9 essentials you can’t overlook in your international SEO strategy [+examples]

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To successfully take your brand international, you can’t afford to skip building an SEO strategy. If you want to grow your business on new markets, SEO opens the door to the entire world, with no borders.

The main challenge is that these markets are also home to competitors who are already well established. Despite this fierce competition, it’s not impossible to carve out your place and even overtake them!

Discover the 9 essentials you can’t overlook to run a high-performing, successful international SEO strategy.

💡 Want to go further?

We recently published a white paper presenting an exclusive methodology powered by advice from 6 SEO and Content Marketing references (Amandine Bart, Charley Bouzerau, Karim Elmlih, Nicolas Nguyen, Vincent Terrasi & Christophe Vidal) to help you develop and strengthen your international presence.

Going international, a growth driver for French companies

Before we dive in, let’s take a step back and look at where French companies stand internationally, with a few figures.

According to the Team France Export report, French companies show very strong momentum internationally. A new record was even reached, with 135,600 French exporting companies in June 2021.

135,600 French exporting companies in June 2021

66% of companies already established abroad want to consolidate their presence on their markets

79% of companies see going international as a competitiveness lever

67% of companies see going international as an innovation opportunity

87% of companies see going international as a driver of revenue growth

32% of companies believe their revenue growth will come from conquering new markets

Why bet on international SEO?

What is international SEO? Its benefits

International SEO lets you assert your presence on Google for every market you want to enter. In a nutshell, it consists of earning top positions in search results across your various target countries.

Even though it builds on the core principles of a classic SEO strategy (namely building a content strategy, maintaining your site technically and setting up a link-building strategy), international SEO has specificities you need to watch to guarantee your brand’s visibility in another country.

By taking your company international, you:

• multiply your growth prospects;
• unlock new business opportunities on new markets;
• can stand out and grow your reputation among new customers.

You improve your rankings on foreign SERPs and, as a result, increase your market share!

SEO & Content Marketing, the 2 must-have levers to grow your business

Just like in your home country, to boost your reputation and visibility and quickly reach your acquisition goals, you have two ultra-powerful levers: SEO and Content Marketing.

Content is essential to make your brand’s offers and products more appealing to consumers, while SEO is essential to ensure your visibility and capture market share.

To boost traffic to your website and your customer acquisition, this article shares 9 SEO & Content essentials you can’t overlook for your internationalization strategy.

To go further, we also share a unique approach in our white paper. It consists of analyzing the SEO content strategy of the best-performing competitor sites in your sector so you can, in turn, prioritize your production efforts on promising content.

How to succeed with your international SEO strategy? The 9 essentials you can’t overlook

1. Choose your hosting and your domain

To start on the right foot, you first need to think things through on the technical side. Especially your site’s hosting and domain name. To serve your site’s resources as close as possible to your target (and therefore reduce your pages’ load time), you’ll often need to host your site in the target country to get a local IP.

You have three main options:

Top Level Domain URL structure: domainname.fr	Subdomain URL structure: fr.domainname.com	Subdirectory URL structure: domainname.com/fr/
The Top Level Domain makes sense if your strategy differs from one country to another, if you don’t offer the same products and don’t share the same teams. However, a TLD site doesn’t inherit authority from the other versions of the site.	The subdomain is treated as a domain in its own right. It’s independent from the authority of the other domains, allowing autonomous site management.	The subdirectory is tied to the parent domain’s authority, but is very practical if the catalog is identical across the different markets.

2. Define your targeting (and your URL structure)

Defining your targeting shouldn’t be taken lightly: it’s tied to the core of your international growth strategy. The URL structure you adopt must be consistent with your market-entry strategy.

You have several options for defining your targeting:

Country Targeting (or geographic targeting)

Geographic targeting makes sense when you’re aiming at a specific territory, with a different catalog for your various markets. It pairs with the Top Level Domain (domainname.fr, domainname.uk) and lets you clarify your geographic targeting for Google and users, and be fully independent from your other markets’ domains.

However, this requires a larger infrastructure (1 site = 1 strategy per country), and you don’t benefit from the authority of your various domains.

