Dave the SEO – International SEO Consultant & Specialist
In my career I have worked with dozens of clients where they have come to me or the agency where I was working at the time because they thought expanding their offering to some more markets by creating a copy of basic translation (often done through Google Translate) was going to be a way to quickly gain new revenue.
International SEO Strategy and Optimisation: More than just translations
There are many reasons why the above isn’t, and never really has been true. Even if your brand and offering hits the spot just as well in any new markets, and more often than not it needs some localisation even at this level. Getting your SEO right: getting the keywords, content, UX and probably most importantly, and most often fouled up, your technical SEO right are all important to make a success of things.
True website localisation for SEO
I know I don’t know the nuances of every culture in the world. What I know is how to find out and the processes that are needed to find out and then make sure this is reflected in your website and SEO strategy. I have also worked with SEOs and copywriters all over the world to make sure client’s web pages really are localised and they really understand the markets they are entering.
Localisation is more than just translating content, web pages in the same language usually need localising for different markets. This isn’t just changing some Ss to Zs either.
Webpage Localisation is about understanding:
- Understanding if the same target audience or users exist in each market (do demographics, use cases, income differ)
- How do your target audience search in the market? This may be impacted by knowledge of the sector and products / services
- What is the intent behind the search terms people are using? In some cases the same term, even in the same language can have a different intent
- What are the factors that will most influence engagement and conversion?
- Some markets users want to make a decision fast, others want more information, sometimes this will be more qualitative e.g. reviews from similar users, or more quantitative e.g. product data
- What should the Calls to Action or next steps look like to move people from a landing page to the next step?
- What does the full user journey look like? e.g. Will there be more or less touch points? A longer timeline? Do people want to speak to a human before they buy
International Technical SEO Consultancy
I really enjoy the technical side of International SEO because it is so complicated and easy to get wrong, but when you have everything working as it should the results can be incredible; perhaps some of the biggest impacts on clients’ performance I have seen have come from fixing technical International SEO setup issues which meant the wrong pages were being shown to the wrong people. This can happen because Google don’t know which pages are relevant to which markets or languages or because they can’t actually find all different versions of your site or have treated them as duplicate content.
There are lots of unique issues and rarer issues in international technical SEO but
The four biggest Technical International SEO issues are:
- No setup, partial setup or incorrect setup of Hreflang (and there’s about 25 different sub-issues that can cause this)
- URL/domain structures that limit visibility of market sites by limiting link equity and authority
- Use of IP and/or browser language detection to redirect users in such a way some pages or content can’t be indexed
- Use of SPAs or Web Apps to create market sites that have no indexable URLs for market or language specific content
Fixing these can involve investments in Dev time or a lot of manual work but the good news is it can be easy to put a value on the improvements; also in some cases it might be a matter of adding a module or add on to your site or just ticking the right setting.
Approach to putting a value on fixing International Canibalisation
My approach is to use the following steps to predict the impact these fixes (you can look at this on a Monthly, Quarterly or Annual basis):
- To calculate lost clicks or Click Gap
- Identify from Google Search Console traffic where the URLs showing are the correct ones for the country where the users are based.
- Identify from Google Search Console traffic where the URLs showing are the incorrect ones for the country where the users are based.
- Split in to Brand and Non-Brand traffic
- Compare, for each country, the difference in click through rate for brand and non brand between when users land on the right pages and the wrong ones
- Use impressions and CTR difference to calculate your Click Gap for each market
- To Calculate lost conversions or Conversion Gap, or lost engaged sessions
- Using data from Analytics for all pages break down traffic, engagement and/or conversion data by country of origin for the user (can also be done for browser language)
- Export data and identify for every URL which market (or language) it is relevant to (ensuring the naming of countries is the same as for the origin of the users)
- Calculate the difference in conversion rate or engagement rate (or another engagement metric such as time on site) between where users land on a relevant page for their country (or language) or the incorrect one
- Use these differences and the number of visits to calculate the Conversion Gap or lost engaged sessions
- For sites where you have a value per conversion or Average Order Value use this to calculate the lost revenue from the conversion Gap and using the conversion rate and Click Gap the lost revenue from lost clicks
- This will give you a lost revenue figure which can be compared to the cost of fixing issues which will often have a very low amortisation time period