7 Simple Steps To Do Global SEO

According to recent research, 45% of mid-market companies get half of their income from the international market.

Is it possible that you’re one of them?

If you don’t, you’re handing over half of your revenue to your competition.

If your company is outperforming the competition locally, you’re ready to take the next step toward worldwide expansion. All you need is a global SEO plan to assist you to reach the depths of local markets and cultural facts from different countries to fill in the gaps.

This is what we’ll talk about today.

Today, you’ll discover how to identify a significant opportunity in a different country, how to rank high, and how to produce extra sales that go beyond your initial investment. 

What Is Global SEO?

“Global SEO is the process of optimizing your website’s content for numerous locales and audiences all over the world”.

It doesn’t require much change to your SEO strategy right now, except that you’ll need to publish content in multiple languages spoken by your target audience, for different regions where your website visitors come from, and, most importantly, for the most popular search engines in that region or country.

In essence, search results are displayed differently for users in China who choose Baidu, for users in Russia who prefer Yandex, users in Japan who prefer Yahoo, and for users in South Korea who prefer Naver.

Because of these disparities in search results and search engines, your global SEO efforts should not solely focus on optimizing your website for Google, even though Google is the most popular search engine worldwide.

Why Is A Global SEO Strategy Important?

Unless you run a local brick-and-mortar store with no e-commerce component, your customers are likely to come from all over the world. It doesn’t matter where you are when you’re selling goods and services to foreign customers.

It’s critical to consider your business from a global viewpoint if you want to attract clients regardless of their geographic location.

You can’t just have your website translated into a foreign language and expect to appear in international search engines and rank highly for your chosen search terms.

While making your website content accessible to visitors who speak a different language is crucial, it isn’t enough to develop a worldwide SEO strategy.

Here are a few pointers to help you develop a worldwide SEO plan that will please clients all around the world.

Steps To Do Global SEO

Decide Which Countries Or Languages You Want To Target

To be effective with your worldwide SEO efforts, you must first conduct research: – where are your products and services most in demand?

As you can see, doing your study is critical—it is one of the most important phases in your worldwide SEO plan. Start by looking at the Language and Location tabs in your Google Analytics account’s Geo option.

Keep track of which languages and nations convert well on your website, especially if you’re already conducting business worldwide.

If you’re not yet transacting globally, the information from the Language and Location tabs can still be useful – pay attention to the users’ behavior, particularly their clicks, engagement, and time spent on your site.

Brazil, for example, converts better than more affluent countries such as the United States.

As a result, with global SEO, you can never assume that just because a country is larger or wealthier, it will convert well.

Knowing where your traffic is coming from can be beneficial. As a result, you should start looking at your Google Analytics. This is a priority while performing global SEO.

Conduct Keyword Research For Global SEO

When conducting keyword research for your global SEO strategy, keep in mind that just because a few keywords are popular in one language does not guarantee they are also popular in others.

Remember the multiple search phrases you’d have to optimize for if your company operated in several nations, like the United States, Japan, Russia, France, and Spain?

They don’t seem to speak the same language, and they’re unlikely to employ the same search words in browser and voice searches.

You may now wish to focus on branded keywords or search queries as well.

If you notice a substantial volume of traffic coming from different nations or people speaking different languages in your Google Analytics account, it’s time to take action.

It’s time to start looking for branded keywords and queries that only you can rank for.

Because it’s quite improbable that your competitors will associate your brand with terms, right?

To locate the perfect terms for your worldwide SEO plan, employ online keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner and Ubersuggest.

Bonus Tip: Pick keywords with strong search volumes but low-paid and organic competition.

If you’re seeking to target search consumers in a specific country that prefers Yandex as a search engine, such as Russia, you might also want to look into other search engines’ keyword research tools, such as Yandex Wordstat.

Conduct A Competitor Analysis

Aside from determining which keywords are worth pursuing, you should also investigate your competition in other areas.

Will you be competing with other sites that have implemented a multilingual SEO strategy, or will you be competing with only local sites? Furthermore, how competitive is the market as a whole?

Understanding competition is critical for mainly two reasons:

i. It can help you decide whether or not it’s even worthwhile to try to reach out to that location in the first place.

ii. It will tell you how much work you’ll have to put into optimizing for that specific location. You can conduct global SEO competitor research in the same way that you would for a single-language site. Tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush might help you get started if you’re not sure where to begin. 

Make A Long-Term URL Structure Plan

It’s not only about content in your global SEO strategy. You must also ensure that your website is robot-friendly.

A great global SEO plan will include a clean, well configured, and frequently updated sitemap, as well as SEO-friendly URLs in each language you’re optimizing for.

It’s a good idea to add certain keywords in your URLs, as this helps bots and humans understand what the page is about, and it’s also a good idea to link different sites in different languages together. 

For example, the French version links to the English version, and so on.

Translate SEO Metadata And Social Graph Information

You’re probably aware that the SEO title and meta description of your website are crucial for search engine optimization.

To execute SEO for global markets, you must translate and optimize your SEO metadata for each language and region, just as you did for the original language.

To improve the click-through rate (CTR) and add keywords from your global keyword research, you should localize the title and description.

