Guidelines for International Expansion of Your Business

‘International SEO’ just like its name, is quite a huge concept. When this word comes to your mind, you automatically start imagining over 1000 of offices and employees all around the globe.  But along with that there are many other questions that emerges in your mind at the same time. One of the main questions that emerge in the mind of some of the Phoenix SEO expert is ‘whether to consider the ranking of a country on the basis of country or language’.

To help you understand, let us tell you that Google has numerous country code top level domains with each country providing search results for a specific country in its native language.

However, another search engine like ‘Bing’ work on a different approach and set its own location and language cookies.

Apart from that, you should also know that most of the top search engines varies as per a specific country and also each search engine has its own ranking factors and operating practices.

Still, to have a general idea you should know about some of the general ranking factors for international SEO.  This info will help you to take the best decisions for your budget, company, and visitors.

What to target – country or language?

When we talk about this thing, the internet if filled with different types of opinions. Google supports targeting the country instead of its native language. For the same purpose, the settings of Google Webmaster tool can help you to designate a particular Geographic target. Also, you can even register subfolders separately in Google Webmaster Tools and designate a different geographic target for each subfolder. But for this purpose, you must register subdomains separately for Webmaster Tools to recognize them.

Targeting on language is beneficial when you have clients in different countries. This is due to the reason that in such cases it makes more sense to focus on languages to avoid the issue of content duplication.

Which one to choose - ccTLD, Subfolder or Subdomain?

For international SEOs, the best option is to have ccTLDs as they are more efficient for competitive link building and results in getting a better addition to compelling content. They are especially recommended for the counties where search engines like Google and Bing aren’t considered as the top search engines.

In case, if your company is just a startup business, then you must not be having a lot of authority among you international ccTLD sites and hence a subfolder strategy might work in a better way for your company.

Domain-wide authority ultimately largely benefits country and language section respectively. As you move forward, you can comfortably switch to a ccTLD strategy for your website.

Subdomains are only suggested by Phoenix SEO expert in a situation when maintaining ccTLD is too burdensome and the use of subfolders is not possible. Hence, subdomains are least preferred among the three. However, the only exception is when each subdomain receives new content and links regularly. This may result in a high ranking.

Hence, take the decision very wisely keeping all the constituents in your mind!