Global SEO

The majority of businesses understand the importance of targeting their national and local markets online and sufficiently invest in their SEO budgets effectively to reach these potential visitors by ranking high in the SERPs. But do you have a potential global customer base that you are failing to reach?

Global SEO is the process of improving your websites global rankings making it both comprehendible and accessible to an international audience. This is obviously of the most benefit to businesses that can sell and market their products or services worldwide.

Going global with your SEO efforts may seem complicated but it carries the opportunities for a massive influx of visitors and increased traffic to your website if implemented correctly. Gaining positive results from any SEO campaign - international or not - requires a great element of strategic planning by a competent team – there is no cutting corners with SEO. Any underhand or black hat techniques will only be quashed by search engines.

With Global SEO the same rules apply. Each search engine runs with a different algorithm which means differing ranking factors. So do your research on any search engine that you wish to rank, keyword percentage, social signals and meta data all need to be taken into consideration. As with most algorithms, guidelines and recommendations change over time so you will need to adapt your strategy accordingly.

The first course of action for a successful Global SEO campaign is to review your existing organic visibility internationally, existing traffic and conversion rates. The results of which countries have enough relevant competitive keywords and search volume to compensate your potential SEO campaign efforts should be the ones to target and prioritise first.

Only 375 million people speak English as their first language in the world – without a broader online mindset you are excluding over 6 billion more people from your company voice online. Countries such as China, Russia and South Korea all prefer to use different search engines. Although Google receives over 100 billion search queries each month, China has Baidu with 500 million active users monthly, giving it 79% of the search engine market share in China. It is also the 5th most popular website globally. Russia uses Yandex which boasts 53.3 million users and Korea users Naver with its number of users reported recently to be 600 million. In Japan however Yahoo has 40% of the market share for search engine usage. So being “Google friendly” is not always enough when it comes to global search.

Understanding your target markets seasonal trends and cultural nuances is essential so that websites can be optimised for differing regions and languages.

• Essentially Global SEO has similar objectives to SEO in general.
• Increasing sales of products/services and increasing your global customer base.
• Expanding brand awareness and online visibility on multiple platforms globally.
• Encouraging a positive connection with international visitors to your website and your chosen target audience worldwide.

So what are you waiting for the world is out there waiting for your business. Start acting Global!