Factors that impact international SEO - Adwords Tutorial

- [Instructor] International SEO is about promoting and optimizing your content in order to make the site visible to a target market or audience across multiple countries and or languages. Depending on your business objectives, it could be that your site just needs to provide specific content to specific language populations. Think of a U.S. company that only serves the U.S. but still recognizes the need to cater to a Spanish speaking population. Or a Canadian organization that needs to attract both English and French speakers. Or maybe you're a multinational corporation with locations in multiple regions all around the world. And you need to not only have content available in local languages, but maybe even entire websites dedicated to these countries. Not only would you need a French candidate internationalization, you would also need a French version for France. And maybe business conditions dictate what you can or can't sell in each country. Or if you're a news publisher, you may have a completely different set of content, country by country. As you begin to develop your international SEO plan, you'll need to make sure it reflects your business needs and think carefully about whether you're marketing to specific languages, regions, or a combination of both. If the goal of your business is simply to provide the same content in multiple languages, then you'll be focusing on optimizing your site's translated content in order to be found by search engines. A multilingual site simply offers users a choice of more than one language. Search engines have come a long way with respect to language detection. And these days, you can assume they'll be able to easily pick up on the languages you have your content translated into. But no matter how smart they might be, you're still going to want to take advantage of some of the techniques to send strong signals and indicators for the language you're using on a page of content. Including the target language in a URL structure, such as in a subdomain or a subfolder is one tactic that tends to work very well for this. If you were a search engine crawling through these pages, the use of either a subfolder or subdomain with internationally recognized language codes would send you a strong language signal and help you to index this content appropriately. For multinationals and large enterprises however, we'll have to be able to accommodate more than just a translation of the same content into different languages. Often there'll be different offices operating in different countries with different business environments. And your optimization efforts will be spent making sure visitors can discover and consume that regionalized content in their local flavor of language. The Spanish spoken in Spain for example, is very different from that of Mexico. And that's a very different Spanish from what's spoken in Argentina. You can see how all these combinations can become pretty complex. But a simple example for North America would be a website targeting the Canadian and U.S. markets. Even though both are primarily English speaking countries, there're differences and nuances in the languages that you need to consider and address. And when you do, you'll find that citizens in the respective countries will not only appreciate the content for its relevance and readability, but also find it easier to discover your site in the search engines. And of course there are large markets of French speakers in Canada and Spanish speakers in the U.S. that will need to be accommodated as well. We also need to consider different search engines around the world. Our North American example is likely pretty Google or Bing centric. But globally, there are other search engines you need to be thinking about. In China, there's Baidu. Russia and Eastern European countries use the Yandex, and Naver is a popular platform across South Korea. You'll want to research your markets to understand the relevant search engines and adapt your strategies accordingly, making sure to sign up for any publisher or webmaster type tools that are offered. At this point, you're hopefully realizing that there's not a single right answer to the way you'll handle which search engines, languages, and regions you'll target. But instead, this will largely be driven by your business model. Whether your site's focus is multilingual, multi-regional or both, you'll need to pay close attention to how it's structured and how search engines are able to discover and understand your content so that they can deliver it to the target markets when they're searching.