Expanding your business internationally is a monumental step that can bring your SEO game to the next level. However, it’s crucial to ask yourself: are you truly prepared? Launching your website internationally means there’s no turning back—you must not only own your initial efforts but also continuously maintain them. Often, a single plugin won’t suffice.
Has your business already begun to attract interest from international markets? Are prospects from different countries reaching out for the products or services you offer? If you’re finding ways to engage these international prospects, imagine how much better their experience could be if your business was presented in their native language.
If you find yourself in this promising yet challenging position, consider the following technical aspects before making the leap to go international. And to make things more fun, the article will follow a use case of LATAM region. With a generous help of ChatGPT4, and more specifically DALLE, you can enjoy some iconic imagery and reflect on how our AI buddy interprets the extensive data that was fed to it over the years.
Let’s kick off a with basic question.
What is International SEO?
International SEO expands beyond just language considerations to include geographic targeting. This strategy aims to optimize a website for different countries and regions, addressing local competition, cultural nuances, and search habits.
- Optimizing a website to rank well in search engines for target markets in different countries/languages
- Ensuring search engines can properly crawl, index, and serve the most relevant content version
- Addressing technical and on-page factors to improve visibility and user experience
What is Multilanguage SEO?
- Focus on Language: Multilanguage SEO is specifically concerned with optimizing web content for different languages within the same or different countries.
- Translation and Localization: This involves translating content into various languages and may also include localization to adjust the content culturally and contextually to suit different regions. However, the focus remains primarily on language rather than on regional or national specifics.
- Technical SEO: Includes implementing hreflang tags in the HTML of the website, which signal to search engines what language a page is targeting.
In essence, multilanguage SEO is a subset of international SEO, focusing specifically on the linguistic aspects. In contrast, international SEO is more comprehensive, dealing with both language and regional considerations. It integrates both multilanguage and multicountry strategies to ensure the website is appropriately optimized for various global markets based on both language and location.
Language, localization, and cultural nuances
- Language translation is critical for connecting with local audiences
- Localization goes beyond translation – adapting content, tone, examples to cultural norms
- Understanding local preferences, slang, idioms are essential to create resonating content, aka not just translate but transcreate
Localization Work Examples
- Local currency – essential for e-commerce websites
- Local address and business listings
- Making the copy more localized and more unique – common phrases and terminology vary from country to country
- Images: translation of files and alt attributes
- Local experts as authors of strategic content
- Local link building
- Local seasonality and holidays
Technical considerations
- Choosing a suitable domain structure (subdomain, subfolder, ccTLD, gTLD)
- Implementing hreflang tags to indicate language/region variants
- Setting up XML sitemaps for each language/region
- Metadata optimization (titles, descriptions, canonicals, alt text)
Common Pitfalls
- Duplicate Content
- Canonicalization
- Skipping other Search Engines variants
- UX: IPs and Internal Linking
Unlike our AI friend, seduced by the intricate headgear from eastern Europe, merging it with the tropical background and calling it a job well done, humans may skip the obvious cultural faux pass. But, you can still end up in a version of International SEO hell, where your pages get deindexed as your own directives were too conflicting to search engines–if you don’t follow best practices.
Duplicate content
Most common issue with international AND multi language websites, is being flagged for duplicate content when you are using same-language targeting across different countries. This is why transcreation is a crucial concept to use, and localize content for each country. But, if the content is translated into a new language ( the site is multilingual only), search engines would not consider it duplicate content.
Messing up Canonicalization Setup
One common mistake is canonicalizing international variations to one primary language. However, each language/region is a valid variation in-and-of-itself, and therefore each version should self-canonicalize!
Bad UX Practices
This is commonly done by large corporate sites, but never use IP sniffing to auto-redirect users to the “right” location.
It’s a frustrating user experience (especially for people traveling, or near large borders), and Googlebot is “from” the transient country.
Internal Linking Tips
Do:
- Build internal linking pathways to international pages
- Hyperlink the “international homepage(s)” from your primary homepage.
- Build crawl paths from the international homepage to international sub-pages.
- Interlink between language variation pages as appropriate.
Don’t:
- … silo international pages in their own bubble, expecting hreflang to notify search engines about all your new page variations.
- … depend on “links” from a language dropdown that requires user interaction – Googlebot can’t mimic that.
And now for the fun stuff!
International and Multilingual Case Study: Latin America
646 million inhabitants / 400 million internet users.
Language-wise:
Spanish or Portuguese covers 99%
Latin America spans over 20 countries. And counting(?), at least according to DALLEs vision. If considering going just multilingual, for starters–rather than international, you’d still want to pick a base language you would transcreate your content for. As any copywriter would know, 101 lesson is–know your audience, pick one persona you want to speak to in your content piece and then write for them. So the next question you’d ask yourself is…
Which Country Has the Largest Spanish-speaking User Base?
Spot #3…
Pro:
45 million inhabitants
Con:
Spoken Spanish is difficult to understand to other Spanish speakers
Spot #2….
Pro:
50 million inhabitants
Con:
No cons, really the country’s awesome.
Spot #1
With no doubt in your mind…
Pro:
120 million inhabitants
98 million internet users
Spoken dialect easy to understand to other Spanish speakers
But wait, there’s more!
Extra spot!
340 million inhabitants / 42 million NATIVE Spanish speakers.
- Mexican Spanish
- Caribbean Spanish
- Central American Spanish
Yes, you have guessed it, it’s USA. Image didn’t make the cut, but you should consider transcreating your content to one of the big cultural communities in the states as well. Bonus question, which is the area of US with largest Spanish-speaking community?
It’s one of these three…
Those were the key aspects of international vs Multilingual SEO and a little bit of target market analysis specific to LATAM and Spanish-speaking audiences.
Hasta la próxima!