Expand Your Global Reach with Expert International SEO Services
Companies seeking to penetrate international markets must go beyond local SEO and build their reputation worldwide. Our international SEO agency helps you create a robust online presence that attracts attention from global search engines, improving conversion rates across numerous regions. By optimizing for international audiences, you can enhance global rankings and outcompete national competitors.
What Are International SEO Services?
International SEO services aim to optimize your online presence for multiple countries and languages. By ensuring that content reaches the right audience in each target market, you can ensure global success in your industry.
An international SEO strategy requires thorough keyword research and market analysis to understand search habits in different countries, which will shape your digital marketing efforts for each international market. You’ll also need multilingual SEO with relevant keywords for other languages, ensuring you match the needs of a global audience.
These projects are complex and require careful orchestration. A consistent tone must be maintained across all markets and languages. As such, many international companies rely on professional SEO services to manage their global marketing needs rather than attempting to tackle everything on their own.
Why Your Business Needs International SEO
Reaching an international audience can be challenging, as search engine results are typically localized based on geolocation and relevant keywords. Additionally, international search engines may use different algorithms, and users in international markets may use different keywords than those in your primary market.
An international SEO strategy helps you overcome these challenges by localizing content and keywords to different markets. By building an international website and conducting careful keyword research, you can funnel global market segments to the most relevant version of your site, providing value to each audience. This boosts international web traffic and improves conversion rates across multiple countries and languages.
However, international SEO marketing can be challenging, especially if you want to focus on your core business operations instead of marketing. Our global SEO company handles these processes on your behalf so that you can enjoy online growth while delivering excellent customer service across all marketplaces.
Key Benefits of International SEO Services
International search engine optimization plays a key role in developing global brand visibility. This helps you build international traffic and improve rankings in every market.
However, international SEO requires a systematic and thoughtful approach. Users want to feel that you are speaking directly to them rather than simply incorporating content from your native language into their market. They may also have different preferences, such as certain content formats, images, and rhetorical approaches.
By adopting local SEO strategies internationally, you can improve the user experience in every target market, enhance ROI, and ensure long-term business growth. This will translate to greater success in each market, improving your revenue streams.
Working with experts guarantees better results, as we have the skills and experience necessary to tackle these complex projects. We’ll leverage our international network of link partners, contract professional translators, and rely on technical SEO experts to enhance every aspect of your digital footprint. Thanks to our expertise, you can focus on providing excellent customer service to a worldwide consumer base.
Our Comprehensive Approach to International SEO
As an experienced international SEO agency, we apply proven SEO strategies to your company’s online presence to help you dominate global markets. Our global SEO strategy includes international market research, localization, hreflang implementation, and content creation that will appeal to different market segments.
-
Conducting Global Market Research
To begin the international SEO process, our team will learn about your target regions, audience behavior, and competition so that we can adjust our approach to achieve the highest rankings. We’ll use advanced tools to analyze user behavior by region and develop a strategy to address their unique needs.
-
Localizing Website Content
Our international SEO company excels at creating region-specific content to meet the needs of international markets. Straight translation often feels inauthentic to a global audience, who may think that your company doesn’t care about their needs. At worst, mistranslation errors could misrepresent your product or service, leading to consumer complaints.
Rather than simply translating your original copy into a different language, we work with experts to match the cultural and linguistic preferences of your target audience. Multilingual SEO enables you to capture more web traffic while satisfying user needs worldwide.
-
Implementing Hreflang Tags
Hreflang tags are critical when targeting different countries and languages. These signal the right language and regions to search engines based on the user’s location and language preferences so that they receive the most relevant version of your website.
By directing website traffic to the most appropriate page, you can prevent duplicate content issues, which can damage your global rankings. You also ensure a more pleasant user experience, as visitors won’t have to use an auto-translate tool or sift through your website to find content in their language.
-
Optimizing for International Keywords
Keywords are the secret sauce for an SEO campaign, but they often vary significantly by market. This is especially true for international SEO. While local markets in the same country usually only need localized keywords, global markets require a more specific approach. Regional variations in terminology and language can impact how users search for certain products or services.
We conduct keyword research for each market to ensure that we are targeting the terms that consumers are using. This is especially important for certain areas of content marketing, such as when targeting long-tail keywords. While these keywords have lower search volume, directly answering these user queries can boost conversion rates.
However, users in some countries may use different grammatical structures or slang, which machine translation may not capture. As such, we perform in-depth research into search behavior and intent across your marketplaces, identifying how regional variations and terms impact your rankings. This ensures that you get maximum visibility for every localized page.
Technical SEO for International Websites
Our international SEO services include technical SEO, a crucial component of adjusting your content for international audiences. As global websites must target multiple countries and languages, they require complicated redirects to ensure that every audience receives the right version of your site.
-
Structuring URLs for International SEO
As part of our international SEO services, we will determine the right URL structure for your website content. Options include subdomains, subdirectories, and country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs), each with its pros and cons.
Subdomains are part of your global domain, but they use a country code to differentiate which version of the website should be displayed. They are usually placed in front of the main domain, such as “de.sitename.com.” Proxies and CMS tools often default to this, so subdomains are a popular way for companies to improve their international SEO.
Because subdomains are connected to the larger website, they benefit from the site’s authority, making it easier to penetrate new markets. It can also be cheaper because you don’t need to purchase separate domains for each market. However, they don’t provide automatic user association with the target market and require a separate SEO strategy for each subdomain.
Subdirectories, also known as subfolders, are essentially folders on the main website, much like “sitename.com/shop” is a subfolder. You would then create a subdirectory for different countries and use a hreflang code for each one. All of them would be hosted on the same general top-level domain (gTLD), such as “.com” or “.net.”
This international SEO strategy can be very beneficial, specifically when it comes to building authority. Every subdirectory will benefit from backlinks on other subdirectories, though they all require a link-building strategy. As such, search engines may rank a subdirectory higher. However, some domain names may not translate well into different languages, leading to a lower reputation in these markets.
Lastly, country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) use a different domain for each of your markets. Essentially, each ccTLD will appear to search engines as an entirely different website, providing greater local SEO benefits. This allows you to develop a precise global SEO strategy with highly localized content and employ different content management systems for each domain.
While ccTLDs can be incredibly helpful for major international SEO efforts, they are also expensive and time-consuming to set up. Every domain must build its authority rather than relying on the authority of other subdomains and subdirectories, and all must have a separate link-building strategy, as they can’t rely on different domains.
Our international SEO agency will help you determine which of these approaches will work best for your company. This will allow you to enjoy global success without unnecessary investments.
-
Improving Site Speed Across Regions
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are crucial for managing international traffic. They create a system of different servers worldwide, all of which will have cached versions of your website. When a user clicks on your page in search results, the closest server to their location will respond with the most recent version of your site.
By improving server response times, you can create a better user experience while also ranking higher on search engines, which use page speed to determine rankings. As part of our international SEO services, we help companies set up and manage CDNs worldwide.
Content Strategy for International SEO
Reaching a global audience requires content tailored to each market’s preferences, search habits, and needs. Our international SEO services include a globally optimized content strategy that leverages proven local SEO processes.
We will create location-specific content, such as specialized landing pages and product descriptions, that resonates with audiences in each international market. Through our keyword research and cultural understanding, we’ll write engaging blog posts that meet user expectations in different markets, giving your company a local feel with a global reach.
-
Creating Multilingual Content
Though machine translation can be helpful for small-scale projects, it can be dangerous when employing an international SEO strategy. Far from being a minor nuisance, translation errors can have catastrophic consequences if they misrepresent your services or confuse your audience. Some errors, like directly translated idioms, could even be offensive.
Our team uses professional translators for our international search engine optimization, which ensures accuracy and cultural relevance for every market. We ensure that your international audience receives content that is both engaging and relevant to their needs.
-
Adapting Visual Content for Global Audiences
It’s said that a picture is worth a thousand words, but this isn’t always true for international SEO. A global audience encompasses many cultures and races, all of which will want to see themselves in your website content. For example, while one audience may be comfortable with images of women in tank tops, other audiences may have different perceptions of modesty and appropriate attire.
As part of our international SEO services, we’ll carefully consider what photos and videos will most appeal to different market segments. We will thoroughly evaluate each image or multimedia presentation and how an international audience may react to it, then select representations that match user preferences in each market.
Building Backlinks in Global Markets
To appear high in search engine results for a certain region, you must have a thorough backlink profile for that area. For example, if you’re targeting Australia, sources like Brisbane newspapers or Canberra influencers will benefit you more than backlinks from New Zealand.
Our global SEO services include location-specific link outreach to build authority and encourage international traffic. We will identify high-authority, reputable domains in your niche and manually contact them to request a link partnership. Depending on your specific needs, this may include guest posting, editorial reviews, or niche link inserts.
Tracking and Measuring Success in International SEO
As with other SEO services, international SEO requires constant monitoring and refinement. Throughout your work with our team, we will provide monthly progress reports with both data and analysis, separated by region and target language.
