International SEO is an important piece of any global marketing strategy. In a recent webinar, international marketing experts showed how to optimize for new markets.

International SEO has long been a hot topic for enterprise-level brands and global companies. But, the increased ease of connecting with people around the world means these tactics are becoming vital for a growing number of businesses.

International search experts Clayton Warwick and Gary Reilly of Wordbank and Jeramie Heflin of Safeguard Global recently presented a webinar that highlighted some of the most common pitfalls, and their solutions, when it comes to optimizing for searchers who live in different countries or speak different languages.

Here are three important tactics from the panel about how marketers can prevent international SEO mistakes.

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Put together a persona-based international SEO strategy

“As marketers, the most important thing we can do is to understand who our customers are and when and how they buy,” said Heflin. “Going into new international markets, you’ll most likely develop targeted personas.”

“It’s okay if those personas are different than they are in your core markets; in fact, they probably will be,” she added.

Most of these new customers are not ready to purchase from the get-go, so marketers need to guide them through relevant content and experiences before pushing for conversions. To help with this process, Heflin recommends leveraging customer personas when reaching out to international markets. This can help marketers better understand their new audience’s needs.

However, to ensure these personas accurately reflect audiences, marketers need to pay attention to international search data to quantify the market opportunity for their brands.

8 International SEO Mistakes to Avoid

The lots of Digital Marketer are doing these 8 International SEO Mistakes while doing  SEO – 

1. Using Wrong Keywords

Before creating your first content for the website you must do the keyword research according to the niche. There are lots of FREE keyword research tools in the market like SemRush, Google Keyword Planner, Ahref, and many others.

This task will significantly increase your conversions.

2. Not Working on Website UX

If the website is having poor UX, it can be the biggest mistake in any International SEO Strategy. Most of the people are working to enhance the website speed but not taking care of the website UX part. You must have to create a balance between over-optimization and UX.

3. Disregarding Local SEO

If you are doing the SEO for your international client then you can also gain the high profit and exposure from the Local SEO. You no need to ignore this part. Optimize the Google My Business profile as the people’s want to know about your brands, products and services in their city.

4. Neglecting Unique Locations

If you are trying to compete in the international market then you need to segment the targeted locations. The most important thing is to input the local language and create your content accordingly. Cover the most relevant and trending topics to increase the engagement on your web pages and send a positive review to Google. As you know that the Future Of SEO is changing very fast according to the new search engine updates.

5. Translating Content Directly

Translating content directly is a biggest mistake as every language has its unique expressions and traits. So, if you are thinking that you can do this with google translator then translating content directly can be easy but it can spell disaster for your brand value.

Must have a solid content writer in your team who can understand the content nuances of English as well as can write content in their own language.

6. Single ccTLD for All Countries

If you are a large brand and working internationally, you need to have separate websites for each country. So, you will need to have sites such as .uk(for United Kingdom), .de(for Germany), .hk(for Hong Kong), and .au(for Australia).

If you have multiple ccTLDs, you can target the local audiences and search engines. Also, Google will recognize your website that this is intended for that particular country and will give you a boost in ranking and traffic accordingly. But do not forget to use the local language.

7. Introducing Wrong Hreflang Attribute

The hreflang attribute is one of the best tactics you will need to cover. Tell search engines that you implemented these lang tags for these pages on which you are using the international or local language so that search engines that your site includes international web versions.

By using this thing, Search Engines can understand users’ language preferences and can connect specific pages with specific searches as per local search. 

8. Implementing the Same URL for Different Versions

Google and other search engines can find resources on the web with URLs. Each URL has several elements such as name, TLD, resource name, and the protocol. After combining these elements, we get a full url of the page.

If we talk about the International SEO Strategy, you need to make sure that your URLs are modified with the different regions and languages. That’s the reason that Google or other search engines

Avoiding International SEO Mistakes

We have already mentioned the top 8 International SEO Mistakes that will boost your web pages.