Language Targeting (or linguistic targeting)

Language targeting is appropriate when you offer exactly the same catalog across all your markets. Subdirectories (domainname.com/fr/, domainname.com/uk/) are particularly suitable for this type of targeting, because they benefit from the authority of the whole domain.

That said, since the server’s geographic location is unique, the physical distance between the visitor and the website can increase, which will negatively impact the user experience.

When your brand expands into a country with several languages (like Canada, Switzerland or Belgium), we talk about multiregionalism. The best solution would be to opt for a subdomain (fr.domainname.ca, en.domainname.ca), so that your targeting is clear for search engines and users. Unfortunately, subdomains don’t benefit from the domain’s full authority.

💡 The Semji tip: Use a CDN

You can also turn to a Content Delivery Network (CDN) if you manage your site with a subdomain or subdirectory. This system lets your site be hosted on several servers simultaneously located in different places around the world, so it can serve your resources as close as possible to the user.

3. Set up Hreflang tags

Hreflang tags, located in your page’s <head> tag, tell search engines the page’s language and geographic area. Using these tags well is essential to rank your pages in the right language, limiting the bounce rate and avoiding duplicate content between your same-language content aimed at different countries.

You’ll therefore need to run a semantic audit to uncover the most commonly used keywords in your new market. Here, we realize the most appropriate term would be “roller banners”.

You can also anticipate the next trending keywords! Charley Bouzerau, SEO expert at Semji, gives you the keys to anticipate the next search engine trends through the use of weak signals.

5. Analyze competitor sites’ SEO content strategy

You need to determine which sites perform best on this topic, and which keywords they rank for. By high-performing site, we mean: the sites publishing the most content and capturing the most SEO traffic.

You then get a list of keywords on which to prioritize the production and optimization of your content. By organizing the data you’ve collected in a table, you directly identify the potential amount of SEO traffic to capture on each keyword, based on the traffic captured by competing pages.

This is only the first step of an in-depth analysis method for your competitors’ content strategies, detailed in our white paper.

You can also define a default language with the hreflang x-default tag for users who don’t have any of the specified languages set in their browsers.

4. Select which markets, sectors and keywords to target

You can, for example, start from the keywords you rank for on your local market. However, a simple translation is sometimes not enough: you need to do in-depth research to find the translation that exactly matches consumers’ search intent on your new market.

Let’s say you’re a site selling advertising displays: you rank for the keyword “Kakemono” on your home market (France). It’s clear that when you type your query on a UK (United Kingdom) SERP, “Kakemono” corresponds to Japanese tapestries.

6. Organize your content production into a semantic cocoon

Once your keyword list is confirmed, you can launch content production. Well, almost! To optimize your production, you can group all your keywords by topic, and adopt a semantic cocoon approach.

In a nutshell, the semantic cocoon consists of producing several pieces of content around the same topic, while creating a logical tree structure to guide users toward the pages that matter most to your business.

In our white paper, you’ll find a method to properly architect your content into a semantic cocoon, as well as advice from expert Christophe Vidal.

7. Build a content strategy and an editorial calendar suited to the targeted market

As we saw earlier, when entering new markets, you need to deploy SEO content strategies that meet the expectations of your various audiences. It’s therefore essential to build editorial calendars suited to each strategy for each market.

“You need to segment your content strategy based on the target market: your different markets don’t always have the same concerns. The audiences of the targeted markets don’t necessarily expect the same types of content.”

Karim Elmlih, Lead SEO at Qonto – International SEO: 4 steps to conquer new markets

One of the keys to succeeding with your international SEO strategy is anticipation, especially if you want to maximize your content’s visibility during key commercial moments.

To do this, you need to be aware of the seasonal topics of the different countries you’re targeting. We also suggest organizing your content production by following a roadmap made up of different sprints: strategy design, brief preparation, production, validation, publication…

💡 The Semji tip: Use an automation solution to produce the right content at the right time

Once you’ve identified your new market’s seasonal topics, you have just one mission left: anticipate and rank for strategic keywords!

Let’s say you’re an online store selling home décor products. It would be interesting to rank for the query “Mother’s Day 2022”. However, you’ll need to be careful to publish them early enough (refer to our roadmap) because this timely content becomes obsolete very quickly.

