Publisher growth tactics for election season | WEBINAR
Publisher growth tactics for election season | WEBINAR
After going through this module, the reader will acquire an in-depth understanding of what international SEO is, what multilingual and multiregional SEO are and what are their benefits, and how to go about optimizing a website when targeting audiences across borders, or in different languages.
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International SEO is optimizing content so that it begins to rank in web searches outside of the country it was published in, or in languages other than the one it was originally written in.
There are two components to international SEO:
If you’re trying to optimize your English language content to get more traffic from the US, the UK, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, you’re engaging in multiregional SEO.
If you’re catering to an audience in the southern United States with content in both English and Spanish, it is multilingual SEO.
If you’ve created both English and Spanish versions of your content, and are targeting English-speaking audiences in the US and the UK, Spanish-speaking audiences in Mexico, Spain and Argentina, and bilingual audiences in the Philippines, you’re engaging in multiregional multilingual SEO.
Since over 60% of all websites on the internet are in English, most publishers creating English language content often have their content accessed by English users across regions.
For instance, a user searching for the keyword “Bitcoin” may see a large number of results from the US, irrespective of the location they are in.
We can see that American portals such as Coindesk and Bloomberg appear in search results along with local content. However, this does not mean that these portals are necessarily multi-regional. Google defines multi-regional websites as those which explicitly target specific geographies.
A good example of targeted multi-regional SEO is the popular American business magazine Entrepreneur.com.
When we visit the magazine’s homepage, we see the American version, with the domain in the address bar reading www.entreprenur.com
However, the magazine is conscious of the fact that a large segment of its readership comes from outside America, even though their language of choice is English. For this reason, it prominently displays a notice on its homepage asking readers if they would like to read their local version of the magazine instead, carrying stories from their geography, but in English,
Clicking on the Go here hyperlink of the page takes a reader to their local version of the magazine, with the domain name too changing to a local address. In this case, we end on up Entrepreneur.com’s Asia Pacific version. The domain in the address bar now reads www.entrepreneur.com/en-au signifying that this is English language content, but for an audience located in Australia or nearby geographies.
Multilingual SEO is more than just translating the content on a page from one language to another. To explicitly target audience in a different language, it is important to deploy tactics such as:
Each of these will be discussed in detail in this module.
Publishers may want to use multilingual SEO when they want to expand their reach to a target audience that speaks a different language than the one their content is in.
Multilingual SEO may be needed within a single geography or may have to be combined with multiregional SEO.
For instance, Canada has two official languages — English and French. Most businesses operating in Canada need to have content in both, especially if they are located in a Francophone region of Canada such as Quebec.
Similarly, Switzerland has four national languages — German, French, Italian and Romansh. To maximize their organic traffic in Switzerland, businesses may need to create content in all four.
In both these cases, multilingual SEO is needed even though the target audience is located within the same country.
If on the other hand, a UK-based publisher wants to expand their reach into Norway, they may need to create content in Norwegian for an audience that is located in Norway. In this case, multilingual SEO is used in conjunction with multiregional SEO.
Reach a Wider Audience — While 60% of all websites on the internet may be in English, only around 25% of all internet users use the web in English. Which means three-fourths of internet users are searching for queries on the internet in languages other than English. This represents a huge business opportunity for publishers willing to engage in multilingual SEO to scale their reach.
Localization — Content localization has long been acknowledged as the key to unlocking growth in new markets. Content behemoths such as Netflix have successfully used content localization to establish their brands globally. Smaller digital publishers can similarly find new markets for their content by creating content in local languages by deploying multilingual SEO.
Improve Overall SEO — How users engage with a website matters to Google. If Google notices the Spanish language version of a particular site generating healthy user engagement, the trust this generates will carry over to your website as a whole, irrespective of the language. For this to happen, you will, of course, need to make it clear to Google that the different language pages are different versions of the same site, which is where multilingual SEO comes in.
The most obvious difference between international and local SEO is one of scale. International SEO requires efforts at a much larger scale, which in turn necessitates greater inputs, and when successful results in far greater revenues for publishers.
