When it comes to boosting website traffic, search engine optimization, or SEO, is one of the best strategies for businesses. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram can be crucial to promoting your business, but search engines generate 300% more traffic for websites than social media. So, if you’re looking to expand your business to a multinational level—or have already done so, developing a global SEO strategy will help you bring in customers beyond your country’s borders.
What is Global SEO?
International or global SEO refers to optimizing a website in such a way that its pages appear in the search engine results in multiple countries and languages. This is different from local SEO, which focuses on targeting a specific area’s audience by ranking for local searches. In global SEO, you may even have to create several versions of your website in different languages, depending on what countries you’re targeting. You also have to take their culture and even local slang into consideration so you can relate better to your audience.
Creating a global SEO strategy works best, however, when your company has already done some local SEO, too. To compete with websites around the world for many of the same keywords, you’ll likely need to invest in a marketing team that translates your content into other languages. As such, building up a local customer base with SEO can keep your business going while you work towards marketing globally.
How Global SEO Helps Your Business
Brand Awareness
If done by the right SEO team, global SEO can potentially boost your brand’s presence all over the world. Since you’re optimizing your site to appear in search engines worldwide, you’re increasing your chances of having more people see your business’s name when they do a search that’s related to you. If they see you appear in the results more often, they’re eventually going to start associating your services with your brand.
Customer Experience
Changing your site so it can compete on a global level means you also end up improving its quality as well. Doing this results in a more satisfying site experience for all of your visitors—even more so if your web content is in a language that they find easier to understand.
On average, users spend 10-20 seconds on a web page before leaving. They’re likely to leave your website if you don’t have the information they need or if your content isn’t engaging. They also won’t trust your business if your site’s design is too old or difficult to work with since it tells them that you don’t care much for making it better for them. But if they’re happy with their time browsing your website, they’re less likely to venture elsewhere for the product or service you offer.
Sales
Businesses that do overseas deliveries, have store branches worldwide, or provide services that don’t need customers to visit their office can benefit from a global SEO strategy. After all, you’re letting people in other countries know that your goods and services are available to them, no matter where they’re located. Chances are they’ll be more confident buying from you since you’re providing service or product information in languages they understand better.
Tips for Implementing Global SEO
Check if your site is ready.
Before planning your global SEO strategy, first, optimize your website for your customers. Even if you only do basic optimization, it will make any future work to the site easier and quicker to finish. For instance, if it already has an SEO-friendly URL structure, it’ll be easier to translate into other languages since your URLs are already clear and concise.
If you’re still unsure whether or not your website is ready for launch, don’t hesitate to have it checked by an SEO expert.
Create alternative sites.
Creating different versions of your website is a common practice in global SEO. This is so that businesses can modify each site’s content to better suit their audience, no matter where in the world they’re located. It’s generally done it two ways:
Use multiple languages.
Make versions of your website in the languages you want. This not only means translating your content but also studying the search terms used in the countries that speak these languages. That way, you can adapt your content to include keywords that are relevant to the location and improve your ranking in the search results.
Consider the location.
Instead of translating to another language, you can create another website that’s still written in English, but targets a particular country or geographic region. This tactic is helpful if some of your products are only available in select countries. For example, if you have something that’s only for sale in Europe, you can have that product displayed only in the European version of your site, and not, say, the Asia-Pacific version.
Optimize for other search engines too.
Google may be the most popular search engine in the world, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have an SEO strategy for other ones. Some countries also have a preference for different search engines. For example, Baidu is very popular in China, while Yahoo! has a considerable influence in Japan.
If you’re planning to target other countries in your global SEO efforts, it’s a good idea to do some research on what their other popular search engine choices are so you can reach users there too. You may be unfamiliar with how to do SEO on multiple search engines—all of which will have unique algorithms, so make sure you have an SEO team that has experience with them.
If you need help with planning your business’s global SEO strategy, SRJ Digital is here to lend a hand. Their team has the skill and experience to provide successful online marketing strategies for tourism, real estate, healthcare, and finance companies. Through organic methods such as SEO, lead generation, and reputation management, SRJ will help your business grow sustainably. Book a free strategy session online or call the office today at (202) 738-1207 for more inquiries.