commerce businesses can harness. It plays a vital role in creating brand awareness, especially when it comes to selling your products across the globe. For this, you will need an international SEO strategy to help you with language changes, cultural differences, and staying ahead of the competition. Here is how you can do this.
1. Know Your Target Countries
Your first step to going international is deciding the countries that you will target. Start by creating a list of the initial countries you serve based on the global sales and then check your international audiences. Most of this information on their demographics is accessible on analytics platforms or dashboards such as Google Analytics. If you are unable to settle for this precisely, consider working with an International SEO agency such as Eskimoz to help you narrow down your reach.
2. Conduct In-depth Market Research
Now that you have a target audience, gather information about them, the competitors in the niche as well as the relevant trends. This gives you insights when expanding into international grounds or countries. For instance, with your findings, you can know the competitors and how they approach the customers. It gives you a competitive edge as you move forward to tailoring your strategy to their particular preferences and needs.
3. Tailor Your Strategy to Each Country
The success of any SEO marketing strategy hugely depends on how your website performs on its audiences’ most preferred search engine. While search engines such as Google and Bing are popular, they are not the most preferred in some countries. For instance, most people in South Korea use Naver while in Russia they use Yandex. Your strategy should be tailored to their search engines.
4. Localise Your Content
The digital age requires that you have high-quality and optimised content. Besides ensuring quality, you must also create localised content for your intended clients. This makes their experience on your website easier as they do not have to keep translating languages, converting currencies and calculating time differences. If your target customers speak different languages, ensure the content is available in their desired language. Avoid using automated translation functions as this may be too literal and distort your point.
5. Lookout for Technical Aspects
When targeting multiple markets, consider having a dedicated URL for each. One way to do this is by getting the country’s code top-level domains. For instance, you could use .de for your German site, .ca for your Canadian site, and .fr for your French site. All this goes to creating an intuitive user experience for your users. Don’t forget to craft the website structure to the target audiences’ country to make your clients feel comfortable.
Conclusion
And there you have it! As you can see, getting into the international SEO battlefield doesn’t have to be difficult. Like regular SEO strategies, you must invest in knowing your potential customers and crafting services and products to suit their preferences. Get to know the search engines they use, and the competitors in the market, and localise your content. Availing content in their language pushes ahead in the search engine results pages (SERPs) thus a huge plus for you. Don’t skimp on the technical aspects such as the domains, sub-directories, and sub-domains. Good luck!