International SEO: 10 Best Practices for Websites in 2024

Have you ever imagine to expand your business to a global scale but are still unsure about what strategy to prepare? If so, then International SEO can be your first stepping stone.

International SEO is a practice that is used to optimise your business website to be largely known by your international target market.

Let’s get deeper into international SEO explanations and learn the best practices from the article below!

What Is International SEO?

International SEO is the strategy for optimising your website for audiences from other countries that speak different languages. The main goal of these practices is to get more traffic from international audiences. 

International optimisation will help you address geological challenges to sell products or services due to its cost-effective benefits and ability to reach a very wide audience. 

Any type of business can implement international SEO as long as they aim and are ready to expand their market reach beyond their home country or region.

Why International SEO Matters for Business?

Do you know that some of your website visitors may come from different countries and speak different languages? Actually, there is a big possibility that a good share of your website come from other countries.

If you want to optimise websites that specifically target audiences from different countries and different languages, you can implement an international SEO strategy.

Implementing international SEO strategies for your websites will help your business to get an online presence on a global scale, drive more traffic, and also increase leads from global markets.

Benefits of International SEO

Besides its main goal to reach a wider audience, there are more benefits you will get from implementing international SEO practices, including:

• Help your websites get higher ranking on other country's search results.
• Increase your website's visibility in other countries.
• Building international brand awareness.
• Help expand your customer base.
• Increase conversion rate.
• Increase international sales.

International SEO Best Practices

International SEO marketing can be your strategic approach to your business's international expansion, so you can effectively reach wider target audiences. 

Here are the international SEO best practices that you can use for your businesses:

1. Know Your International Market

The first thing you must do is know your international market. Of course, if you wanna do business expansion, you must target the international market that needs and wants your product/services.

You can check on SEO metrics like traffic, share, and keywords that are relevant to your niche market. By doing so, you can get an insight into which country market has the strongest potential for your business expansion.

After you decide who and which country is your target market, you can search for detailed information about your target audiences, like their age, social media usage, socioeconomics, and interests.

2. Use Global Language

Once you know your target market’s countries, you may need to consider providing content that is written in multiple languages per country.

Google wants to show the search results in people’s native language. So, make sure that your website is customised to your international audience's languages, starting from the content you made until the navigation bar on your website.

3. Costumise URL to Your Target Countries

Besides considering content language, to implement international optimisation on your websites, you should customise your URL structure, too. 

Every country has a different type of URL structure code. For example, a country like the United Kingdom usually uses domain names that end with “.com,” but if you want to search for a transaction, the results are dominated by “.co.uk.”

Customised URLs can help your websites to be understood by search engines and get higher traffic from targeted country audiences. To customise that, you can use different domain strategies, such as:

• Country Code Top-Level Domain (ccTLD): Use different country codes on your website’s domain, like “www.yoursite.fr” to target France and “www.yoursite.de” to target Germany.
• Subfolders: This strategy maintains one original international website but can switch to a localized version of the site for each global audience by changing the URL path. For example, “www.yoursite.com/fr” is for France, and “www.yoursite.com/id” is for Indonesia.
• Subdomain: This is your main domain’s extension that is used for segmenting content by specific languages, for example, “www.us.yoursite.com” for targeting the United States or “www.de.yoursite.com” for targeting Germany.

4. Use Content Delivery Network (CDN) on Your Site

The next international SEO strategy is installing a Content Delivery Network (CDN). CDN will help each international version of your website load faster and maximise user experience.

CDN uses group distribution servers that ensure your international content loads on a localised server instead of a centralised server. 

5. Choose Country-Based Keywords

As a user doing search for products or services, you most likely using words or phrases that are according to your daily language. 

So, it is important to costumise your main and variant keywords that relevant and suit your target audience languages.

If you want to localise your keywords from each country, you can consider using local-based words or terms that are relevant and engaging. Tips! Remember to choose a keyword that has a high search volume but with low competition. 

For example, in the UK, it is common to use the keyword “crisps” instead of “potato chips”, but in other countries like the United States, “potato chips” is more suitable and relevant.

6. Use One Specify Language for Each Page

For enhancing your worldwide user experience, using one language for each page on your site is important. However, you should avoid using dynamic translation on the same URL. You can create separate URLs instead, which can help search engines read, discover, and index your site more effectively.

This means that you should create a specialised web page that is customised to one language, including all on-page aspects like images, currencies, time zones, and metadata.

7. Ensure Internal Links Perform Properly

If you create a different version of your site, you need to make sure that your internal linking properly connects to your content in the same language.

Building Internal links on each country-specific version of the website will improve user satisfaction and user experience on your websites. 

Moreover, this linking practice will also make it easier for foreign audiences to navigate your website.

8. Use Hreflang for Your Websites

Hreflang is code that is mostly located in a page's backend or sometimes via sitemaps. With Hreflang mapping process Google can easily know the alternative URLs that related to the page.

The alternative page here means the other version of your webpage that match with audience language or region preference.

9. Build the Targeted Country’s Backlink

The next international SEO strategy is building backlinks from targeted countries to your websites. As you know, backlinks are one of the important aspects of SEO success. Google will detect your website's credibility and authority based on your backlinks.

For that, it is important to consider and build backlinks from the target country. If you have trouble building connections and backlinks with parties from your targeted countries, you can work with an international SEO agency or international SEO consultant.

10. Avoid Using Auto Direct Page

For the last SEO strategy, you should avoid setting up an auto-direct page on your website. This is because the auto-direct page can be not curated and confusing for your audience or search engine.

Instead of using auto auto-direct page, you can set up a switch language option in your website’s navigation menu, it facilitates your audience to choose what language version of the site they want.

Conclusion

If you want to expand your business to a global scale and get a wider audience, implementing international SEO marketing for your business is an essential and effective strategy. 

With an effective international SEO strategy, your business will be more visible to the international market, easily compete with other global businesses, and most importantly, get more sales.

Are you ready to grow your business to a global level? If so, cmlabs can be your best partner! With SEO Services by cmlabs, backed by extensive experience and a proven track record of success with international clients, we can help you implement customised international SEO strategies to maximise your business growth potential. 

If you have any business needs and goals, kindly contact our marketing and get a free consultation!