Covering some aspects from "why" to "how", to expand and grow your business internationally. It covers: 1. How to find potential opportunity for expansion 2. Deciding on web structure 3. Making experience local for better user and search engine experience

1. Hello, World!

2. User-agent: *
Allow: /planet-earth

3. Nitin Manchanda
Global Head of SEO
SEO Consultant
SEO Speaker at Online/Offline Events
Webinar Host at SEMrush

4. Experienced
International SEO

5. 55 65
Markets Domain Instances
5

6. 24 26
Markets Domain Instances
6

8. Let’s get started!

9. #1

10. Find the Target
Market(s)

12. Identify languages
and countries which
are already bringing
traffic to your site
Source: GA > Audience > Geo > Language/Location

13. Identify markets your competitors are already present in,
but you don’t!
Source: SEMrush > Marketing Insights > Traffic Analysis

14. Make sure you’ve sufficient demand!
Source: SEMrush > Keyword Analytics > Keyword Magic Tool

15. Convinced about the
Opportunity?

16. Also ensure
The expansion plan aligns with the overall
strategy.
You’ve enough resources to work on it.

17. Yay!
Time to expand!

18. #2

19. Decide on Web Structure

20. Cookies / Scripts

21. URL Parameters

22. ccTLDs
vs
Subdirectories
vs
Subdomains

23. 6500+
23
Languages in the world spoken today

24. 22
24
Languages in India

25. 63%
German
Languages in Switzerland
25
22.7%
French
8.4%
Italian
5.9%
Romansh &
Others

26. Language Targeting

27. Subdirectories
vs
Subdomains

28. Yay!
Web Structure is
Decided

29. #3

30. Go Local

31. Ensure local experience for the users

32. Non-local experience can
hurt CTR, UX, Conversions
and essentially Rankings

33. Check misalignment issues for your domain

34. Emulate any location to verify
(VPN or Chrome Dev Tools can help)

35. Geolocate sub-domains/sub-directories in GSC
to target country
P.S Do nothing in case of ccTLDs, as they’ve country targeting as an implicit feature!

36. Auto redirects

37. Auto redirects

38. Auto redirects = Bad User/Search-Engine Experience

39. Instead, suggest the local version

40. Localize everything - URLs,
title, meta tags, navigation
& everything else user might
be interacting with

43. Use HTML lang attribute to indicate the content language

44. Use hreflang
to indicate
the
alternative

45. Some Rules
Every page should include itself in the list, with respective
language-country code
Hreflang tags should be reciprocal i.e If A is linking B as an alternate
version, B should have A as the alternate version
Use ISO 639-1 values for Languages and ISO 3166-1 for Countries
[Optional] Use x-default to indicate the fallback domain option

46. Hreflang can also be
implemented using XML
sitemaps or HTTP headers

47. Be very careful
Double verify it before going live!

49. Some Interesting Articles
https://www.onely.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-international-seo/
https://www.semrush.com/blog/7-ways-to-fail-at-international-seo/

50. 50
Nitin Manchanda
Thank you!
@_nitman
nitman