International SEO: 10 Moves to Position Your Website Abroad

For effective international SEO, use hreflang to indicate language and geographical target, choose appropriate domains, localize content, research specific keywords for each market, and optimize site speed.

If you need to optimize your website for foreign markets, you can’t do without international SEO.

You must therefore implement specific techniques to attract a global audience and effectively scale your online presence beyond national borders.

Discover 10 moves we use at Qreativa to position websites abroad. Read the paragraphs below. Enjoy reading!

1. Start with Good Market Research

Starting with good market research is the first fundamental step to develop an effective international SEO strategy.

You need to gather and analyze information on potential foreign markets to better understand the opportunities, audience needs, and specific challenges of each country.

Thorough market research allows you to make informed decisions on where and how to expand your online presence.

Key components of market research:

• Demographic analysis of the target market population, such as age, gender, income, and education. This helps you understand who your potential customers are.

• User preferences and behaviors such as which devices they use (mobile vs desktop), and their preferences in terms of content and products.

• Current and emerging market trends in your industry to identify growth opportunities or unexplored market niches.

• Analysis of your competitors in target markets. Examine their SEO strategies, strengths and weaknesses, and identify areas where you can differentiate or excel.

Examples of market research:

• Study of the Japanese market for cosmetic products: you might discover that Japanese consumers prefer natural and organic cosmetic products, with a strong focus on quality and packaging. Your research might also reveal that blogs and online reviews strongly influence purchasing decisions in Japan.

• Analysis of the German market for “consumer electronics”: you might find that German consumers place great importance on sustainability and energy efficiency. Additionally, you might discover that price comparison platforms are extremely popular in Germany, and influence how consumers search for and purchase electronic products.

2. Research Keywords for International SEO

Keyword research for international SEO allows you to understand which terms are used by your target audience in different countries to search for products, services, or information relevant to your industry.

This step is crucial because search expressions and terms can vary significantly from one language to another, and even between different regions that speak the same language.

Well-executed keyword research will help you optimize your content to better respond to specific search queries in each market, thus improving your visibility in international search engines.

How to conduct keyword research for international SEO:

1. Identify your target audience, consider cultural and linguistic differences, and search intentions.
2. Use keyword research tools such as Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Ahrefs, and others specific to each country.
3. Analyze the competition, look at which keywords your competitors are using in target markets.
4. Pay attention to linguistic nuances: ensure that the chosen keywords are culturally and linguistically appropriate for each market. Sometimes, a literal translation is not sufficient or can lead to misunderstandings.

Examples of keyword research for international SEO:

• Fashion in France vs United States: If you’re optimizing for the fashion market, the keyword sneakers popular in the United States might not be the same in France, where baskets is more commonly used. This demonstrates the importance of knowing the specific language used by your target audience.

• Consumer electronics in Germany: For a site selling consumer electronics, the keywords used by German consumers might differ. For example, “smartphone” might be commonly searched, but terms like “Handy” (a colloquial German term for mobile phone) are also widely used. Optimizing for both terms increases your site’s visibility in Germany.

3. Remember to analyze competitors

Identify and analyze the strategies used by your direct and indirect competitors to attract and engage the local audience, obtain good visibility in search engines, and convert visitors into customers.

Through careful competitor analysis, you can discover untapped opportunities, identify industry best practices, and develop strategies to differentiate yourself and outperform the competition.

Key steps to analyze competitors in international SEO:

1. Identify who your main competitors are in each target market. You can use competitive analysis tools, market research, and even search engine results to identify them.
2. Analyze their website, your competitors’ site structure, quality and localization of content, “use of keywords, loading speed,” user experience (UX) and other on-page SEO factors. See how they present their products, or services, to different markets and which languages or local variants they use.
3. Observe their backlink strategies. Use tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Moz to analyze your competitors’ backlink profile. Find out where they get their links from, the quality of these links, and how you can apply this information to your link building strategy.
4. Evaluate their social media performance and content marketing. Look at how your competitors use social media and content marketing to engage international audiences. Which platforms do they use? What type of content do they publish? How do they interact with their audience?
5. Monitor their advertising strategies such as Google Ads or social media advertising (Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, LinkedIn Ads, TikTok Ads, YouTube Ads), try to understand which keywords they target, what advertising messages they use, and how they structure their campaigns.

Practical example of foreign competitor analysis:

Suppose your company sells beauty products and wants to expand into the South Korean market. After identifying the main competitors in the South Korean market, you discover that they extensively use influencers and video tutorials to promote their products.

You also notice that they place great importance on detailed descriptions of product benefits and use specific skincare-related keywords that are popular in Korea.