The differences between international and local SEO can be summarized as the three Cs of SEO. These are:
Cost — International SEO means reaching a far larger audience than local SEO. This not only means creating content at a far greater scale, but also ensuring that other elements of SEO such as core web vitals (CWVs) are primed to handle greater traffic and reach. All of this entails higher costs.
Content — The content strategy for international SEO differs from that for local SEO. With international SEO, publishers may need to cater to audiences speaking different languages, and having different cultural preferences. Content would need to be localized, customized and personalized for specific geographies..
Competition — A wider reach comes with greater competition. With international SEO, publishers may face much higher competition for keywords, niches and audiences than with local SEO.
Publishers typically encounter the following challenges when trying to implement international SEO:
Locale-adaptive pages capable of showing content adapted to a different language or geography without a change in the URL. This is usually done using the Accept-Language HTTP header, or by detecting the IP address of the user. However, this can create problems with indexing, as Google’s crawler bots are mostly located in the US, and may have trouble identifying and indexing the adapted version of the page if it does not have a different URL.
International SEO makes sense for a publisher only when they have saturated their existing market. To this end, it is important for publishers to establish metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure their success in their home market before thinking of expanding. However, smaller publishers may not be aware of how to put such KPIs in place, and sometimes be led into making the leap into international SEO without fully exploring the potential of their home geography. Thus not knowing when to expand into international SEO is a major pain point, especially for small publishers. Conducting market research and using tools such as Market Finder can help provide business context to your editorial efforts.
Consumers in different parts of the world have different preferences. For instance, tea is an important beverage in countries such as the UK, Ireland, Turkey and India, but is not consumed in significant quantities in the United States. On the other hand, Americans consume a lot of coffee while Britons, Turks and Indians do not. If you are a publisher that publishes content related to food and beverages, this is important information, and perhaps, even new information that you may not have been aware of.
Similarly conducting keyword research in new languages can be a challenge. Missing diacritical marks and other markers of emphasis in keyword spellings can result in differing keyword insights.
For instance searching on ahrefs for Soupe à l’oignon (French onion soup) with and without the diacritics paints two very different pictures of its search volumes.
Languages rarely get translated word-for-word, and brand messages can easily get lost in translation. The annals of marketing history are rife with brands that suffered when expanding to newer geographies because either their brand name, or their campaign slogans did not translate well into the new language. The most well known examples are those of Nokia Lumia, Mitsubishi Pajero and Microsoft Zune, all of which unintentionally translated into cuss words and vulgar slangs in certain geographies such as Quebec and South America which they tried to enter into.
The key to successfully implementing international SEO is making it clear to search engines and users that your site is targeting users from a specific geography, or speaking a specific language. This can be done in the ways mentioned below.
Optimizing your URL structure or website domain targeting lets search engines and users know which country your content is targeted at.
Typically, there are two most popular ways of using TLDs for international SEO. These are:
For instance, Huffpost is an American progressive news website with local and international edditions. Huffpost has different URLs for tha variety of markets, allowing search engines to pull up the most relevant content for the specified geography as shown in the screenshot below.
The website has been able to achieve this country-specific targeting by making use of top-level domains (TLDs) and country level domains (ccTLDs).
Websites targeting specific geographies can use URL structures that are variations of the above two for even more specific SEO results. These include using subdomains and subdirectories. This further creates the following three possibilities:
We’ve covered the different ways in which publishers can organize different language pages using URLs such as the use of subdomains or subdirectories. The domain strategy eventually deployed should also take into consideration the pros and cons of each, and then measured against a publisher’s specific requirements such as cost, hosting space, etc. The table below summarizes each strategy for easy reference.
| Approach | Example | Advantages | Disadvantages |
| ccTLD | mysite.mx |
|
|
| Subdomain | mx.mysite.com |
|
|
| Subdirectory | mysite.com/mx/ |
|
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| URL Parameters | mysite.mx?lang=es |
|
|
Subdirectories can be considered as the most efficient and cost-effective method of scaling your traffic and audience development in specific locations. Subdirectories are also relatively easy to set up compared to ccTLD and subdomains, and inexpensive to maintain as they do not require a separate host.
Another advantage of using subdirectories is that since Google treats them as part of the same website, they benefit from the domain authority of the root domain. Subdomains on the other hand are treated by search engines as two separate websites.
On the other hand, since subdirectories use the same host, they can end up using more of the host’s resources, and you will need to put in more measures to provide stronger country targeting signals, since Google Search Console has depreciated the International Targeting Report .
It is important to note that as long as you have content in different languages, it is important to have dedicated URLs for the content in each language. Whether you choose to implement these URLs using subdirectories, subdomains or URL parameters is best decided by analyzing priorities and preferences.
Hreflang is an HTML tag that tells Google which language your website is in and the specific Google Country search engine to serve it for, especially if there exist multiple versions of your website in different languages. Here’s how it is typically implemented:
link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com” hreflang=”en-us” />
What this code tells a search engine is that the page being crawled is an alternate version of another page, but in language X instead of language Y.
For instance, BBC News Mundo is the Spanish language version of BBC.
When we right click on the page and select View Page Source, we can see the hreflang attribute being used.
If the local version of your site is hosted on a server in the location it is geotargeting, it will have a local IP address. This in turn lets Google know that your content is local, thus reinforcing it to show up in local search results.
The world wide web is built on a system of interlinked content, which is why links are often called the currency of the internet. If your content links to other local pages in your geography, and if you in turn receive backlinks from local resources, this sends a strong signal that your content is considered trustworthy and valuable by other pages within that location. This in turn allows it to show up in searches within that geography. The same applies to multilingual SEO.
The content-language tag goes in the <head> section of a page’s HTML code and describes the language the page is in. It is usually rendered as:
<meta http-equiv=”content-language” content=”my language”>
So, if a page from Mexico is in Spanish, this is what the content-language tag would look like:
<meta http-equiv=”content-language” content=”es-mx”>
The language and the country are denoted using the globally accepted two-letter ISO 639 and ISO 3166 codes respectively.
This is primarily used for Bing, Baidu and Yandex
When translating the content on a page, it is also important to translate the metadata. While doing this, publishers may need to research what is a good translation for their primary and secondary keywords. Instead of simply using Google translate, use ahrefs and filter by country to arrive at an idea of what a good translation of your keywords would be.
If your website is available in different language versions, it is good practice to make all versions easily accessible from site wide elements such as header menu, a footer or a sidebar. This is helpful for both users and for web crawlers.
Menu
Footer
Besides the essentials of international SEO covered in the preceding section, publishers would also benefit by paying attention to the techniques listed below.
In order to rank well, it is important to create content at scale. When doing multilingual SEO, it then becomes important to translate content at scale. If you plan to cover multiple languages, you would need the ability to translate accurately into several languages.
A good and cost effective way to achieve this is to use AI and ML-powered translating tools such DeepL and Linguise. These tools allow you translate entire websites into over 80 languages quickly and accurately.
As mentioned in the previous section, having a subfolder approach towards your international targeting can result in an increasing load to your sites server. A Content Delivery Network (CDN) can essentially help load your sites file and content based on the location (or nearest server) which your sites user traffic is originating from.
It is an additional budget consideration and cost, however, the benefits of improving the sites page experience, caching and handling of concurrent traffic can outweigh any potential cons.
See Content Delivery Network (CDN): What It Is & How It Works to learn more about the basics.
Publishers also need to be careful about avoiding these common pitfalls that can hinder effective international SEO implementation:
If you’re creating pages for different regions in the same language, make sure to keep your content unique too. Simply copy-pasting content from one geography onto a page from another geography in the same language could lead to Google classifying the content as duplicate.
For instance, if you have an American version of your page in English, and you now want to expand to Australia. Simply getting a .au ccTLD/subdomain or an /au/ subdirectory and copying the English language content from the American website/page onto the Australian website/page will likely be classified by Google as duplicate content. This is because Google does not see this as translated content.
