The Increasing Importance of International SEO

According to Our World in Data, “63% of the world’s population was online in 2023” and it does not take a genius to hypothesize that this number will only continue to grow in future years. While we often think of SEO in terms of reaching local users, the reality is that billions of people around the world are online, using search to find answers, resources, products, and services.

As our world gets more and more connected, International SEO is growing in importance. Because I am interested in working for global organizations, I wanted to look into how companies use international SEO, and how it might differ from local SEO. One of the initial questions in my mind was how companies manage the language barriers that are bound to occur, especially in other contexts where many languages are all spoken within the same country.

Lokalise defines international SEO as: “internationalizing your website’s structure in a way that makes it easy for search engines to understand which countries you want to rank in.” Before starting international SEO it is important to recognize that the audience in each country is unique, and will require and individualized SEO strategy.

One theme that kept coming up in my searching was how important it is to research! SEO can be a time consuming and expensive process, so you want to maximize your impact. Various articles suggested researching user intent, evaluating current resources, researching your competitors in each local market, and learning about cultural differences that might exist. This research needs to be done before anything else, and it should inform every other decision that is made in the SEO process.

It is important to apply what you have learned about the language and culture to keyword research as well. A keyword or phrase that works well in an American context might not translate well or be relevant in another country, so you will need to re-evaluate your keywords and how you use them. Accurate translations are also crucial to ranking well in the results. We can probably all think of an instance where we read the instructions on something that were clearly translated into English without a native English speaker checking for flow. If your site is the same way, it will not rank well.

It might also be wise to prioritize which countries you are specifically seeking to rank in, instead of trying to broadly increase rank around the world. You simply cannot reach the whole world all at once. Once you have determined which country to target, one option is to create specific sites with local domains for each country you are trying to reach. This approach is very time intensive, but tends to yield better results than the alternative of trying to have just one website optimized for the whole globe.

Some other suggestions for successfully optimizing your site for international search included creating a web of backlinks from local sites in that country to add legitimacy to your site, and having a complete plan for backlinking.

While a lot of these same things must be considered when you are doing local SEO, my research opened my eyes to how much more each of these elements needs to be evaluated in order to rank internationally. However, my research was conflicting in terms of whether “global SEO” and “international SEO” are the same thing. One article defined them completely differently, whereas another article said they are essentially synonymous. This poses an interesting topic for me to research and explore in a blog post in the future.

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