By Marketing Tech Outlook | Wednesday, June 12, 2019
FREMONT, CA: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one biggest lever that a business can use as part of their growth strategies. SEO helps business owners create fast, robust, and user-friendly websites that rank higher in search engines, and helps bring more qualified customers to their sites and eventually increase conversion rates. Even when a company makes a significant investment in SEO, generating value and rank in search engines in international markets has to withstand a different set of challenges. Below are certain core best practices to overcome those challenges.
1. Global Keyword Optimization
International SEO depends on selecting and optimizing for the keywords that international visitors are likely to search for online. When building an SEO strategy for the multilingual site, ensure that the content has translated versions of the keywords that will help local and regional search engines index and rank the website more accurately. If SEO is valuable to the business, it is ideal for translating the entire site to help feed search engines with keyword rich content that will improve the relevancy and rank.
2. Integrated Global Presence
The more seamless experience a brand can create for its online guests, the better the company will benefit from connecting and integrating the global online properties. Search engines will value the internal links for strong relevance, and the customer will appreciate them for making their user experience seamless in their preferred language. Consider implementing capabilities that allow the site to detect what language the visitors are likely to speak and help direct them to the localized version of the site easily and quickly.
3. Global Technical Checklist
A brand must have a sound international SEO strategy, and apart from that, companies can make simple technical adjustments to their sites to assist search engines in finding translated versions. Submitting localized versions directly to search engines will help them appear in organic search results quickly. Businesses should be sure to deploy multilingual sitemaps, as search engines can utilize them to determine the relevance and rank of multilingual sites. Localizing helps search engines know that the website contains valuable, relevant and high-quality content that deserves prominent placements in search results.
With digital marketing becoming more mature, it is no surprise that companies are continually getting better at SEO. A report by MarketDive says that marketers see SEO as becoming more productive, with 82% reporting effectiveness is on the rise and 42% stating effectiveness is increasing significantly. Making efforts in implementing and optimizing the above best practices can help drive global customers.