International SEO

[DeltaNine]

Hey guys - its been a while since I posted.

I have a question for the brains here in BUSO in relation to "International SEO".

The company I work with have a SAAS product, sold internationally and I am trying to assist them in gaining visibility in the SERPs across the UK, IE, CA, NZ etc. (primary focus of the UK at present).

We have a .com and rank in our home country (AU) fine.

The site is set in WMT to not target a specific country.
I've setup href lang attributes across the site and this appears (after some playing around) to work now and I am seeing localised URLs example.com/uk and example.com/au ranking in the respective search engines (I am monitoring with SERPwoo to see how this is being effected across regions).

The business is not a service business, so no local map pack appears for the main target terms.

What are the main ranking factors people have found to be useful when working internationally?

The competition in the UK for example have a mixture of .co.uk and TLDs ranking in the Google.co.uk.

I'd expect some geo relevance from business addresses etc ( which I have in the UK - soon to be market up with JSON-LD - waiting for dev to complete).

Links from other businesses where their primary country of origin is in the uk, uk domain, ips, uk addresses etc.

Are there any other major factors apart from the standard business citations with the address etc?

 

[Ryuzaki]

Moz published this recently, seems to have some good correlative and meta-analysis info in it: https://moz.com/blog/top-15-myths-international-seo

This isn't something I've tried to do, so I don't have much qualified advice. I can add that on my main project, it's a .com and I've set no geo-targeting. I'm hosted in the US, have links from sites on IP's around the globe in all languages. Lots of Japanese for instance. No nihongo on the site though. I get zero Japanese search engine traffic. I get the most from the US, which is the goal. 2nd most is from the UK but it's a fraction. I do get CA and AUS too.

Maybe that can bring some insight. That link covered what a lot of global big brands are doing. Good luck!

 

[DeltaNine]

Thanks for the info Ryuzaki - i am wondering where you would submit the links to for the localised regions.. does anyone know if the link equity flows nicely between the regional urls...? Ive seen some geo specific folders ranking well on seemingly low inbound links and on further investigation its the other regions with the links.

 

[dresden]

I deal with intl a lot, but mostly with google news. For that, hreflang isn't even entirely required.

I mean, it sounds like you've nailed the best practices in general. I do know that we have tested international spellings (colour, €, etc) and they do seem to help, as does (as expected) reference local businesses or locations. I think that last part comes down more to interest and what people actually search for internationally than any major tip or trick.

Aside from a cc tld, verify your hreflang markup is correct (with x-default and everything) and ensure crawlability in general. No ajax without pushState() / popState() and you should be OK.

 

[DeltaNine]

I appreciate your feedback @dresden
yeah I think I've got most parts correct, and yeah x-default is right from my testing.

similar to this

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.softwareadvice.com/" >
<link rel="alternate" href="http://www.softwareadvice.com/" hreflang="x-default">
<link rel="alternate" href="http://www.softwareadvice.com/" hreflang="en-US">
<link rel="alternate" href="http://www.softwareadvice.com/" hreflang="en">
<link rel="alternate" href="http://www.softwareadvice.com/au/" hreflang="en-AU">
<link rel="alternate" href="http://www.softwareadvice.com/ca/" hreflang="en-CA">
<link rel="alternate" href="http://www.softwareadvice.com/ie/" hreflang="en-IE">
<link rel="alternate" href="http://www.softwareadvice.com/nz/" hreflang="en-NZ">
<link rel="alternate" href="http://www.softwareadvice.com/sg/" hreflang="en-SG">
<link rel="alternate" href="http://www.softwareadvice.com/za/" hreflang="en-ZA">
<link rel="alternate" href="http://www.softwareadvice.com/uk/" hreflang="en-GB">

one thing was was not right and this is a note for others. (this is not a wordpress site). any regional section of the site should *always* reference the regional urls and its easy to forget this and think you can rely on your "alternates" to do the work, you cant.. e.g if you have keyword page: example.com/keyword (x-default) targeting all location unspecified and you have a regional page example.com/au/keyword and there is a link on this page to the home page in the body text not referencing the localisation is screws the crawlers.
(I hope that made sense).

I like your idea of referencing more local enteties in geo specific pages.

one thing ive noticed and it appears to go against current teachings is geo local ips, the number of backlinks in total (not unique) to the page, domain hosting. And ccTLD are also a factor but the ips seem to be more of a factor.
Also linking sites with a sitewide geo local address (visible in footer) appear to help, with topical relevance. (and I suspect with varified g business verification for extra local relevance).

I'll post what I discover.

 

[CCarter]

This might help round out knowledge for International SEO: Establishing Your International SEO Strategy: How to Start Your International Web Presence

 

[DeltaNine]

I wanted to follow up on a few tests in relation to this that may help people in the future.

We are as previously mentioned were targeting - AU, UK, US (to start with, then adding IE, ZA, SG, HK, NZ, CA)

I setup the href lang attributes on the site very similar to this company initially:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.softwareadvice.com/" >
<link rel="alternate" href="http://www.softwareadvice.com/" hreflang="x-default">

<link rel="alternate" href="http://www.softwareadvice.com/au/" hreflang="en-AU">
<link rel="alternate" href="http://www.softwareadvice.com/uk/" hreflang="en-GB">

- I didn't explicitly setup the US version....and when I did add this, this is what happens across a number of keywords:

<link rel="alternate" href="http://www.softwareadvice.com/" hreflang="en-US">

http://imgur.com/a/6xgte

The increase in the SERP for a number of keywords was dramatic.

