Lost In Translation: 3 International SEO Mistakes

More and more business are turning to international SEO in order to boost their online presence across the world. However, it’s not necessarily as easy as it first looks; there’s a lot more to do than simply creating a new localised domain, translating the content and building some new links. Is there a reason your international seo is failing or are you just about to branch out into international markets? Here are three things that you should avoid in order to give your international users a better experience.

Automatic Redirection

Google doesn’t like users to be automatically redirected to new sites, and it positively hates it when this is done sneakily. It’s understandable that you want to point users to the most relevant site for their location, but you can never be 100% sure what they really want to see. Just because a visitor is in Japan doesn’t mean to say that they might not have correctly clicked on your .co.uk site. Perhaps they are away on business.

Instead of forcing your visitors to a region-specific site, it’s better to give them an unobtrusive helping hand, and suggest where they might like to be. Ideally, a bar at the top of the page will do the job; pop-ups are not desirable. If your visitor really does want to be somewhere else, then they can find this easily, and you won’t run the risk of redirecting someone who was in the right place.

Poorly Translated Content

While having barely understandable content is obviously a big no-no, what many people fail to take into account are subtle differences between regions. If you really want to show your international users that you can serve them as well as your domestic ones, then make sure that you’ve considered them properly, and your content is tailored to them with international seo keyword research. This can include things like making sure that currency and other measurements are in the most widely used format. A customer in the Japan will have little interest in euros for instance, and they might not be as interested in your euro-specific blog posts. Always bear your users in mind; after all, they’re the ones that you’re going to be doing business with.

Complex New Sites

Unless you’ve got very deep pockets and are managing a huge multinational company, there really isn’t any need to create a complex new international site. This will simply make things unnecessarily confusing and time consuming.

Ideally, you want a very similar site for all of your users, containing the same relevant information, and region-tailored content. Ensure that none of your users, wherever they are, are missing out on anything that you’ve got to offer. It’s important to keep your branding the same across all sites too; this helps your image.

International SEO doesn’t have to be a major difficulty, but it’s certainly worth taking the time to consider who you’re marketing yourself to. You wouldn’t bombard your local users with annoying popups and redirects, and you wouldn’t supply them with irrelevant information, so don’t do this to your international users either.