These observations help you develop a targeted content strategy and identify new opportunities for collaboration with local influencers.

4. Which server and domain to choose?

The choice of server and domain affects the site’s loading speed and its geographical relevance.

These factors can have a significant impact on ranking in local search engines.

Here are some tips on how to choose the most suitable server and domain for your international SEO strategy:

Server choice:

• Server Location: Ideally, the server hosting your website should be located in the country you want to target. This is because physical proximity to the server reduces the site’s loading time for local users, improving “user experience and potentially SEO ranking. If you’re targeting multiple countries, consider” using a Content Delivery Network (CDN), which distributes your site’s content across global servers to speed up page loading.

Domain Choice

• Country-Code Top-Level Domain (ccTLD): “Using a ccTLD (e.g., .it for” Italy, .de for Germany) can improve SEO ranking in that country because it clearly signals the site’s geolocation to search engines and users. However, managing multiple ccTLDs can be expensive and requires a dedicated content and marketing strategy for each site.

• Subdomain or Subfolder: If you prefer not to use ccTLDs for each country, you can opt for subdomains (e.g., it.yoursite.com) or subfolders (e.g., yoursite.com/it/). Subfolders are generally preferred for SEO as all the SEO power of the main domain is transferred to the subfolders. Subdomains can be useful if you have very diversified businesses or if you want to clearly separate geographic or linguistic areas within your site.

• Generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD): gTLDs like .com, .net, or .org are geographically neutral and can be used to target multiple countries. Google allows you to set a specific geographic target for these domains through Google Search Console, but you might not get the same local impact as with a ccTLD.

Practical Tips for Choosing the Domain and Server:

• Analyze Your Goals and Available Resources: The decision on which domain structure and server location to use depends on your specific business objectives, your international SEO strategy, and the resources available for managing multiple sites or investing in technological solutions like CDNs.

• Consider the Long Term: Think about how your choice will affect the management, maintenance, and future expansion of your site. For example, a ccTLD may offer immediate local SEO advantages but could limit your flexibility if you decide to expand into new markets.

Remember, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to choosing the server and domain for international SEO.

The decision should be based on a careful assessment of your international market strategy, your management capabilities, and your long-term business goals.

5. Improve Website Loading Speed

A fast site improves conversion rate, reduces bounce rate, and is favored by search engines like Google.

Here are some key steps to optimize your site’s speed globally:

1. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A CDN stores a copy of your site on servers located in different parts of the world, reducing the distance between the server and the end user. This significantly accelerates loading times for international users.

2. Optimize Images

Large images significantly slow down your site. Use modern image formats like WebP, which offers comparable quality to JPEG and PNG but with significantly reduced file sizes. Also consider implementing lazy loading, which loads images only when they enter the user’s viewport.

3. Minimize CSS, JavaScript, and HTML

Reduce superfluous code and minimize CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files. Tools like UglifyJS for JavaScript and CSSNano for CSS automate this process!

4. Leverage Browser Caching

Configure browser caching to temporarily store versions of static files, reducing the number of requests a browser needs to make to the server when a user revisits your site.

5. Reduce Redirects

Each redirect introduces a delay in page loading. Try to minimize permanent (301) or temporary (302) redirects within your site.

6. Use Fast and Reliable Hosting

The quality of “hosting directly affects the speed of the site. Choose a hosting provider that offers optimal performance, especially if your target audience is located in a specific” geographical area.

7. Implement AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)

For sites with high mobile traffic, consider using AMP to create versions of pages that load almost instantly on mobile devices.

8. Monitor Site Speed

Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix or WebPageTest to regularly monitor your site’s speed and identify areas for improvement.

9. Optimize Critical Rendering Path

Identify and load first the critical content necessary for the initial page display, delaying the loading of secondary or less important content.

6. Localize Content and Don’t Just Translate

Localizing content means adapting it to reflect the cultural, legal, linguistic, and market specificities of each target country, going well beyond simply translating the text.

This process includes adapting expressions, units of measurement, date and currency formats, images, culturally relevant examples, and even the SEO strategy for local keywords.

The goal is to make the content as relevant and welcoming as possible for the local audience, improving user experience and increasing communication effectiveness.

How to Localize Content for International SEO

• Ensure that your content is respectful and relevant to the local culture. What works in one country might not be accepted or could be misinterpreted in another.

• Each country has its own laws and regulations regarding advertising, online privacy, and the sale of goods and services. Localization helps ensure that your site complies with these local regulations.

• Literal translation can often be incomprehensible or misleading. Localization considers the context and linguistic nuances, ensuring that the message is clear and convincing.

• Keywords relevant to one market might not be the same in another. Localization includes researching and optimizing for market-specific keywords to improve visibility in local search engines.

Example of Content Localization

Imagine you’re managing a website that sells coffee online, and you’re expanding your market from Italy to the United Kingdom.

Here’s a simple example of content localization for the British audience:

• Language: British English, adapting some expressions to reflect local language (for example, “coffee” instead of “caffè”, “flavour” instead of “flavor”).

• Content: introduction to Italian coffee for the British audience, how to enjoy an espresso like an Italian, stories about the origins of Italian coffee, but also tips on how to integrate Italian coffee into the British tea routine.

• Images: replace images with ones that may include coffee cups next to teapots or people enjoying coffee in typically British settings, such as pubs or home kitchens.

• Currencies and Units of Measurement: convert prices to British pounds and use measurements in grams and ounces where necessary.

This example of localization takes into account the cultural and linguistic differences between Italy and the United Kingdom.

The content becomes more relevant and engaging for the British audience while maintaining the authenticity of the Italian product.

This approach not only attracts customers interested in Italian coffee but also helps them feel more connected to the brand through familiarity with their local culture and preferences.

7. Use Hreflang Tags

The hreflang tags indicate to search engines the language and “specific geographic area for which a web page is intended. They improve the” user experience and the “effectiveness of international SEO.”

These tags help prevent duplicate content issues in multilingual and multinational sites, ensuring that users are shown the most appropriate version of the page based on their geographical location or language preferences.

How to use hreflang tags

To correctly implement hreflang tags, you need to insert a link rel=alternate hreflang=x in the head of each HTML page of your website, where x indicates the ISO 639-1 language code for the language and, optionally, the ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 country code for the geographic region.

Here’s a practical example:

If you have an Italian page for Italy and an English version for the United Kingdom, you need to add these tags to the respective pages:

• In the Italian version of the page:

• In the English (United Kingdom) version of the page:

Additionally, it’s good practice to include an “x-default” hreflang tag to indicate to search engines which version of the page should be considered as default for users who don’t match any of the specified target languages or regions:

Best practices: follow these tips!

• Ensure that the language and country codes are correct and comply with ISO standards.

• Use hreflang tags consistently across all corresponding pages of the site to avoid confusion for search engines.

• For sites with a large number of pages, consider adding hreflang tags in an XML sitemap. This can simplify the management of hreflang tags and help search engines discover all language and geographic versions of your pages.

• Use tools like Google Search Console to identify and correct any errors in the implementation of hreflang tags.

By correctly implementing hreflang tags, you can significantly improve the experience of international users and the visibility of your site in global search results. And you’ll ensure that each user accesses the most relevant version of the site for them!

8. Plan a link building strategy abroad

A link building strategy, i.e., acquiring incoming links (backlinks) from other websites, is an important factor for ranking in search engines.

However, when it comes to foreign markets, it’s essential to adopt a targeted approach that considers cultural, linguistic, and market differences.

Here are some tips for developing an effective link building strategy abroad. In addition to localizing the content of the site, identify influencers, bloggers, and journalists in the target market, relevant to your industry.

Being active in local events, conferences, workshops, and online communities can also help you build relationships with other companies, websites, and organizations in the target country.

9. Monitor the website and adapt it to various markets

• Use tools like Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console to monitor your site’s key metrics, including bounce rate, time on page, most visited pages, and conversions. This will help you understand how users interact with your site in different markets.

• Collect user feedback from various markets to better understand their needs and preferences. Be ready to make changes to the content, design, and functionality of the site to meet local cultural expectations and browsing habits.

• Each market has its own laws regarding privacy, e-commerce, and online advertising. Make sure your site complies with these local regulations to avoid penalties and build trust with your audience.

• Conduct A/B tests on various elements of your site, such as CTAs (call-to-action), images, and page layouts, to see which versions convert better in each market. Use the collected data to continuously optimize the user experience.

Monitoring and adapting your website to various markets requires continuous effort, but it’s essential to ensure that your international business remains relevant, accessible, and competitive in every country where you operate.

10. For an international SEO strategy, you can’t improvise as a specialist

Expanding your website to international markets represents a great opportunity to grow and reach new customers.

However, implementing an international SEO strategy is not child’s play!

For this reason, we offer a free consultation to help you evaluate your current strategy, identify areas for improvement, and plan effective actions to successfully expand your online presence internationally.

Contact us today for a free consultation and discover how we can help you leverage the full potential of your website in international markets!