7 international SEO positioning mistakes
Posted: Sun Dec 22, 2024 10:12 am
Having a broad web presence that is multilingual and/or multi-country to expand your business and reach an international audience requires a deep understanding of your target markets, as well as knowledge of international SEO so that your website architecture reflects the desired segmentation, as well as technical configuration, content development, optimization and promotional efforts.
Lack of experience with the above elements means that it is not uncommon to see international SEO positioning processes affected by a wide variety of problems, many of which can lead to a poor use philippines phone code r experience and international SEO processes that end up failing to achieve the expected results.
That's why having a solid knowledge of technical SEO is a must when working with international campaigns.
Below are some common issues that cause errors in international SEO processes (and how they can be avoided or solved):
1.- Do not use different URLs for each of the international versions of your website
It is essential that each of the pages in different languages or countries be displayed with their own, accessible URL, so that they can be crawled, indexed and positioned by Google .
This option is better than adaptive local crawling, which tries to identify the language and/or country from which the user is connecting in order to show a version of the content with the same URL.
As Google mentions in their own official documentation : “Google cannot crawl, index, or rank all of your content for different locations. This is because the default IPs for the Googlebot crawler are located in the United States. Additionally, the crawler sends unconfigured HTTP requests using the Accept-Language function in the request header.”
That's why you should set up an individual web structure for each of your international versions, using either ccTLDs, subdirectories or subdomains if you're targeting by country, or using subdirectories or subdomains if you're targeting by language.
All of these options have pros and cons, and the choices should be based on the best international web structure in relation to your own characteristics, objectives and constraints.
What's also important is to consistently show visitors the actual URL version of the page relevant to a language or country when they land or choose to go to that version.
Lack of experience with the above elements means that it is not uncommon to see international SEO positioning processes affected by a wide variety of problems, many of which can lead to a poor use philippines phone code r experience and international SEO processes that end up failing to achieve the expected results.
That's why having a solid knowledge of technical SEO is a must when working with international campaigns.
Below are some common issues that cause errors in international SEO processes (and how they can be avoided or solved):
1.- Do not use different URLs for each of the international versions of your website
It is essential that each of the pages in different languages or countries be displayed with their own, accessible URL, so that they can be crawled, indexed and positioned by Google .
This option is better than adaptive local crawling, which tries to identify the language and/or country from which the user is connecting in order to show a version of the content with the same URL.
As Google mentions in their own official documentation : “Google cannot crawl, index, or rank all of your content for different locations. This is because the default IPs for the Googlebot crawler are located in the United States. Additionally, the crawler sends unconfigured HTTP requests using the Accept-Language function in the request header.”
That's why you should set up an individual web structure for each of your international versions, using either ccTLDs, subdirectories or subdomains if you're targeting by country, or using subdirectories or subdomains if you're targeting by language.
All of these options have pros and cons, and the choices should be based on the best international web structure in relation to your own characteristics, objectives and constraints.
What's also important is to consistently show visitors the actual URL version of the page relevant to a language or country when they land or choose to go to that version.