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How to Scale your business on search engines internationally

Posted on by Mario

How-to-Scale-your-business-internationally-on-search-engines

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 Ways to Build Better Online Reputation through SEO

Posted on by Mario

 

How-SEO-can-help-shape-your-online-reputation

The main purpose of SEO service is to optimize any strategy to boost your website rank in the search results. One of the strategies that you can rely on is to show your “human” side of your business. This strategy will make your business seems more relatable and real. But, how can you show your human side through SEO? The answer is simply by collecting and displaying reviews. In fact, positive and negative reviews are used as a ranking factor. Negative reviews cause bad rank to your site while positive reviews will elevate your rank.

How Do I Take Advantage of Online Reviews and Improve my SEO?
Nowadays, customers wish to get better “transparency” from sellers. Transparency as a business means to open up to criticism and feedback. In detail, the action includes as:

  • Allowing employees to talk about your products and services publicly such as through an employee advocacy program.
  • Establishing 1-to-1 communication channel
  • Asking for feedback
  • Not hiding from criticism
  • Addressing criticism publicly

There will be some reviews that may destroy your reputation. Although, you can remove all the bad reviews but it is not a wise move. The best way is to turn the negative reviews to positive reviews through better customer service experience. Here are 7 tips that you can use to uplift your online reputation management:

  1. Monitor Your Reviews
    Apply social keywords when responding to social media messages directed at your brand. Set a Google Alert to notify you of any news posted about your brand. Therefore, by monitoring people’s reviews, you know what people really want and you can improve your product better.
  1. Friendly and Quick Respond
    Read your reviews daily. If you have more time, you can login to view and respond to social media messages multiple times a day. Make these daily routines as your habit, just like checking your email. In short, try to respond any reviews in less than 24 hours.
  1. Have Personality
    You can learn from many famous online businesses. Amazon is a good example. It always comes with a positive attitude and a willingness to help. Besides, it opens up a conversation in a witty style no matter what you have to say.
  1. Think of SEO as your Digital Business Card
    As it is stated above, good SEO strategies will help you boost your business. It works better than any business cards or flyers. In fact, business directory and profile sites help you accurately list your company online and monitor your reviews. Here are lists of business profile sites, that you can get started:
  • Amazon
  • Angie’s List
  • Better Business Bureau (BBB)
  • Bing Places
  • Citysearch
  • Consumer Reports
  • Demand Force (newer review site)
  • Dex Knows
  • com
  • com
  • Google+ Local/Google Places
  • Home Advisor
  • Insider Pages
  • Judy’s Book
  • MerchantCircle
  • Trip Advisor
  • Yahoo! Local
  • Yellow Pages
  • Yelp!

To gain and monitor your reviews, you can list your business on these sites.

  1. Pay Attention to Reviews on Social Media
    Remember that social media profiles are also part of digital reputation management. Therefore, sites like LinkedIn, Google+ and Facebook are best for business as it has important information and people can post their reviews in these social media.

Why Crawl Budget and URL Scheduling Might Impact Rankings in Website Migrations

Posted on by Mario

why-crawl-budget-and-url-scheduling-might-impact-rankings-in-website-migrations

During a migration, many webmasters will notice that there is turbulence happens in PageRank, this is because all signals impacting rankings haven’t passed to the new pages yet, so they assume that PageRank was lost. Besides, Googlebot also needs to collect huge amounts of data for collation in logs, mapping and updated internally, and rankings which can fluctuate throughout this process. If you are a SEO service engineer or web developer, you may need to read the following passages to understand why website migration can impact on their PageRank.

Crawl Budget = host load + URL scheduling combined

URL scheduling is important since they will show what does Googlebot want to visit (URLs), and how often?” while host load is based around “what can Googlebot visit from an Ip/host, based on capacity and server resources?” Both of them still matter in migrations, together, these make up “crawl budget” for an IP or host.

This will not bring a lot of impact, if you only have few pages of websites, but this things terribly matter when you have an e-commerce of news site with tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or more URLs. Sometimes, even crawling tools prior to migration “go live,” cannot detect any wrongs but the result will show that there any rankings and overall visibility drops.

This can be caused by “any late and very late signals in transit”, rather than “lost signals.” In fact, some signals could even take months to pass since Googlebot does not crawl large websites like crawling tools do.

Change Management/Freshness is Important

Everyone knows that change frequency impacts crawl frequency and URLs change all the time on the web. Keeping probability of embarrassment for search engines (the “embarrassment metric”) by returning stale content in search results below acceptable thresholds is key, and it must be managed efficiently. In order to avoid any “embarrassment”, scheduling systems are made to prioritize crawling important pages which change frequently over less important pages, such as those with insignificant changes or low-authority pages.

These kinds of key pages will be easily seen by search engine users versus pages which don’t get found often in search engine results pages. This also shows that search engines learn over time the important change frequency on web pages by comparing the latest with previous copies of the page to detect patterns of critical change frequency.

Why can’t Googlebot visit migrated pages all at once?

The above explanation has given us two conclusions; first Googlebots usually arrive at a website with a purpose, a “work schedule,” and a “bucket list” of URLs to crawl during a visit. Googlebot will surely complete its bucket list and checks around to see if there is anything more important that the URLs on the original bucket list that may also need collecting.

Furthermore, if there is important URLs, Googlebot may go a little further and crawl these other important URLs as well. If nothing further important is discovered, Googlebot returns for another bucket list to visit on your site next time.

Since Googlebot is mostly focusing on very few (important) URLs,  wheterh you’ve recently migrated a site or not, with occasional visits from time to time to those deemed least important, or not expected to have changed materially very often.

Moreover, Googlebot will likely send a signal to tell us if there is a migration of some sort underway over there when Googlebot comes across lots of redirection response codes. Once again, mostly only the most important migrating URLs will get crawled as a priority, and maybe more frequently than they normally would, too. Due to this, it is importance to know several factors, aside from page importance and change frequency that would make URLs be visited. They are limited search engine resources, host load, and URL queues an low importance of migrating pages.