Digital Marketing » Blog » Search Engine Optimisation In a time of globalisation and constant technological growth, the search for ways to reach more people globally and locally never stops. Owners of multinational business are aware of the value of digital presence to their business. It is essential to cater your content to your audience, across different markets or linguistic backgrounds. To successfully reach your target audience across different markets and show them the suitable content, an understanding of international SEO basics is required. International SEO refers to optimizing your website to help search engines understand in which countries and in what languages you want your site to appear. Before going the extra mile to do that, you need to decide whether you need a multinational and multilingual website or not. To get to that, start by looking at traffic sources to your website and overall geo-location and geo-language analysis through Google Analytics. Does it receive a considerable amount of traffic from various regions in which you wish to rank? If yes, then it’s time to develop a multinational and multilingual website. Keep in mind that international SEO demands time, maintenance of more than one website and investment. A multilingual website offers content in more than one language within a region or across the globe. For example, a website in the UAE with English, Arabic and French interfaces is a multilingual website. Multinational websites, on the other hand, indicate that a website is targeting different countries using one language or more. An example of a multinational website is one that is Arabic but targets users in Saudi Arabia and UAE. Both types can increase your reach and help you expand your business. Most websites in the Middle East are available in English and Arabic. If you offer services in a region that speaks many languages, then you may want to focus only on creating a multilingual website. Also, if a website offers the same services across different languages, then it needs to be a multilingual website. A multinational business targets users from all regions and offers them an experience customised to their requirements. A multinational website will be developed accordingly, despite the probability that they target countries that speak a common language. For instance, if you have a business based in the UK, Canada and USA, then your content will be in English. Despite the fact that they use the same language, other website specifics like cost and currency will need to be tailored to each country. An example of multinational websites is e-commerce sites that offer services in multiple markets. You can use either multilingual or multinational or a mixture of both depending on your audience. Yet, if you wish to target regions such as North Africa, the European Union and the Middle East, you can only target countries and regions. If you plan on developing an international website, then your strategy should go through these top-level stages: International sites and URL structures: There are different ways to employ if you plan to target a specific country: After identifying which URL structure is suitable for your SEO strategy and have the hreflang tags in place, you would want your users to use your multinational and multilingual website. Nevertheless, it is highly advised to not opt for location-based targeting, since it does not allow for good user experience. To ensure the optimal user experience is to show them the language version of the website according to their browser settings. Which means that an American visiting your site in the UAE won’t get hit with an Arabic interface if he or she has their browser settings set to English. It is also recommended that you include language options that are understandable in other languages. If your website has unique content to each of your target countries (images, news, prices, culture, etc.), then you want to allow users to navigate to regional websites and choose different languages. The best practice is to list down all the countries and languages on one page for users to view and choose from. Once you decide that owning a multinational and multilingual website should be part of your digital marketing strategy, you would want to select the audience countries and languages. Choose the URL structure that matches your strategy and begin developing content in different languages for the dedicated countries. It is vital to ensure proper use of hreflang tags across the website(s) so that search engines understand your target countries, languages or the combination of both. This, while also making sure that your users can easily see the various options and can navigate from one language/regional version of the website to another. Once your new website is up and running, hire a professional SEO agency in Dubai to maintain and grow your website. Then you can sit back and watch your business make an impact online!
What is International SEO?
Multilingual Websites:
Multinational Websites:
User Experience: