What is the difference between international SEO and local SEO?

The main difference between local and international SEO lies in scale. While local SEO focuses on keywords and audiences within a limited geographic area, international SEO focuses on audiences across several geographic regions.

There are four key differentiators between local SEO and international SEO:

Costs: Because of their size and scope, international SEO efforts normally involve significant costs. Reaching target audiences worldwide requires a significant investment in resources and strategies.

Content: To ensure international reach, you need to create significantly more content than for a local SEO strategy. Diverse cultural backgrounds and language differences require a differentiated approach to serve the diversity of your international audience.

Capture: International SEO expands the target market you are trying to capture, which requires in-depth research to ensure your brand matches customer expectations. Understanding different cultural contexts and market segments is essential to success.

Competition: Competition for keywords and customers is much greater in international SEO efforts. Instead of competing only with companies within the same local sphere of influence, you may have to deal with multinational companies. This requires a heightened strategic approach to stand out in a much more competitive environment.

SEO steps for international websites:

1. Determine where and who you are targeting: Start by choosing your target market and audience. For example, decide if you want to target the broad market of Brazil and then specifically zoom in on a subset of that market that has the resources and motivation to buy your product. The more focused your decisions are regarding "where" and "who," the better your results will be.

2. Decide whether to hire an international SEO agency: Do you want to carry the heavy burden of international SEO yourself or do you want to outsource this effort? Both have their advantages. You know your brand better than anyone else, but SEO experts are adept at understanding local preferences and creating a strategy to match.

3. Conduct international keyword research: Using relevant keywords is a crucial part of search engine optimization. It is not enough to just translate your keywords if you are working on international SEO. In most cases, you need to "transcreate" them.

Treat your keywords on a case-by-case basis. Some keywords will be harder to convert than others. Understand exactly what people in your target market are typing into search engines and adjust your keywords accordingly.

When you have finished translating or researching your keywords, look at how often they are searched for. Use tools such as Google's Keyword Planner to research how often they are searched for monthly in each target area.

4. Choose the right international domain structure: Your website's domain structure makes it easier (or harder) for visitors and search engines to find your content. Several options include:

• ccTLD (Country Code Top-Level Domain): Specific two-letter domains assigned to specific countries (e.g., .us for the United States, .ca for Canada).
• gTLD (Generic Top-Level Domain): Domain extensions with three or more characters (e.g., .com, .gov).
  
• ccTLD or gTLD with subdomains: Create subdomains that combine aspects of both ccTLDs and gTLDs.
  
• ccTLD or gTLD with subdirectories: Create subdirectories for your site that change the location of the country code.

5. Optimize content for region and language: Finally, make sure all your content is optimized for your target region and local language. This includes double-checking all TLDs, translations and content assets to ensure they are in line with local expectations.

Oh, and don't forget the "rel="noopener" target="_blank" hreflang" tag. This HTML attribute specifies the geographic area and language of a Web page. It is used to distinguish similar Web pages aimed at different audiences so that search engines do not consider them duplicate content. It looks like the following:

<link rel="alternate" rel="noopener" target="_blank" hreflang="x" rel="noopener" target="_blank" href="https://example.com/alternate-page" />

SEO in Clonable: simplified international optimization

Want to apply international SEO quickly and easily? Then Clonable is a powerful tool that simplifies and improves this optimization process. Not only does Clonable make it easier to quickly clone your website to multiple languages, positively impacting SEO anyway, there are some built-in features and capabilities in Clonable that make it easier for you as a user:

A good foundation: Clonable detects everything on your page, including menus, widgets, footers, theme elements and dynamic content, so that 100% of your site is available in the new target language(s). This prevents confusion for both search engine bots and human visitors.

Customize texts in translations: Within Clonable, it is easy to edit translations: this is meant to be more than just a linguistic adjustment; it is a strategic approach to ensure that the content is culturally, linguistically and search engine-appropriate and has a positive impact. Taking into account local nuances and trends creates a seamless integration with the target audience, which increases the likelihood of engagement and ultimately leads to positive conversions.

