Taking the giant leap into international SEO is both daunting and full of potential banana skins. Matt Barby's SearchLeeds talk helps makes the leap a little less daunting for you, and so that you avoid many of the common mistakes that are made. Packed full of examples, you’ll see how many of the top companies in the world have approached their international setup and how you can decide which is right for you.
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Targeting Options
Language
Your sales process isn’t impacted by the country of your customer.
There isn’t a huge amount of country-level demand in search.
Country
Your sales process is impacted by the country of your customer.
There is significant demand within each country for key search
terms related to your business.
Country + Language
There is significant demand in each country, and there are also
enough opportunities in search to capture demand from multiple
languages that are spoken in that country.
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When to Use ccTLDs
You have large audiences in each target country.
Resources to develop and maintain multiple web properties.
Resources to run local link building campaigns.
You want to boost the appearance of a local sales presence.
You want to build your brand presence in each target country.
You have different product/service offering in each region.
Resources to develop localized content for each target country.
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When to Use Subdirectories
You don’t have the resources to build and maintain individual sites.
You don’t have the resources for local link building.
Your product/service offering doesn’t differ much by region.
You want to keep costs low.
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When to Use Subdirectories
You don’t have the resources/ability to acquire and manage
individual ccTLDs.
You aren’t able (for tech reasons) to go with subdirectories.
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Hreflang
Needs to be set up no matter how you chose to structure your
international site(s) - i.e. ccTLDs, subdomains, subdirectories,
etc.
Used to tell Google which pages are translated/localized
versions of each of your pages.
You can also assign a version as the default URL for all other
country/language variations not specified.
Prevents duplicate content issues across localized content.
It’s very easy to mess this up.
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domain.es/page-a/ (Spain)domain.com/page-a/ (USA) domain.fr/page-a/ (France)
(purple dashed lines are hreflang links)
<link rel="alternate" href="https://domain.com/page-a/" hreflang="en-us" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://domain.fr/page-a/" hreflang="fr-fr" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://domain.es/page-a/" hreflang="es-es" />
This code is in the <head> of all three of the above pages