Stepping into the global arena is a big and exciting growth stage for European business. It can help you multiply brand awareness and revenues while also letting you get one step ahead of the competition. Yet, while it is undoubtedly an important step for scaling your company, the big question is – how can you successfully handle expanding business globally?
Apart from conducting thorough market research, adjusting your product/service offering to meet new markets’ needs, and building a thorough marketing tactic, there is one thing businesses often miss out of sight – search engine optimization (SEO). International SEO strategies help you acquire instant visibility in new markets and drive qualified leads right to your website. They can become a powerful yet cost-effective completion to your overall marketing efforts.
In this article, we’ll guide you through the core stages of SEO for European businesses seeking expansion to help you develop a strategy that brings you to your goals!
Studying the Market and Your Competition
Comprehensive international market research and an in-depth understanding of local competition are the keys to expanding business globally. It can give you the following benefits:
- Understanding cultural nuances and location-specific consumer behavior trends.
- Understanding the state of competition and defining your company’s viability in the given setting.
- Uncovering current market trends and predicting future trends.
- Identifying potential risks and challenges caused by region-specific laws, political situations, or economic stability.
- Detecting the most profitable markets based on size, demand, and purchasing power.
Conducting thorough research is also crucial for building your European SEO tactic. During market analysis, you can leverage tools like SEMrush or similar to tap into your target market’s SEO specifics. If you aren’t familiar with this tool yet, you can check out SEMrush Review or research similar SEO tools that can aid you in the process.
Once you pick a tool that works for you, use it to conduct:
- Competitor analysis in your target area. A competitor analysis tool will help you peep into your direct and indirect competitors’ strategies for dominating search engine result pages (SERPs) in a specific region. This should help you determine gaps and opportunities.
- Keyword research. Multilingual keyword research is a pivotal stage in your SEO expansion tactic, as keywords help you appear in relevant SERPs. By researching them in advance, you can outline the key target queries for your future tactic to know what to focus on.
Leveraging Multilingual and International SEO Best Practices
When expanding to new markets, most likely, you will have to engage in multilingual SEO. Simply put, you will have to adjust your tactic to different regions and languages.
So how do you do this? The obvious answer is that you have to translate your site into your target languages. Your first urge might be to translate your entire site, which seems logical as having all your site pages translated should contribute to a consistent user experience. However, the truth is that not all your pages and content might be up-to-date and relevant enough to spend time translating them.
Here is a good roadmap to guide your international search engine optimization content tactic:
- First, focus on translating the main pages that people typically visit on your site, such as your homepage, navigation tools/menu, CTAs, etc.
- Run an audit to detect which of your pages currently demonstrate the best performance in terms of rankings, traffic, and conversions and translate them as well.
- Identify target regions’ top high-volume keywords using international SEO tools and translate pages corresponding to these queries.
- Leverage language meta or hreflang tags to translate your content. These bits of code are specifically used to tell search engines which languages your content spans and, hence, help them rank you for global search.
- When optimizing old content, keep an eye on any location or culture-specific statements that need to be adapted to resonate with different target audiences.
- Create well-optimized localized content crafted specifically to match readers’ needs and pain points across different countries.
Pro tip: Do not neglect the importance of multilingual keyword research. It’s important to remember that popular queries can vary greatly from one region to another due to their cultural specs. Also, it’s important to note that your primary keywords can have different search volumes and competition when translated into other languages. Hence, conducting thorough research is pivotal for success.
Creating a Strategy for Building Quality Links Internationally
Link-building is a special element of European SEO. Since links act as votes of trust for search engines and users, earning them is a good way to establish credibility in new markets. Needless to say, the more credible your brand will look to new audiences, the more likely they will convert.
So, how do you earn quality backlinks from reputable resources from all across the world? There are a few steps you need to take:
- Tailor your content to match your target regions’ cultural needs and specs.
- Work with professional translators to translate your top-performing pages to your target languages.
- Ensure you consistently deliver share-worthy content that offers a unique perspective on the topic, shares unique insights or findings, and deserves to be featured in other articles.
- Diversify your content types – leverage how-to’s, evergreen content, case studies, research findings, infographics, and other types of content that frequently receive backlinks.
Using these tips and top-notch content, you can earn links naturally. However, you can leverage additional tricks to speed up the link acquisition process, such as guest posting and building relationships with bloggers and webmasters who can become your potential link donors. To do this, you need to identify the top websites and blogs relevant to your niche in target areas and start seeking opportunities to earn links from them. You can also leverage competitor analysis to see where your competitors get their backlinks from and maybe leverage the same resources for guest blogging.
And don’t forget about collaborating with influencers. These days, social media influencers have a lot of trust from their audience, making them a perfect addition to your global SEO tactic. With their help, you can greatly boost brand awareness and drive many qualified leads while earning your customers’ trust and loyalty across different markets. To use this to your benefit, you need to find global influencers who reach out to your target audiences and seek partnerships with them.
Conclusion
When your business grows into new regions, this is exciting and, at the same, challenging. Expanding to international markets takes a lot of preparation and consistent work to learn what your target audience in each region needs and ensure you cater to them.
Among different expansion techniques, international search engine optimization plays an important role in getting you in front of new audiences and capturing their attention. Now you know what global SEO software and tactics you need to use to make this a reality. Start using the tips we shared here in practice to dominate global SERPs and expand successfully!