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How to Scale your business on search engines internationally

Posted on by Mario

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At some stages, mostly many online sites have a desired to expand. The only way to do it is by creating and offering more products to an international market.  This is not an easy or simple task by any means. Therefore, as a SEO services, web developer or online entrepreneur, you need to learn more about its risks, research and steps involved in expanding your business into an international market.

Considerations and Research
The first thing that you need to know is whether it is the right time to go international. This relates closely to the future and the current needs of the business. The only sign that you are ready to start implementing an international SEO strategy is when you see visitors increment from international locations. Besides looking for international visitors’ increment, you can take some questions below as part of your consideration:

  • Are you able to implement ALL technical fixes?
  • If targeting a different language, do you have somebody to translate?
  • Is the business ready to carry out international orders and process transactions?
  • Do you have the resources to carry out the work and manage each variation in the future?

After asking yourself some basic questions above, now you can move on to further research. As with any new website idea or build, it’s all about making sure it’s a worthwhile venture.

Moreover, conduct a keyword research will be one of the biggest researches to know if there is demand in the locations.

Website Structure
There are many types of different implementations of international, each having different pros and cons. One of them is by leaning towards using subdirectories, but it will depend on the type of targeting you will be using.

These are the main structure types:

  • ccTLD – Domain variations such as example. Fr, example.au
  • subdomain – fr.example.com, au.example.com
  • subcategory – example.com/au/, example.com/fr/

Below is an example of the set up for a website with the subcategory URL structure for the UK and France.  Place your main website on a .com as this tends to be the norm now, but this work the same with .co.uk.

You’ll see variations that include both language and location, but this can be done with just language or just location.


This would mean that we add the following code to our website:

<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com” hreflang=”en-gb” />

<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com/fr-en/” hreflang=”fr-gb” />

<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com/fr-fr/” hreflang=”fr-fr” />

<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com/en-fr/” hreflang=”en-fr” />

We can also add an X-default tag to this piece of code to be safe. This will tell search engines that if there is a URL that is not using this structure that it should default to the URL specified. This would change our code snippet to:

<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com” hreflang=”en-gb” />

<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com/fr-en/” hreflang=”fr-gb” />

<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com/fr-fr/” hreflang=”fr-fr” />

<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com/en-fr/” hreflang=”en-fr” />

<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com” hreflang=”x-default” />

The above links are for our example website. Internal links reference the specific URL rather than the homepage, they use this code with the URLs changed. In fact, example.com should pass through a redirect if you were to change example.com to example.com/en-gb/.

Sitemap Implementation
They tend to be referring to implementing localization through the use of sitemaps, when people talk about using sitemaps and international SEO. In fact, this is another possible solution for different language and countries despite of hreflang. It works the same with hreflang, but sits within a sitemap rather than in the website’s source code.

Metadata & Content
Based on different languages, you can figure out where the demand is by conducting keyword research. This causes metadata needs to be used for each language variation. Moreover, targeting the right variation of the word is used is also important. For example, if the hreflang is aimed to say the page in Japanese, it should be written in Japanese. This is a basic thing that everyone must know, but still many people get it wrong. In-house resource or outside help are also other important factors to help you complete this all before launch.

Above all, do not translate directly from English; this will sound awkward and probably not understandable in another language. In fact, you need to take considerations on some cultural differences when writing new content or trying to sell a product in a different market.

International Google Local
This section will be very important if you have a physical location in the new countries. Moreover, you can create a listing giving full details of their company along with the location through Google My Business. This will be important in building up an organic search presence in a new location. Below are the main steps of local SEO that you can follow:

  • create the location here https://www.google.co.uk/business/
  • add as many details as possible
  • add the address to the most relevant page on your website
  • mark the address up with local schema
  • obtain links from relevant websites in the area or region

Summary
In the end, good preparation is the key to success before scaling a business to target an international market. Without good preparation, it will be impossible to achieve what you initially set out to do.

5 Strong Reasons Why You Need to Improve Your Organic CTR Rate Right Now

Posted on by Mario

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Many SEO services acknowledge that links and content are two of the most essential things in SEO. In fact, this is no longer a secret as your competitor may pursue the same things. They also know that they have to build an amazing link profile and create the greatest content that they can make.

So, what makes your SEO effort stands out from the rest? The answer is your organic click-through rate (CTR). Below are 5 reasons that will explain why improving your organic CTR can make your SEO result gets better. Check this out!

  1. CTR Impacts Ranking

According to Paul Haahr at SMX West, Google is constantly conducting A/B experiments on search results, looking for changes in click patterns. This is because Google wants to provide the best answer to users. One of the most important element that Google uses as its measurement as its success is clicks.

For example, both of you and your competitor answer the query and neither page has an advantage in links. But your competitor’s page ranks #1 and your page ranks #2. What makes the difference? And what’s the easiest way to beat your competitor page ranks.

Can longer content win? Or building more links help? The answer is by getting more people click on your result. This is how Google will consider your page as the best result for searchers, because more people are clicking on it and engaging with it.

  1. Beat the Competition with Engagement Metrics

To assess whether your page has a good quality, Google will see your page through three key elements: expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. This means Google is looking at the content of your entire website, not just individual pages. To obtain higher engagement metrics, you need to work hard to have higher than expected engagement metrics.

Moreover, Google will also asses the users’ behavior on your site. For example, if your visitors’ bounce back is high, that’s a huge signal that your page doesn’t provide what searchers are looking for. So, having high task completion rates is also one of the biggest considerations that determine your success. As a result, Google will reward your higher task completion rates with expertise, authority, and trust.

  1. Users Click on Awesome Headlines

What makes an awesome headline? According to BuzzSumo, there are five common elements present in all viral headlines: format, emotion, content type, promise and topic.

What would a super clickable headline look like? Well, BuzzFeed is a master of these. One of their most shared posts in the past was “27 Amazing Charts That Will Turn You Into A Baking Whiz”. Let’s break it down:

  1. Pages with Low CTR are Website Cancer

Your content cannot be considered as great if nobody clicks on it. Actually, this is what Panda is aimed for. The update is made to assess your website’s content as creating content for the sake of search engine can be dangerous. Moreover, in the long run, it will lead to a death spiral of lost rankings and traffic if there are so many people are bouncing off your site.

  1. You can Influence Search Volume and CTR

Targeting people who have never known about your brand will be more difficult than targeting the same keywords to people who have never heard of you. Therefore, to increase your organic CTRs, you can use social media, such as Facebook and Twitter ads to promote your brand. Besides that it is efficient, the ads are also inexpensive.

Remember that people who know your business will have bigger tendency to click on an organic result from you when they see your brand name in the organic search results. The importance thing is that people know who you are and that you do, only by this you can drive more traffic and see higher CTRs.

In-Depth Checklist for International Service

Posted on by Mario

International SEO An In Depth Checklist_1

For some reasons many SEO services think the need of international SEO as part of their campaign. However, few only conduct international SEO since international SEO is a challenging task. Therefore, to help you conduct international SEO we provide you with several steps, such as follow.

Find Your Current International Audience

Doing research is the first step that you should take before let your SEO goes international, so gauge current and potential interest by looking at your site traffic by country in Google Analytics. Find the countries that your traffic originates from by opening the location report under Geo and sort by sessions. These top listed countries are your top candidates to get their own targeted sites or pages.

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The next step is to open up the Google Search Console Search Analytics report and filter by country. Check the boxes for impressions, click through rate (CTR) and position. A country who contributes lots of click will receive a large number of impressions and have higher average positions are good starting points for international targeting. In fact, it is easier to rank well in countries where you’ve already gained some transaction.

Determine Language vs. Country Targeting

Now there are two ways that can make your site goes international, you can choose to create sites in alternate languages, or to target them geographically? It looks like two of them works oppositely, but it will have big impact on how you go about creating your international site.

Both of them have their own weakness and strength:

  • Language:

You’ll get widen reach of audience once you have optimized your pages by language. Since people in French will be relevant and accessible to French speakers all over the world. It will also make translating/creating simpler since you won’t need to optimize it for specific cultures or markets. The downside is that your content will have to be generic and free of idiomatic phrases that may not be used globally.

  • Country:

You can provide more discounts, sales and other offers since you’ll be able to really target your content. Linguistic variations, like the differences between British, Canadian, Australian, and American English will not bother you anymore. In fact, since the SEO will be limited into a single country, therefore you need to do any market research to optimize your content for local buying behaviors.

Decide which URL Structure is Best for You

Arranging the best URL structure is necessary for your SEO site and there are three options for URL structure that is good for international websites:

  • Country code to-level domains (ccTLD)

ccTLDs is quite self-explanatory: they use country codes in their domain name or domain extension, instead of the generic.com, .org or .net. In fact, the biggest advantage of using a ccTLD is because it does your geotargeting for you. When Google sees example.co.uk or example.it, it knows that those sites should serve United Kingdom and Italy’s users.

  • Subdomains

Another way to build up a lot of brand awareness globally is by using language or country-specific subdomains as the way to go for a company. Moreover, you need to make sure to use Google Search Console’s International Targeting if you do create geotargeted subdomains. This will make sure that Google will use that subdomain in searches in the appropriate country.

  • Subfolders (also called subdirectories)

The main advantage of having subfolder is that because it is the fastest and easiest option to implement, as they just require you to create a few extra folders for each country and/or language. Due to this, subfolders are a great option for smaller companies. However, subfolders somewhat can be ambiguous for both human users and search engines since people will be confuse, for instance is /fr/ meant for users in France or for all French speakers?