We use tools like Google Analytics to segment your markets and identify trends in key performance indicators, including traffic, keyword rankings, and conversion rates. This allows us to assess your campaign’s performance and brainstorm ways to maximize the benefits of your international presence.
-
Analyzing Regional Traffic and Conversions
Our international SEO company will collect regional data on your campaign progress, such as local traffic and conversion rates. The approach will differ slightly depending on how you have segmented your markets, whether that is through subdomains or ccTLDs. We’ll then compare the performance of different areas and identify ways to improve each region’s success, such as through additional localization or a stronger backlink profile.
-
Monitoring International Keyword Rankings
Your performance on search results is connected to your keyword rankings, making them a key way to identify how a given campaign is working. We use tools like Google Search Console, Ahrefs, and Semrush to measure keyword performance across different countries and regions, including overall search volume and your specific rank.
As we process the data, we’ll assess trends in performance and workshop ways to improve your rankings. This may include further research into your local competitors, adding more specific keywords, or identifying local variations in terminology.
Common Challenges in International SEO & How We Solve Them
Achieving international success requires a tactical approach and in-depth research, which can only be possible with help from global SEO experts. Common issues include language barriers, cultural differences, and technical problems.
Running your website copy through a translation app isn’t enough; both search engines and users in your global markets will recognize this as low-quality content, and you’ll rank lower as a result. Our global SEO services will localize your content to ensure it reads perfectly in the target language and resonates with users.
Technical problems can also be a major obstacle in international SEO. In addition to localizing content, you must ensure that search engines show the correct version of your website to a specific audience.
International SEO agencies like Stellar SEO can structure your website so that search engines automatically redirect users to the right version in their language, improving conversion rates.
Why Choose Stellar SEO for International SEO Services?
We are a leading international SEO agency thanks to our years of experience and proven success in building global website traffic. We use advanced SEO tools and comprehensive international keyword research to adjust strategies for each target audience, helping your brand resonate with users worldwide.
Our team understands that no two businesses are alike, so we tailor our SEO services to your specific needs. We perform careful research and strategy development based on your desired markets, audience, and business goals. This ensures that your SEO approach is an exact match for your marketplace, making it more likely to resonate with consumers.
With Stellar SEO’s international SEO marketing experience, you can reach more consumers than ever before, all with a personalized and market-specific approach. To request a consultation with our digital marketing experts, contact Stellar SEO today.
International SEO FAQs
-
How does International SEO help businesses expand globally?
A successful international SEO strategy will help you build domain authority in new markets by adjusting your digital presence to appeal to different audiences. This process will increase your ranking in search results for each market, boosting organic traffic and improving lead generation.
-
What is the role of hreflang tags in International SEO?
Hreflang tags play an important role in international SEO success by directing search engines to show a specific version of a global website in targeted countries. For example, if your target markets are France and Germany, hreflang tags will ensure that the French version is shown to a user in Paris and the German version is shown to a user in Berlin.
-
How do you choose the best keywords for global markets?
To begin, you must conduct careful keyword research using tools like Google Keyword Planner for each market. Start with general keywords for your niche, then identify regional variations, considering factors like target language, location-based words, and regional slang.
What works in one market may not necessarily work in another, even if the two countries share a language. For example, casual athletic shoes are called “sneakers” in the United States, while they are typically called “trainers” in the United Kingdom. You’ll need to work with local experts who can help you identify these variations and target them in your regional keywords.
-
What’s the difference between localization and translation in SEO?
While localization and translation both involve converting content from one language to another, they serve different purposes. Translation is simply converting text into a different language so that a target audience can understand. However, localization goes beyond this by adjusting keywords, references, and tone to match user expectations and make the content relatable.
Localization can be a challenging process, which is why many companies choose to work with an award-winning international SEO agency like Stellar SEO for these needs. We can conduct in-depth keyword research and work with local experts to ensure your brand’s global presence resonates with users worldwide.
-
How do you measure the success of an International SEO campaign?
The success of an international SEO campaign must be assessed market by market. We will use analytical tools to break down traffic, keyword rankings, conversion rates, and other key performance indicators (KPIs) by region and then identify potential areas for improvement. This will ensure that we can precisely target different markets and improve your rankings in each area.
-
Can International SEO work for small businesses?
An international SEO strategy can be helpful for small businesses expanding into global markets. For example, if you have already achieved market saturation in your local area, international SEO efforts can help your company break through market constraints. As you may have limited staff and resources, a global SEO agency can handle this process on your behalf and allow you to focus on your core offerings.