But don’t only focus on the SEO information. You’ll also want to translate your social media graph information so that when people share your site on Facebook and Twitter, it includes localized content. 

Read More: Tweaks For Page Title & Meta Description That’ll Boost Your SEO Traffic & CTR

Localize Your WebPages’ Content

“You always talk about other languages, but we only speak English!”

There’s no problem — you should hire translators if your budget allows it, and since you’re going global.

You see, if you want your global SEO strategy to succeed, you’ll need to translate and adapt your material for each region or language speaker you wish to target. You can do so by using Upwork to hire native speakers of the language you’re targeting.

However, you should choose an editor or translator who is familiar with your target market, speaks both English and the local language, and has a thorough understanding of your sector or field. 

Better yet, you may wish to employ a search engine optimization (SEO) firm that specializes in search-engine-friendly translation and content generation.

Then, the question that might be buzzing into your mind is, “Why should we spend so much money on translators when there are technologies that can do it for us?

Yes, these internet translation tools are simple to use and navigate. Despite this, none of them can translate an entire piece of material that accurately relays your message and connects with your target audience, which is made up entirely of humans.

You don’t want to have 100 articles translated into various languages just to realize that they are all of the poor quality, requiring a human translator to redo them. That’s a waste of time and money.

You cannot converse with the elderly on an equal footing, as you do in the West. If you do, your audience will be hesitant to give your business a chance, especially if they know you’re young.

If you run an e-commerce business that caters to Japanese customers, but your products are sold in packs of nine or four on your website, you’ll almost certainly have a high bounce rate, signaling the search engines to look for you. 

Translating your existing content is the most difficult process when it comes to developing content for each language/location you’re targeting. Creating a local site, however, entails more than just translating information.

It’s more vital to work on localizing your site than just translating content if you want to improve your global  SEO strategy.

Here are some instances of extra localization steps that go beyond simply translating your material into many languages:

Displaying different images depending on the user’s language so that each image is optimized for that language;

• Cultural references are being updated to reflect the language/location in question.
• Currency conversion to the local currency;
• Using local units of measurement (e.g., Metric rather than Imperial);
• Changing the layout of your website to meet the size and layout of each language;
• Changing the date and number formats.

Consider the following examples: day/month/year vs month/day/year.

Incorporate Other Search Engines Into Your Overall SEO Strategy

You’re missing out on a lot of traffic and conversions if you’re only optimizing for Google as part of your overall SEO plan.

Although Google is the most used search engine on the planet, there are many more important companies.

Knowing your target audience includes determining which search engine they prefer.

In essence, populous countries like China, Russia, South Korea, and Japan use different search engines like Baidu, Yandex, Naver, and Yahoo. Consider the following guidelines when evaluating other search engine players as part of your overall SEO strategy:

Ascertain that your translators are capable of conducting proper keyword research using tools tailored to the individual search engine. For example, instead of using Google Keyword Planner, Yandex Words should be utilized when developing content for potential clients in Russia.

Investigate how the most popular search engine in your target region or country operates — 

search engines use various algorithms. As a result, they have a variety of ranking considerations. To thrive in worldwide SEO, you must do your homework.

For example, Google and Yandex may allow hreflang attributes to identify which of your web pages will be sent to your intended audience. However, hreflang tags are not supported by Bing, one of the most popular search engines in the world.  As a result, your website must be properly marked up.

Global SEO Tips You Should Not Forget

Whether you’re working on a normal SEO plan or nailing your worldwide SEO, these are some of the steps in your SEO strategy that you shouldn’t skip:

i. Create shareable URLs and seek out people who speak a different language to encourage them to share your website’s links via email or social media.

ii. Build links—develop high-quality content that attracts connections from websites in your target location.

iii. In particular, if you have shops or offices in several countries, keep your NAPs (Number, Address, Phone) up to date.

iv. Make use of AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), especially in areas where page performance is a concern.

v. Perform regional SEO in the area you want to target.

vi. Your website’s data and privacy policies should be updated.

vii. When creating material, keep the relevance of the content in mind. 

viii. Develop trust with your potential customers.

Create many communities out of your target audience, each of which speaks a different language and originates from a different country or region – this is why hiring the correct translators and editors is critical, especially if you only speak one language as a business owner.

Measure your overall SEO efforts to find out what’s working and magnify it, as well as what’s not working, and change your SEO strategy. 

Conclusion

SEO isn’t a magic wand, and it doesn’t work in a day or two. It takes time for search engines to properly index your site, and once it is cataloged, it will take time for your site to establish the durability, clout, and reputation necessary to rank for the keywords you have chosen.

Because international SEO is equally as competitive as local SEO, you’ll need a strong global SEO strategy that includes localized content optimization if you want to see long-term success. 

You should conduct extensive research. Just because a keyword is popular in one language doesn’t mean it is popular in another.

Even if the language is the same, search volume in different nations or areas can vary significantly, making keyword research crucial.

Don’t try to break into too many new markets all at once. It’s preferable to acquire a reputation for high-quality items and culturally relevant content in one or two additional markets than to flood the web with low-quality text in 30 regions. Slow and steady is the way to win this race.

In today’s global marketplace, marketing to overseas customers is critical, and global SEO is how you get your product or service in front of them.