International and Multi-lingual SEO

I have worked on sites for multi-national clients targeting different regions and languages. The first question that always arises is “what is going to be the best way to localise my site?”

Everyone – this is a loaded question!

My answer is: get a ccTLD (country code top level domain such as .au) and/or have the site hosted in the country that it is targeting. Simple, right?

OK – this blog post is now complete…….

Oh, but wait, I did say it was a loaded question and it truly is because it is rarely that simple. This post hopes to cover off a fair few situations.

There are a number of ways, or indicators, that tell search engines what your target region is. The top two are:

1. Domain choice

2. Location of host

There are a number of ways to present regionalised sites to users aside from the domain/hosting scenario.

The key is to make the best choice for your business and do all the right things where you can, so the engines know what your intent is. What if the site is broken into sub-domains or is using folders to split out regionalised content and languages?

3. Language

I find that non-English speaking sites have a leg up due to the character encoding. If the site is written in German, then the target is Germany. Alas, that doesn’t always work either. If your site is written in French is that targeting France or French-Canadians?

4. Local Business Listings

5. Regionalised footer

Next would be local information. Use accounts in Google and optimise the listings in Google’s Business Centre and fill out as much information as you can, from addresses to opening times, and select the appropriate keyword categories.

Ensure you put local addresses and contact details on the pages of the site. The footer is usually ideal as this appears on every page of the site.

6. Inbound links

Another great indicator for the engines is inbound links, primarily links from sites in the same region. If a good number of Australian sites are pointing to yours, the engines make assumptions about your target region. This can work if you don’t have a ccTLD or hosting in the target country as an alternative strategy, but we all know how hard link building can be.

7. Google Webmaster

Google Webmaster Tools has the ability to set the location of site sections to help them understand the site’s geographic target. I wouldn’t wholly rely on this because it’s fallible and pretty reliant on your site’s architecture. That, and not all countries have an 80% Google market share, so addressing it with Google only will leave other engines to falter.

Now to tackle sub-domains and folders; there are pros and cons to this as well as the choice of a ccTLD.

Scenario 1

International site with ccTLDs hosted in Finland (or in target country)

Each site will factor in local search due to the choice of ccTLD. This is good for local search but is a management nightmare. Who’s responsible for content, global and locally? Is there duplication of said content and will this be a problem?

Pro – Localisation is much easier

Con – Each site has its own SEO equity and will have to build on this individually

Scenario 2

Global site with sub-directories, no ccTLDs and hosted in the US

This is a large site with a folder structure such as /australia or /au or something similar. There are still the same issues around content management. What about the affect of duplication of content on the same site? A product page for /au, /us, /uk etc…..

How are the engines to know what region this content belongs to?

Pro – This is a large, fresh site with lots of content. Site equity belongs to the one domain so off-site strategies will affect all regions

Con – Localisation can be difficult

Scenario 3

Global site with sub-domains, no ccTLDs and hosted in Finland

This is not much different than using sub-directories. While sub-domains will be seen as related to the parent site, they are still individual sites.

Pro – May be easier to handle language and localisation by segregation uk.mydomain.com, au.mydomain.com

Con – Each site has its own SEO equity and will have to build on this individually

So, what else can you do to help the engines along, particularly with Scenario #2 and #3?

8. Use UTF-8 Character Encoding

9. Ensure all domain redirects are handled appropriately. For instance:

www.mydomain.com.au–> 301 –> www.mydomain.com/australia/

10. Use the HTML or XHTML lang tag to specify the pages’ language en-au, en-us, en-gb

11. The use of keywords in the URL /en-au/ may be less understood than /australia/

There is really no perfect fit and a multi-domain strategy should be well thought out for any international SEO Campaign.

Tags: domains, international seo, languages, local search, SEO