Following the internet revolution globally, local companies find themselves able to communicate and do business with any connected customer worldwide. But, this expansion imposes an increase in the competency too. Nowadays, any company that wants to develop business globally needs to have its digital assets discover-able worldwide. Her is where the importance of local SEO comes in.
Local SEO will help brands to have the appropriate content listed in the correct Search Engine instance which allows them to reach the right visitors and to share the right messages.
Globally, Google is recognized as the big leader of search engines but what we may not know is that Google has local instances for almost every country and the search engine results may differ from one local version to another one. Example:
Open your local instance of Google and search for a term, then use Google for another country(.com) or (.ca) and search using the same keyword(s) again. You will get a different result! See below:
Arabic instance:
International instance:
This shows how important the language and the location is for any successful Local SEO strategy for Google.
From another perspective, for some other areas of the world like China or Russia, Google is not the first search engine here. The SEO fundamental processes will be the same but with a certain variety to adapt to these Search Engines. Here are some of their characteristics:
Baidu in China
– Host your Chinese website locally in China to accelerate website speed. It will also facilitate better crawling of the site by Baidu which will increase the website visibility in that region.
– In order to follow this approach, you will need to have what’s called the ICP number issued by the government.
– As an Advantage, Baidu provides site owners with a set of tools to help SEO and marketing initiatives.
– In case you do not have Chinese native speakers to help, you may face difficulties incorrectly applying the right local SEO.
Yandex in Russia
– This Russian Search Engine doesn’t index pages frequently like google.
– Yandex focuses more on its local/ regional market.
SEO Internationalization Tactics and Hints
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URL Structure
[language code].[domain].com or www.[domain].com/[language code]: using a recognized language code in the URL structure as a sub-domain or sub-folder helps the Search engine to index the language of your content. Next Blog will be dedicated to this subject. See more details here.
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Culture
The local SEO process includes culture-correctness. The culture and dialect are different from a country to another. (Images, expressions, jokes, etc…)
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Google Analytics
Google Location and Language reports can be a good start to determine where most traffic comes from. Based on this you can decide what the most important locations are for you as well as what languages to include in your SEO Internationalization plan. Keeping in mind that Formal Market researches are crucial for an accurate result.
This was just an introduction to warm-up. The next blog will go into more details about the SEO Internationalization.
Feel free to leave a comment or to Contact Me for an open discussion!