With the Web being such a dynamic environment for businesses and users globally, one of the factors that has been toughest for many brand names (particular big names) to get their heads around is the targeting beyond their own national borders.
This means making sure their message is distributed accurately across all markets and that users abroad don’t just see the “English Site”. That site may even have content in other languages but it doesn’t fare well in Google – in fact, it often requires users to fish it out themselves when on the site.
At the same time, many companies may want to serve different content to different locations, show different prices to different users (even if the language is the same) and otherwise personalise their digital presence for each international market. But, what’s the right way of doing this?
From an SEO perspective, Google’s recent algorithm would lead one to recommend using a region by region targeting strategy, such as establishing a CCTLD (Country code top-level domain) for each region – e.g. company.de, company.ie, company.jp. This increases the ability to target each market and local link relevance. For example, this approach serves well for brands like Amazon and Trip Advisor.
Many other (usually older) brands, however, still pile everything onto one large .com domain. However, this has been proven to show less favourable results when going outside the US – especially into non-English language markets. As its overall algorithm developed, Google tried many times to look at different ways of serving users in each country an improved level of relevance, and in recent years factors such as hosting location, domain extension and even ‘where the sites linking to your site are from’ have become more important.
But a recent announcement on Google’s webmaster central blog looks at combining the canonical tag element (that diffuses any potential page duplication) with the link alternate tag that attempts to tell users the page is pretty much the same, but in country A you get page A, if in country B, you get B, and so on.
This would work well if your Portuguese site is similar to your Brazilian regional site, for example, but falls down if you want to serve those two countries different content in a way that is search-friendly instead of dynamically serving the content to each user off the same URL.
This also helps push a level of international best practice, as recent Google updates (Panda for instance) devalued a lot of sites that had “auto-translated” – and thus low quality – content.
It’s still inconclusive how this will work for international SEO moving forwards and CCTLDs are still the proven way at present – but businesses looking to create or develop an international presence should take a long, hard look at the best way to make their sites search-friendly in those other markets.
By Niall Madden
