International SEO deals with offering optimised content for multiple languages or multiple locations worldwide.

It focuses on optimising content for different languages for the search engines. With a proper multilingual SEO strategy, people in different countries will find your website for their market in their native language. If you want to target countries with similar languages or countries where multiple languages are used, this could pose some challenges; which is where we can help you, through strategy guidance.   

Obviously, you want people who search in German to be directed to the German site. Maybe you even want to have a specific site for German speakers in Switzerland. It would be even better to have a French alternative for speakers of French in Switzerland as well, of course. Let’s assume for now that you don’t have the required resources for that, though. In that case, it’s probably best to send users from Switzerland who speak French to the English site. On top of that, you need to make sure that you send all other users to your English site, as they are more likely to speak English than German. In a scenario like this, you need to set up and implement a multilingual, international SEO strategy. 

In a standard SEO strategy, you optimise your content for one language: the language your website is written in. Sometimes, however, you want to target audiences in multiple countries and regions. These audiences are probably similar, but there are always differences. This presents you with an opportunity and you can use international SEO to reap the benefits. One of these differences is the language they speak. When you make your site available in several languages and target specific regions, you expand your potential audience and improve your chances of ranking for a specific region and in several languages.  

Multilingual SEO can be hard. A lot can go wrong, and a bad multilingual implementation can hurt your rankings. One of the biggest risks of multilingual SEO is duplicate content. If you present the same content on your website on multiple pages, Google won’t know which content to show in the search engines. Again, the team at Dexterous Designs can help you with this!  

For more information on international SEO, please get in touch with us – we’d love to hear from you!