SEO for International Websites

International SEO is becoming of increasing importance to many people. Once you have conquered a marketplace in one country you might be eager to look for new markets in other parts of the world to increase your sales. What should you be aware of when targeting search engine rankings in other countries which speak the same language?

Search engines are drawing results which are biased toward a geographical locations so they will naturally favour sites representing locations in searcher’s area. However, the biggest problem with ranking international sites using the same language is  duplicate content.

Google cannot determine the authorship of different content it has no choice but to share PageRank among the different sites. Just making local changes like  ‘aboot’ instead of  ‘about’ in Canada or G’day Mate instead of Welcome in Australia is not going to cut it in differentiating between different countries. It would be useful to tell Google through Webmaster Tools about different versions of a site for different locations to avoid duplicate content filtering. But that is not possible at the time of writing.

If you don’t want to take the risk you should substantially alter the content on each country’s web site. Of course, this applies to sites written in other languages also. So, similar French and Belgian versions of a web site are at risk of duplicate content filtering if they are written in French.

What is the Ideal solution?

• Host Top Level Domains in each country
• Having a server located in the target country
• Need substantially different content for each location with the same language.
• Links to each geographical site from other sites in the same geographical region. i.e. links for the UK site predominantly come from other UK sites, links for a  Canadian version of site come mostly from other Canadian sites, etc.
• Register with GoogleLocal in countries of interest.

Another solution is to 301 redirect subdomains for different countries to sub-folders of the same web-site. This logistically better as you are administering a single website but may not be as effective.

What else  is important to rank for results in a different geographical locations?

• Have your address on the page, in the footer for example on every page.
• Keywords for location in content. i.e. SEO Specialist UK,  etc.
• Use Google WebmasterTools to target a particular region for each website:

The settings page in Google WebmasterTools can be used to target specific countries.