International SEO Agency

Improve your search engine rankings anywhere in the world, in Google, Baidu and Yandex

International SEO ensures your international audience can find and successfully navigate the most relevant sections of your site. It is the process aimed at optimizing your website’s organic search presence in more than one country or language. In other words, if you have content in two or more languages or you are targeting more than one country - you are already dealing with an international SEO strategy, and you should be reviewing your geotargeting set up.

Novicell’s International SEO Agency is based in Spain and consists of a team of multilingual SEO specialists with broad experience in international search engine marketing on different markets across the globe.

What tactics are used in International SEO?

Market-specific keyword research

Market-specific on page optimization

Content localisation

Geotargeting review

Hreflang implementation

Any SEO tasks related to the local search engines other than Google (Yandex, Baidu, Naver etc.)

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International Search Engines to have in mind

The search engine you should focus your efforts on depends pretty much on the market you are targeting. The vast majority of the internet is dominated by Google. But even if you only work with Google, that should not stop you from pursuing an International SEO strategy.

On the other hand, there are multiple search engines with a market dominance in specific countries or parts of the world, and it is important to be aware of their presence and understand how their algorithms work. These include Yandex in Russia and Eastern Europe, Baidu, Shenma and Sogou, among others, in China, Naver in South Korea and many more.

For a successful International SEO strategy, you need to understand the market-specific obstacles and how to best overcome them.

Which types of International SEO strategies exist?

SCENARIO 1: TRANSLATION METHOD

Your website has content in several languages, organized by local domains (cc-TLDs), a language specific folder structure on one domain, or separate subdomains per language.

This sort of set up is very common, but unfortunately this does not mean it is error-free. Often there are parts of the site that have the translations missing, meta data is not locally optimized and not all the content gets fully indexed in all search engines you should appear in. That’s when an International SEO Agency should step in to identify and fix all those issues. It is essential to set up a strategy and prioritize the work by market, so that the SEO improvements can have tangible impact on your business goals.

SCENARIO 2: NATIVE METHOD

The site is targeting various countries which share the same language (like UK and USA or Spain and Mexico).

This is less common than simply targeting by a language, but also has its important part in the International SEO Strategy, as it's very error prone. Imagine you want to target the local audience from UK, USA, and Australia at the same time. You create a unique pricing page to adjust it to the local currencies, but all the rest is essentially duplicate content. How do you make sure the users based in Australia actually do get the correct, localized result in their search? That’s when various SEO tactics can help, but make sure they get implemented by International SEO specialists.

SCENARIO 3: OVERCOMING FIREWALLS

You have already translated your website in Chinese, to be able to tap into the biggest market in the world, but you’re not sure how to work on SEO.

China’s biggest search engine is Baidu (Baidu.com), often called China’s Google. Outside of standard search service, they also have Baidu Maps, Baidu Wikipedia, forums, weather services, a social network and more. Similar to Google, they offer their own Webmaster Tools called Baidu Zhanzhang and analytics tool called Baidu Tongji, both being offered for free. The main drawback is the fact that the tools are only accessible in Chinese, so if you want to use the wealth of data Baidu offers, you need a specialist with the language skills and the right understanding of the market. Also be aware that even though Baidu is the biggest, it is not the only search engine in China. Sogou (Sogou.com), Haosou 360 (SO.com) and Shenma (sm.cn, owned by Alibaba Group) are some of the other search market players in Mainland China.

Frequently asked questions about our International SEO Services

What is International SEO?

International SEO is the sum of techniques that are applied to optimize a website so that search engines correctly identify which countries and languages are being targeted. This includes technical SEO tactics to indicate language and country targeting preferences, content localisation, and market-specific link building.

How to develop an International SEO strategy?

A successful International SEO strategy consists of a series of activities:

An in-depth analysis of your target markets and audience
A benchmarking study for each targeted market to identify your main local competitors
A localized keyword research per market
Deciding on the most adequate site architecture: ccTLD, subdomain or subfolder/subdirectory
Choosing the right hosting
Localizing the content for each target market and audience
Implementing hreflang tags in the correct way
Applying a geotargeted link-building strategy

What are Hreflang tags?

Hreflang is an HTML attribute used to specify the language and geographical region a webpage is targeting. If you have multiple versions of the same page in different languages, a correctly implemented hreflang tag helps search engines to identify all these variations. This helps them to serve the correct version of your page to the right users.

What is a CDN and how can it improve your international search engine ranking?

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of geographically distributed servers working together to get content to load faster by serving it from a location near the user. In this way, users around the globe can experience an optimal page loading speed, which has a positive impact on your international search engine rankings.

How is Novicell different from other International SEO agencies?

Novicell’s international team consists of native, multilingual SEO specialists with broad experience in implementing SEO strategies on different local markets and in different languages. Apart from Google, we can also help you succeed in Bing, Yandex, Baidu and other search engines.