Variations in American, British and Australian spellings of words also do not count as translation.
If, however, a page is being translated from one language to another, even if verbatim, Google will view it as translated content and not penalize it.
Translated quality will be judged by Google using the same quality standards it applies to content in the original language. Which means the bar of quality and originality is still set high. Eventually, Google only wants to show good quality content that meets its users requirements, irrespective of the language involved. Publishers need to stay clear of low-quality translated content to avoid being rated low by Google’s search quality raters as well.
While it is important to translate the content on the page, along with the meta descriptions, publishers need to take care not to translate the author name as well. This is a common pitfall especially when using automated tools to translate page content. Author name is an important component of SEO that helps establish experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust in the website’s content. Author bios however, should be translated.
Refinery29 is a multiregional, multilingual website creating news and entertainment content for young women in the age group of 16-35. The website has separate pages for audiences in the US, UK, Australia, France and Germany.
Here’s how it implements its URL strategy for international targeting for each region and language.
As can be seen, Refinery29 uses the subdirectory method to specify language and location along with its .com gTLD. Using subdirectories is simple, convenient and allows SEO benefits to be shared among all the URLs as Google does not treat them as separate websites. Using subdirectories is what we at SODP recommend too, unless you have very specific requirements that necessitate the use of ccTLDs or subdomains.
Further, the English language content for its English-speaking geographies is completely unique, and has not been reused.
When we right-click on the page while using Chrome and select View Page Source, we can see that the website has used the hreflang attribute to list all the alternate versions of the page in each language.
Finally, the site also provides easy navigability between the different international versions from the top menu itself.
The Independent is a British newspaper that has been steadily expanding into international markets over the last few years to expand its reach and increase its revenue. As part of its expansion into the US, The Independent has launched a Spanish language version which targets the large Spanish speaking population in the United States.
The Independent has been able to start this new vertical with a relatively small investment in resources. By its own admission, the paper has a staff of only 25 full-time employees in the US including reporters and the sales team. This has been possible by the use of some smart international SEO tactics.
For one, The Independent hosts its US edition on a subdirectory of its UK domain, thereby cutting costs and helping the US version piggyback on the high domain authority of the UK version.
Next, when creating the Spanish content for the US market, The Independent uses a high quality automatic translator built into its CMS which translates American news content from English to Spanish. This means it does not have to create Spanish content from scratch. It can simply translate the content being generated by its already running American news unit.
A frame-by-frame comparison of news stories featured on the US English and Spanish language sites demonstrates how The Independent achieves content reusability and translation at scale.
English Version
Spanish Version
English Version
Spanish Version
As you can see from the Ahrefs chart below,, in the part, particularly in the past two years this has resulted in a significant shift in the distribution of the traffic by country towards being more international.
In addition, it has also grown from four and a half million organic users per month to almost 11, which is almost a three a two and a half fold increase in comparison to the UK audience where it is just gone up by 50% growth.
UK Traffic Trajectory
US Traffic Trajectory
In terms of The Independent en Espanol, they literally were non-existent in 2021. And using this approach they were able to pick up to two and a half million users as of May, 2022.
Of course, being a long-established and reputed news publisher, The Independent makes sure that its automated English to Spanish translations are vetted by an expert Spanish editor to check for idiomatic phrases, cultural contexts and other minutiae of translation.
But they are gradually seeing decline in traffic to more than half which suggests that as much as it, it helped them in the shorter term to grow their audience, it’s time for them to look at investing more into developing more unique stories and original content for the publication.
This module has walked readers through the importance of international SEO and why publishers should or should not engage in it.
International SEO is a great way of expanding reach, but comes at increased costs to revenue and resources.
The two core aspects of international SEO are multilingual and multiregional SEO which can often overlap. Handling international SEO involves optimizing for content, by using good quality translation and at scale, or by creating new content targeted at specific audiences. It also has technical aspects to it, wherein publishers need to be mindful of using the right domain strategy and using HTML tags such as hreflang.
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