Keyword translation rules: Clonable's translation rules provide the ability to highlight appropriate keywords in different language versions. Applying these rules consistently not only creates a uniform appearance but also optimizes for local search behavior patterns. This strengthens the website's position in search results worldwide. By defining these rules, the frequency of important keywords can be increased in a targeted way. This not only affects search engine rankings, but also ensures that the content better matches the user's search intent, further improving the user experience.

Automatically added hreflang tags: Hreflang tags are critical for search engines to understand the language of a Web page and to whom it should be displayed. These tags are notoriously difficult to implement, but Clonable does this automatically for you. This will display the correct language version to the correct audience, optimizing your international SEO efforts.

Meta data translation and customization capability: Clonable not only translates all visible text, but also detects and translates crucial SEO texts, such as metadata and alt texts of images. This optimizes not only the content, but also the underlying technical elements that search engines use for indexing. Within Clonable, customizing metatitles for each language setting is a simple yet powerful feature for international SEO. Optimizing these titles with relevant keywords and tailoring them to local trends not only makes your website findable but also creates instant appeal to local audiences.

Working with professional translators or proofreaders: Clonable allows you to hire professional translators for accurate and effective translations.

Collaborate on SEO strategy: Your SEO experts, content team and translators can collaborate directly on your SEO strategy through your Clonable dashboard. This ensures streamlined collaboration, with all involved having access to the information and tools needed to optimize international SEO efforts.

Dedicated language URLs at WordPress: For each new language you add, Clonable automatically creates subfolders. This is essential if you want Google to index your translated pages. This allows you to maintain a structured and optimized URL architecture for each language version of your website.

International SEO Checklist

Ready to start building your international SEO strategy? Here's a checklist to make sure you don't miss a step of the process, including helpful tips for using Clonable:

Define your market approach

If you sell the same products in multiple countries but to people who speak different languages, you should use a language-based segmentation strategy. This means making sure that all content on your website is translated into all the languages that are important to your business.

Your company will need a country-by-country strategy if its products and services vary in international markets or if it uses a separate brand name in each country's local language. You will need individual country-specific websites optimized for their respective international markets. Take advantage of automatic creation of subdirectories or subdomains, depending on your market approach, for structured international content.

Do market research

Using thorough market research, identify relevant keywords as well as languages for your international target audience.

Research your competitors.

Analyze competitors to discover international SEO opportunities that others may not yet be targeting.

Answer questions in the local language and context.

Carefully translate and adapt content to answer questions in the right context and language.

Consider the overall business processes

Realize well-structured processes to put or keep everything, including updates always in the right language. Clonable can play an important role in this.

Choose the audiences you most want to appeal to.

Implement international SEO step by step, targeting one audience at a time for effective execution.

Translate existing content.

Clonable does this quickly and easily. It takes a lot of work off your hands, allowing that saved time to be spent back on marketing and SEO. Use Clonable's translation rules to achieve not only literal translations, but "transcreation" for culturally adapted content.

Optimize the language options of your website (or website pages).

Use the appropriate language per page, whether you choose country-specific subdomains or a single domain with subdirectories.

Avoid automatic redirects based on IP address.

Manage redirects manually for a more user-friendly approach than automatic redirects based on IP address. However, automatically redirecting visitors or search engines based on IP addresses can irritate users. It can also be confusing to search engines, so visitors may never find certain content.

Adapt topics and pages to local cultures and commonly used keywords.

Involve input from native speakers in adapting topics to local cultures.

Develop a link-building strategy for each market.

Support establishing local link building strategies, applying specific translation rules for each market. Google will see that your content is relevant to German users if you have a large number of inbound links from .de domains.

Automatically implement appropriate hreflang tags and optimize metadata with Clonable.

Automatically add hreflang tags and optimize metadata with Clonable for an international SEO strategy.

Use Clonable for efficient collaboration with international teams.

Facilitate seamless collaboration with international teams, SEO experts and translators through the user-friendly Clonable Dashboard.

Coming soon: AI-proofreading for optimal quality.

Keep an eye on Clonable for the upcoming addition of AI proofreading, which increases translation quality to 99% for an even more effective international SEO strategy.

By following this checklist, optimized with the functionalities of Clonable, you can implement a powerful international SEO strategy and increase your global online presence.