Semji’s Content Ideas module presents content ideas by surfacing the top content ranking for the targeted keyword and related terms, also including synonyms and the most frequent questions. The module also gives you an indication of the keyword’s search volume and its difficulty.

By entering the topic “Mother’s Day”, you can see that the Content Ideas module highlights several pieces of content that could be worth adding to your editorial calendar: “mother’s day gift france”, “personalized mother’s day gift”, etc.

Want to overtake your competitors on strategic queries? Ask us for a demo.

8. Calculate the ROI of your SEO content strategy

Put very simply, you need to know what you’re investing and what you’re going to earn to calculate your ROI.

Adopting an ROI-driven, data-centric approach lets you always keep your goals in mind, without straying from your original path, and justify your actions through the business value they bring back (and, why not, unlock even more budget and resources!).

Finally, calculating ROI gives you proof of your content strategy’s profitability. In the white paper, we share a method to quantify the value of your SEO traffic: it involves assessing what the price would be to acquire the same traffic via paid search using the keyword’s cost per click. You then derive the savings achieved. Download our content strategy ROI calculation template, available in our white paper.

9. Know which resources to call on, skills to develop and tools to use

Every international project is different: it all depends on your goals, your size, but also your resources. Do you have the right tools? The right skills?

Some companies are able to manage everything in-house and from their home country, by equipping themselves with solutions, growing their teams and perhaps already having international SEO specialists in their ranks. Other companies need to call on an agency or external providers to benefit from their services and expertise.

💡 The Semji tip: A few useful tools depending on your goal

Analyze SERPs: Semji, Ahrefs, Technical SEO Local Search

Analyze trends: Semji, Google Trends, Glimpse

Analyze your data: Semji, Google Analytics

Translate your content: Polylang, Weglot, Deepl

In our white paper, we explain how to make the most of these tools for your international SEO strategy.

Examples of international companies and expert commentary

As part of your international strategy, you can enrich your thinking thanks to the testimonials of experts and companies already performing internationally.

In the white paper, you benefit from the expertise of two companies with very different profiles, but which faced the same challenges as you: Waalaxy (Amandine Bart, Head of Acquisition) and the French unicorn Qonto (Karim Elmlih, Lead SEO).

The Waalaxy case

Waalaxy first translated its top 10 articles in France (in terms of traffic) into different languages automatically. Even though the translation isn’t perfect, publishing this content lets Waalaxy estimate its potential. When the results are conclusive, the content gets a refined translation with the help of native writers. In total, Waalaxy achieves an 8.9x multiplication of its monthly SEO visitors thanks to its multilingual SEO strategy.

💡 Amandine Bart’s advice (Head of Acquisition, Waalaxy):

Pay attention to every detail

• Remember to change the target query into the language and make sure the search intent matches it;

• Watch the internal and external links in your articles: change them to direct your audience to pages in their language;

• Make sure your content’s URL, meta title and meta description are also translated.

You can also watch our webinar “How to scale up your international SEO?”.

The Qonto case

For its part, Qonto built a team of SEO Managers and SEO Content Managers to increase the volume of pages created and optimized. By working closely with local teams, Qonto creates content that meets the challenges of its various audiences. This allows Qonto to rank in top position on Google thanks to business keywords across its four markets.

💡 Karim Emlih’s advice (Lead SEO, Qonto):

Identify the business keywords for each market

The most strategic keywords for your current market aren’t necessarily those with the highest traffic potential in another country. There are subtleties from one country to another: you therefore need to identify the right queries based on the target market, and favor adaptation over translation.

You can also watch our webinar “How to use SEO to become an international reference?”.

The 5 key takeaways

To carry out your internationalization project as well as possible, you need to:

• Define a clear and precise targeting strategy (language targeting, country targeting…),
• Prepare your site from a technical standpoint (hosting, domain…),
• Study your competitors closely (which keywords, which types of content…),
• Build an editorial strategy for each market,
• Manage to project SEO gains, measure investments and ROI.

As you’ll have understood, many companies place SEO internationalization at the heart of their international expansion strategy. To do this, you need to build a perfectly crafted SEO content strategy, to guarantee your profitability on your new markets and the success of your market entry. Discover our white paper to prepare or consolidate your conquest of new international markets!

Also read: How to succeed with your multilingual SEO strategy in 12 key points