Ways to avoid international SEO mistakes

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Google has different versions for each specific language and for each specific country.

International SEO is getting your website translated into different languages and getting it ranked for different language versions of Google

For international SEO, you need to understand where your target audiences are coming from.

Yes, there are people across the globe. And the market is much wider than the English market or the United States, UK.

So, when you wish to have global expansion, it is significant to know where your clients come from.

Just because a market has a lot of people, or decent GDP, you cannot target that market.

You need to be sure if there is enough business for you in that market. Only then must you consider expanding.

Does this make sense to you?

In this article, we shall discuss more such international SEO mistakes you could avoid. It would be great to read the article by the end as I will be sharing a tip for email marketing.

Enabling auto-translation

If you just take a tool such as Google translator, when someone comes to your website and upon their request you translate it to their language with auto translation, what do you think will happen?

Will the users be happy with the translation?

A big no!

Instead, you will see people leaving your site increasing the bounce rate.

Remember that auto-translations are not that great, at least now.

If your bounce rate is high and your user metric is awful as a result of auto-translating your content, it will definitely hurt your overall site ranking.

You must translate your content manually. You can hire translators and get the content translated manually.

And then use “hreflang” to let Google know what that content is relevant for.

Pro tip

How to find emails for email marketing?

If you are running an email marketing campaign, you could use an email lookup tool such as GetEmail.io to find emails.

This tool applies big data and machine learning algo to identify the correct email address format.

Targeting multiple countries at the same time

The most common mistake that businesses make is that with their website they try to target too many countries at the same time without laying out a proper plan. They lack insights such as whether they have enough resources or budget

Lack of experimentation or tracking

Most of the businesses and marketers look at what others are doing, what is working well for others and without much thought process, they would blindly copy and follow the strategies that others are working on. They fail to validate or analyze.

Following the bigger player in the market will do no good to your business. What you do should be aligned with your business type, vision, goals, etc.

The ideal way is to experiment different tactics by yourself for your business and see what is working well for you.

Because a strategy working well for a product, or an industry need not yield the same result to your product or industry type.

Always remember that SEO is dynamic; And possessing the ability & willingness to experiment and track performance are essential for any business.

 

Laziness to localize the website!

A business launches their website to target one market let say Australia and use American spelling.

How would you optimize such keywords? The search volumes are going to be incredibly low.

And from consumer trust point, when they visit your website, they will feel OK with different words and spellings.

There is no use of spending millions of thousands of dollars on marketing and failing to get a proper copy written for the home page.

Therefore, it is crucial to localize the website.

When you do not do this properly, it will affect your target audience’s experience on your website. We will discuss this in detail next.

User experience

Mapping the demand with the right supply is vital. Isn’t it?

If you are a shoe company, your website targeting the UK will have the category Football shoes and for the US market, the category will be Soccer shoes because their Football game is entirely a different game.

Hence if you are targeting the football shoes demand of the US market with your product. That is not right, and it will not give a good user experience.

Always remember that connecting the demand with what you have is particularly important.

Concluding thoughts

When you do international SEO in the right manner, you will be able to double the number of potential customers coming to your site.

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