3 key steps to grow your organic search traffic in international markets

Are you looking to expand your online business into new international markets and don’t know which one you should prioritize? Or are you already doing it, not growing as you had originally expected and have ended up with a negative ROI? Minimize these challenges by taking these 3 fundamental steps to grow your international organic search presence. 

Growing your organic search presence in international markets can be complex due to its long-term nature, dependability on external factors and resources and reliance on multidisciplinary and cross-departmental support in a multilingual and/or multi-country setting. 

However an international SEO process can be a profitable way to scale your organic search traffic and conversions while investing in technical aspects and content on your own website to give a satisfactory experience to your international customers, helping them to achieve their goals with your own content, services and products.    
This is why it’s critical to take some important steps to minimize the international SEO complexity while making sure fundamental best practices are followed in a natural way within the process:

1. Establish your priority targeted international markets from the start

One of the most common issues when developing international SEO processes is targeting too many international markets at the same time, not having enough resources to localize your content based on your international audiences’ search preferences and therefore, not allowing you to rank as well as desired or provide the best user experience.  

This challenge can be avoided by setting clear priority target markets from the start, those in which you’ll focus on and prioritize to invest and optimize in order to grow and achieve results. Even if you need to enable your website across many more countries and languages due to other requirements, these would be your key markets to invest in. And you need to make sure that you allocate your SEO resources in those countries/languages where there’s reasonable SEO potential for you to capitalize on.  

What criteria should you take into consideration to select your top international markets to target? Besides the business-related ones, from an SEO perspective you should take into consideration:

• The organic search traffic potential and trend
• The level of organic search competition 
• Audience search preferences for your products/services/content offering
• Your current organic search performance and presence for the market

It’s then fundamental to develop a rankings, keyword and competition analysis (for which native language support is ideal to have) for those international markets you want to assess, to identify your top priority markets among those that can bring you a higher organic search traffic, with not so high competition, and where ideally you might also have already a basic presence to avoid starting from scratch.  

When selecting your top targeted markets it’s also important to identify if you’re targeting languages or countries in each of your markets, or a combination of many languages within some countries, and keep consistency in the way you optimize for these markets.  

Although usually the ideal way to target international audiences is through countries, as it provides a more granular way to personalize your website content and product/service offering to your audience, whose preferences might change based on the country even if the language is the same, your business model might not necessarily need to target countries and you could still perform well by targeting languages.   

Another potential reason is that you might want to target many smaller countries is that individually they may have small organic search traffic potential that might not be worth targeting. But together, they may speak the same language, there might not be a major difference in the used terms, preferences and seasonality between them and for it might not be worth it in terms of business to target at a country level, and so you could target their language instead. 

For example, if you have a technology blog in English, your content might not need to change per country, since the information will be the same for all audiences independently of the country. However, if you have an e-commerce site, you might need to target countries, since the pricing, delivery conditions, purchase seasonality and preferences might change per country. 

Besides verifying which should be your top target markets, it’s then also fundamental to prioritize if you should target them as countries or if you could well target them based on their language instead. 

2. Enable a consistent international web structure to effectively connect with your target markets 

Once you have identified your international markets to target, you can establish a web structure that consistently targets each of your relevant country or language markets, by allowing search crawlers to independently crawl, index and rank each language or country pages through their own specific URLs. 

To target countries you can choose from ccTLDs (.com.mx, .fr, .co.uk, etc.), subdirectories under gTLDs (.com/mx/, .com/fr/, .com/uk/, etc.) or subdomains under gTLDs (mx.brand.com, fr.brand.com, uk.brand.com). 

To target languages you can choose from subdirectories under gTLDs (.com/es/, .com/fr/, .com/de/, etc.) or subdomains under gTLDs (es.brand.com, fr.brand.com, en.brand.com). 

All of them have pros and cons and the best alternative should be chosen based on each site context and characteristics.   

For example, the ideal way to target countries is through ccTLDs, however if you use ccTLDs for each of your country markets you will likely have higher operational costs by managing many domains as well as require a higher effort and longer time to see results from an SEO perspective since you will need to start growing each domain link popularity from scratch. This could be avoided if you use subdirectories under the same gTLD for each country, which can be independently registered and then geolocated in the Google Search Console towards the relevant country.

It’s then important to assess the types of markets you’re targeting, the competition within them and your own requirements and restrictions in order to establish the best web structure in each case.  

3.Connect with your international audience preferences through effectively optimized content

Once you have established your priority markets and the best international web structure to target them, it’s then necessary to identify your audience preferences when searching for your products, services or content, to optimize your content and web experience accordingly.

It is then critical to develop an in-depth keyword research – ideally by native language speakers – for each one of your targeted markets, to identify the top terms to target per category, product type, location etc. as well as the search trends, seasonality, etc. that you should take as input to optimize and organize your content information for each market.

This is critical even if you’re targeting different countries that speak the same language since the terms used across them might be different and/or have a different meaning. You want to make sure that each of your visitors understand what you’re offering and that each of your international version’s pages are effectively optimized towards the relevant terms that they should be targeting in each market, from the title, meta description and headings to the main product or service category or product information. 

If the relevant pages are not the ones shown for their target terms in the desired country and language search results it’s then also advisable to implement hreflang tags to provide an additional signal about each page language and alternatively, target country. 

By following the previous 3 fundamental steps you’ll be able to establish the building blocks of a cost-effective international SEO process, and avoid some of the most common errors. 

Aleyda Solis speaks on this topic at Connecta Bern.