Increasing visibility beyond one’s home market: this is what an international SEO strategy is for in a nutshell. An action plan that aims to identify the unexpressed potential of one’s site and project. At ByTek, we study the possibility of expansion through an International SEO strategy based on rigorous data analysis guided by proprietary technologies and methodologies, thanks to which we provide the client with a concrete plan for growth.

How International SEO works

By international SEO strategy, we mean an organic plan of action that starts with an assessment of the sector in which the client operates and, through keyword analysis, developed on different countries and in different languages, identifies development possibilities.

ByTek develops strategic plans supported by hard data: therefore, international SEO begins with keyword research that examines in detail the needs and demands of users and potential markets for development.

These are the initial two steps:

• Analysis of products and services offered to check which international markets are already interested and to identify potential ones
• Analysis of users’ search intentions and emerging trends

An example of keyword analysis is our research on wine in G7 countries.

International SEO and ranking: how does it work?

With our wine analysis, we carried out a study of search volumes in specific markets (in this case, the G7 countries were chosen), which were then compared with historical interest in the target sector. In this way it was possible to understand, for example, the interest over time of the keywords wine and Italian wine.

A similar keyword mapping analysis could be done for any other industry and for any market and, placed within the framework of an international SEO strategy, would allow the identification of user/consumer trends over time and thus study the best strategy for expansion.

For the purposes of international SEO positioning, therefore, it is necessary to put in place a strategy that includes a comprehensive keyword analysis in the countries identified as potential markets of interest, then actions that include the writing and optimization of multilingual content from an SEO perspective, plus other activities such as link building and Advertising to be evaluated as needed.

Using hreflag attribute

In the context of international SEO, the hreflang attribute proves to be of paramount importance, since it allows content localization even for multilingual variants. All while preventing Google from considering multilingual ones as duplicate content.

The hreflang attribute is generally present in all pages that have translation into other languages and must be inserted in one of these options:

• In the markup of the HTML page
• In the http header
• In the sitemap.xml.

It is a signal sent to search engines to help them position the version of the page in the specific language and country of the user doing the search.

SEO multi-language: best practices

In order to take advantage of the opportunities that an international SEO strategy offers, it is also important to plan optimized multilingual content.

We at ByTek have proposed international SEO strategies with multilingual sites to various clients present in markets other than Italy. We have done keyword analysis differentiated by language studying the search intent of each, structuring different URLs for each language version.

We collaborate with companies also active in very technical fields operating all over the world such as a leading company in the production of stove hoods that currently has plants in Italy, Poland, Mexico, India and China interested in an excellent SEO positioning at an international level.

For a world-leading clinical company that offers innovative products and services for professionals working in the medical and dental fields, we conducted an SEO Audit that highlighted some critical issues, so directions were given to overcome them. For this brand that currently has more than 20 domains and a worldwide target, an international SEO strategy was structured to preside over the most interesting specific topics for each country by not limiting itself to mere translation, but rather by localizing each section and defining technical implementation methods of the architecture functional to allow crawlers to analyze the sites in the best way. In an increasingly global economy, having an international SEO means having an incredibly large shop window and getting your project to everyone who might be interested.