According to Search Engine Journal , organic search still drives an astounding 51 percent of all website traffic, whereas only 10 percent comes from paid search, 5 percent from social media platforms, and 34 percent from other channels such as blogs, videos, etc. While keeping these conclusive findings in mind, it’s not wrong to say that ignoring SEO can expose your business to various severe risks and affect your bottom line.

Entrepreneurs operating an international business as well as trying to target a massive audience worldwide are focusing on various white Hat SEO services and techniques, including local, organic, and targeted. However, there’s one more practice that must be implemented without further delay if they want to function on an international scale as well as don’t aspire to miss out on a six-billion-person market, and that’s Global SEO services.

What is Global SEO?

Global Search Engine Optimization (SEO) means catering your website or subdomains to appeal to a worldwide audience, assessing its performance and ranking for each province’s search engines, and creating as well as optimizing your content for an assortment of regions globally. In this manner, you will need to research the market across countries, conduct a data-driven analysis, and also elevate your content for each combination of language and geographical location. Below we have outlined some excellent approaches to attain global SEO and localization excellence.

Tactic #1: The Research: Keywords, Traffic, Market, and Audience

It’s only realistic to get started with the research for substantiating the beginning point and the potential for each global market. Doing so will allow you to set your global SEO goals and gain visible insights into your current intercontinental organic traffic, conversion rate, and search status.

i. Which countries and languages are driving the most visitors through your marketing funnel?

ii. What are the search volume, conversion rate, and organic CTR for each international markets?

iii. Which relevant and high-volume keywords are being most used within your niche by your audience to search for your brand, products, and services?

iv. Which pages are attracting search visibility and international traffic?

You can use a plethora of analytics and keyword research tools, such as Google Trends, Bing keyword research tool, and Google Analytics, to gather accurate data on your traffic as well as generate real-time reports, which will help you answer these questions. By doing so, you can analyze your existing website and web pages, identify the global industry trends, understand the behavior of your international visitors, as well as find the most lucrative markets refined by the specific language and country.

Additionally, it will also allow you to determine which channel is transmitting the most traffic to your website – social media platforms, blogs, newsletters, emails, or any other source. A keyword research tool enables you to:

Focus on low competition keywords.

Discover your competitors’ keywords.

Identify your current ranking for targeted keywords per country.

Uncover inbound link opportunities.

Improve conversion volume and search visibility.

By analyzing the market condition of different locations and your industry’s potential, you can localize content and countries with the most substantial opportunities and then pour your attention and allocate resources more effectively for the better global SEO expansion.

Tactic #2: URL Structures for Global Sites

A website requires and employs a particular URL structure to target a specific country, area, or region, including a Country Code Top-Level Domain (ccTLD), subdomain, subdirectory domain, or gTLD with language parameters. For a quick understanding: search results and rankings for your website will be different for the United Kingdom using google.co.uk and Italy using google.it since results are sorted and displayed with relevance to a particular area and language.

a. Country-specific domains (ccTLD): These contain two-letter code to automatically specify the country or sovereign state with a website is registered. Also, they are an ideal structure to geolocate.

example.com – the USA

example.co.uk – United Kingdom

example.it – Italy

b. Subdirectory or subfolder domains: These comprise localized subfolders or subdirectories of a root domain. It consolidates domain authority but increases the complexity of web structure.

example.com/us – the USA

example.com/uk – United Kingdom

example.com/it – Italy

c. Subdomains: This type consists of a separate third-level domain that encompasses internationalized content inside it. Compared to ccTLD and subfolder domains, it is easier to manage and also avoids adding any complications to your web structure but requires a lot of context indexing.

www.example.com – the USA

uk.example.com – United Kingdom

it.example.com – Italy

For this reason, businesses need to set up an effective global SEO strategy and campaigns while focusing on their audiences’ cultures, local internet policies and regulations, languages, and behavioral tendencies.

Tactic #3: Content Optimization

To develop an international footprint and notice a spike in global visitors to your website, understanding your audience and localizing your content is most crucial. Once you have set up a powerful web-targeting SEO strategy to reach an international audience and picked out your desired URL structure type to use, it’s time to get your localized website ready and optimize it for global SEO.

About 94 percent of visitors immediately abandon and stop trusting a website due to its degraded web design. That’s why it’s important to make sure that your site is flawlessly built, crawlable, indexable, and relevant to your business and services, displaying search engines the strongest targeting signals. Since each version of your multi-regional and multilingual website needs to be indexable and crawlable, ensure that they are featured accurately in their own URL web structure. Also, don’t forget to translate (language targeted) or localize (country targeted) various elements of each edition, including:

✓ URLs

✓ Menu and navigation elements

✓ Title and Meta description

✓ Headings

✓ Main body information

✓ Images and ALT descriptions

✓ Reviews

✓ Phone, address, etc.

Tactic #4: Language-target your website and all pages

Use language Meta Tags to set up and target multiple languages for your website and all of its pages. They send the most immediate signal to search engines informing them that your website offers different language options. There are an array of multilingual-specific markup tags that webmasters should leverage across each of their country sites. Here are some practices to employ when implementing HTML tags:

a) Ensure that everything, from the navigation and website content to tags and support desk, should be in the primary language of that specific country or region you’re targeting.

b) Don’t automatically redirect your visitors to a different language version of your international site based on their location.

c) Don’t just use a machine translator tool to interpret one language to another (they’re not good enough).

d) Don’t use scripts or cookies to display multi-language styles of the page as web browsers are not able to crawl that sort of dynamic content.

Tactic #5: Organic Visibility

There are a few quick ways to improve your organic search visibility and traffic with high-quality conversions and positive trends and also boost the ranking organically without having to create new content. All you need to do is to: