Are you looking for a universal SEO strategy for your website?
If you want to reach out to the whole world with your website, you better start optimizing your website for that very own thing. International reach requires many different things and it is time for you to get to work.
Let’s see what you should do in a short series of steps.
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Know the market for Universal SEO
You probably know your market already and it’s probably defined by non-SEO factors. It is really important to understand what are the current markets that might present a strong potential for your business. In order to do that, your business:
- May decide to serve a specific chosen market in the future.
- Might be lacking presence in a given market.
- Might be lacking presence in an untapped market.
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Understand the technical requirements
If you want to serve different markets, you need to prepare different landing pages that will cater for the specific needs of every market, you can always rely on language to do the segmentation. You can go as focused as having a page for every country. Everything will depend on your needs.
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Define the structure of your URL
If you are in different countries, it is good to get different URLs for your local presence. Get .uk for the United Kingdom, .fr for France and so. But also when you use different domains, it also has an impact on SEO and PageRank as the content will be divided among different domains.
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Do a keyword research
Once you have everything set, it is time to start looking for the keywords present in all of the countries where you have a presence to see what’s the best course of action you can have in order to start generating content.
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Localize copy in your universal SEO strategy
It is important to understand that not all places are the same, so once you have a general copy that works it is time to start localizing it for all of the different countries you are in. If you don’t pay attention to this part of the process, local readers will notice it and will probably ignore you as you promise a local experience but fail to deliver.
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Google should serve the correct version
It is important that you implement the proper flags for Google to deliver the correct version for the country. There’s nothing more embarrassing than showing the wrong version of the page.
Conclusion
The first thing you need to do is use a URL structure that works best for your business. Then spend all the time needed for localizing. Do your keyword research and your content optimization. Optimize for speed, use local CDN to improve this aspect, and never forget, create backlinks for every market.
It is long and hard work… but if it’s done well, it will pay dividends.
