International SEO
By Duncan Morris

International SEO
• When should you worry about Internationalisation
• The factors used by the search engines
• Pros and Cons of various site architectures for geo-location
• The answer

Why should you care
• Increase in traffic
• Target new markets
• Decrease in bounce rate
• Improved conversion rate
• More business
• More money
• Need I go on?

Why should you care – Not ranking
• Generic tlds (.com, .org, .net etc) can cause issue for local search
engines.
oOften seen as ranking well in the US but not in your local index.
• If you only rank in your local index but want listing everywhere
(informational product)

Geo-location
• Redirecting users based on their IP address can be a good idea.
• Search engines tend to browse with an American IP address
• Information architecture is king.
oYou must have a way for the search engines to browse to every
page, in every language.

Why should you care - Language
“To reach 90% of the world’s 1.2 billion Internet users, companies must
support 20 or more languages” Quova via blogstorm.co.uk

Separate Languages

Factors to “flick the switch”
• ccTLD (.co.uk)
• Hosting Location
• Google Local
• Physical address on page
• Inbound link profile
• Webmaster Central

A Quick note about Webmaster Central
• For some reason I’ve yet to fully understand, Yahoo! and MSN don’t
listen to the Google Webmaster central setting.

Country != Language
• If you want to reach French speakers don’t forget the Canadians.
• If you geo-target your site to be French you will most likely miss out on
French Canadian traffic.

Information Architecture is King
Beckitten - http://www.flickr.com/photos/suteki/462066881/

One Powerful domain
• www.ikea.com
owww.ikea.com/en
owww.ikea.com/fr
• A better solution (?)
owww.ikea.com/us/en
owww.ikea.com/uk/en
owww.ikea.com/ca/en
owww.ikea.com/ca/fr
• This would allow you (force you) to write content targeting the relevant
country, not just the relevant language

Pros and Cons of One powerful domain
All your links go to one domain
• Lower CTR / conversion rate vs ccTLD
• What should you put on the homepage?
• American pages often outrank British pages

Sub-domains
• Wikipedia.com (who only care about targeting languages)
oen.wikipedia.com
ofr.wikipedia.com
ode.wikipedia.co
• If you care about targeting individual countries, the following is better.
ouk.example.com/en
ous.example.com/en
oca.example.com/en
oca.example.com/fr

Sub-domains – The worst of both worlds?
All links to one domain
Could host subdomains in their local country
Links are dampened across subdomains
What do you put on the homepage / www
Lower CTR / conversion rate

Local ccTLD’s
• amazon.com / amazon.co.uk / amazon.fr
oIn this setup you still have to think about language. There are
Canadians who want a website to be in French.

Pros and Cons of ccTLD’s
Geo-targeting is *much* easier
Improved CTR / conversion rate (especially where the tld indicates the
language)
Link building is *much* harder
Can lead to duplicate content issues
.com often still outranks other English TLD’s

What’s the answer?
• Well... It depends!
• Make sure you own all the relevant domains, and either use them or 301
them to the relevant place.
• Local business units ?
oUse the ccTLD’s and treat as separate websites
• Business managed centrally?
oPut everything on the .com and treat as one website

If the search engines are listening...
• How about a way of claiming multiple domains
• What about using sitemaps to pass the language / location of a page
• Tell us if you ignore duplicate content if the pages are geo-targeted
differently (rumours this is the case)
• Make more use of on page factors within a domain (different addresses
on different pages)

Duncan Morris - Distilled
www.distilled.co.uk
duncan@distilled.co.uk
Twitter: duncanmorris