At the same time I also tested adding Ireland (one thing to note with adding this region, all pages on the site were effectively duplicated but for this region.).

<link rel="alternate" href="http://www.softwareadvice.com/ie/" hreflang="en-IE">

http://imgur.com/a/vqVaX

From the image you can see where the change took place and what happens next.

Once I had added the new region I asked Google WMT to 'fetch' the pages from the URL and crawl other linked pages.

We are current ranking in CA, NZ in a similar way to IE listed above, so will be interested to see if the results are the same when adding the next set in bulk - NZ, CA, ZA, SG, HK,


--- Notes ---
1).
I found that each region of the site needs to be entirely siloed within it region, e.g the links on the Irish section (/ie) should always point to the /ie variant and not to the global variant (which is US, or X-default in our case - so thre is no location folder in the path). This can cause the ranking URL to shift between the URLs referenced on the page over time and is not too stable.

2). I have JSON-LD on the page - each region is referenced in here via contact points
The address (which I haven't included here are only offices based in AU, UK as we dont have actual offices in the others - this is "Organization" JSON-LD)

"contactPoint" : [
{ "@type" : "ContactPoint",
"telephone" : "+xxxx",
"contactType" : "sales",
"areaServed" : ["AU","NZ","SG","HK"],
"email": "xxx@xxx.com"
} , {
"@type" : "ContactPoint",
"telephone" : "+xxxxx",
"contactType" : "Sales",
"areaServed" : ["US","CA"],
"email": "xxx@xxx.com"
} , {
"@type" : "ContactPoint",
"telephone" : "+xxxxxx",
"contactType" : "Sales",
"areaServed" : ["GB","IE","ZA"],
"email": "xxx@xxx.com"
} ]

 

[DeltaNine]

On a separate not I wanted to make something else clear with the config on the site.

Google Webmaster Tools is installed on the main domain ".com/" and not targeted geographically to any location.
Google Webmaster Tools is only installed and geo located on the ".com/uk" - to the UK.

All others locations are left as they are for now - and will remain that way and i may test a location at a time.

 

[DeltaNine]

Other International Testing

Part of this little study I thought I'd pick one of the keywords we'd like to rank for in the UK and do a bit of SERP investigation as to whats stopping us internationally...and the factors that could be involved.

The Keyword:

It is a two word, its a generic "product category" type keyword - with no real buyer intent, however its a phrase people use to search for information on products like this (SAAS)
e.g " Hospitality Management Software" (I know this one three words, but you get the idea).

If you were to look at the competitiveness of this keyword:
LongTailPro - 43, SEMrush - 56.79%.

The Factors
I decide to look at the top 20 results in the UK SERPs for this keyword.

I understand there are going to be things I cannot see on each of the competitions domains - but I will make note of what I can see and attempt to locate a pattern - this may well amount to nothing and please feel free to let me know if you think there are missing factors.

On Page (on site/hosting/domain)
ccTLD (is it a co.uk)
Server Hosting IP (is it a UK ip)
Address on Ranking Page (is the address on the page a UK address)
Contact Page
- Google Map - Verified UK address on page
- Address - is there a UK address on the page
- Local Phone number - is this present on the page.
- Local Schema or JSON-LD(local,org) - do they have any.
Regional Phone on ranking page/site - is there a UK number
JSON-LD on the site (org, local business)
Local Currency on ranking page
Href-Lang Tags - UK specific
Geo Content Silos (local sections with only folder specific links) - UK Specific

Off Page (external factors, citations, backlinks
Google Business + - Verified local business/linked website
Social Profiles with address (LinkedIn and FB only)

Link Profile - Using Majestic

Total Number of Indexed urls
Total Back Links
Total Root Domains

Total Number of Back Links with IP + ccTLD of UK
Total Back Links with IP of UK
Total Back Links with ccTLD of UK

Total RD IP +TLD - UK
Total RD IP - UK
Total RD ccTLD BL - UK

I am also looking at the Majestic TF/CT for the top lot ... so we shall see comparatively how we go there.

Data to follow...

 

[DeltaNine]

This update is related to the HREF Lang attribute - adding these regions: NZ, CA, ZA, SG, HK

There has been some upward movement from the new regions, some URLs are not yet updated in SERPwoo (or probably in Googles index)... taking longer than last time.

I show some screen shots after a few days of updates, to see how it settles in the regions (good or bad).

BUT Important to note/log - I've noticed a significant drop with a number of important keyword in our main location - to the point where Sales came over to ask if anything had changed over the last few days.

I am pretty sure its to do with the HREF Lang changes, as its too coincidental (and nothing else significant has changed on the site) ...

By making this change we have increased the page numbers by x5 - these are all correctly attributed to the region (I believe) so it should not be duplicate content causing it, and I suspect its a reshuffle of a lot more data that need to process.

I've noticed a number of URLs shift from the location based folders e.g ".com/au" to the non folder x-default path ".com/" and back again but losing the position.

This is probably a waiting game... so I shall wait and I will update it here.