The world has drastically changed over the last year and a half. This has affected everything from daily life to businesses and search engine optimization (SEO) practices. If you are aiming to take your brand global, it’s important that your website is optimized with international SEO. International SEO ensures that your company is visible to the locals of different countries you’re targeting.
Here are four things you can do to make your website more global:
Carefully Choose Your Domains.
Choosing the right kind of domain is essential if you want to target international audiences. One of the best ways to do this is by using country code top-level domains (ccTLDs). Using domains such as brandname.es and brandame.au signals search engines that these sites can serve users in Spain and Australia respectively.
You can create designated web pages for specific countries using ccTLDs. The downside, however, is that this means creating a whole separate domain, which will need its own content, strategies, links, and more.
You can still use a single domain if the location of your audience has no impact on your products and services instead of using subdirectories to hose designated language or country pages. This is a strategy used by businesses that target only a single market that may speak multiple languages or two or more countries that speak the same language.
Make Use of the Hreflang Attribute.
Hreflang is an HTML attribute that indicates the language of your content and the geographical region it’s targeting. This attribute helps you avoid duplicate content issues when your content has various language versions on your websites, such as English designated for the US, the UK, and Australia.
The following are ways you can implement the hreflang attribute:
- Include it in the <head> section of your HTML
- Include it in your XML sitemap markup
- Include it in your HTTP headers
These are the best practices to stand by when you’re using the hreflang attribute:
- Reference both the page itself and its translated variants.
- Make sure to have bidirectional hreflang attribute references.
- Correctly define language and region combinations.
- Always set hreflang=”x-default.”
- Ensure that the hreflang attribute and the canonical URL match.
- Use absolute URLs when defining the hreflang attribute.
- Use only one method to implement the hreflang attribute.
Avoid Machine Translation at All Costs.
Using machine translations will definitely be easier and quicker for everyone involved. However, it is severely prone to mistranslations and missing nuances and context specific to the targetted country. This can have a bad effect on user experience and overall rankings.
The best way to avoid these issues is by hiring local translators that can accurately communicate the essential information and nuances in the content you provide. This protects your brand’s reputation and increases your chances of connecting with the local market.
Adapt Content for Local Cultures.
Remember that it’s not just the language that needs to be adapted for each country, but the topics as well. Certain content that works in your home country will either make no sense or have no relevance at all to the different countries you’re marketing to. It’s important to have researchers look at the local trends and relevant topics in different countries.
Conclusion
You must be willing to put in the work, money, and effort to take your company international. It requires more than just translating your pages to the local language. You need to provide content that is relevant to the local cultures. This is how you can build strong and genuine relationships with the local community.
The most important thing is that you do your research and get to know your audience so you can properly target them and provide valuable content.
TnZ International is an IT consulting company that provides holistic digital marketing services. We want to help your company go global and achieve more through smart strategies and creative thinking. If you’re in need of help in navigating and conquering the digital world, we are more than excited to help you!
