Most companies based in the United States focus on SEO on one or more of three levels: global, regional and local. At each level geographically specific keywords can be added to a companys focus in order to optimize a website for terms that are more relevant to ones business. A dentist in Chicago, for example, would be wasting time and money optimizing her website for a generic term like dentist because its hyper-competitive, and even if she could rank well for that term and drive traffic to her site, most of the traffic would be useless, as only people in the Chicago area would be willing to use her services. Even a regional campaign focusing on dentists in the Midwest wouldnt make sense. This dentist would maximize her return on investment by focusing on keywords that are as specific as possible to the area immediately surrounding her office, where her patients are most likely to live and work. That probably means that even a keywords like chicago dentist is too broad, and she would instead focus on the specific suburb or neighborhood where her office is located, as well as those within easy travel distance. SEO for a dentist like this would be a perfect example of what we call local SEO.
For a business with wider geographical reach, the focus might be on multiple metro areas, or multiple states. Within the U.S., targeting customers who live a few hours distances from each other in states is a fairly straightforward matter. But outside the U.S., with its relatively homogenous population, targeting customers who live a few hours travel from each other can become a more complicated matter because instead of living in different states, these customers live in different countries, with different languages, cultures, and infrastructure. While international SEO can become quite complicated, here are some basics to take into consideration.
Everything is Different, Everything is the Same
Before going any further, its important to understand that SEO, regardless of where you do it, is made up primarily of four activities: making technical adjustments to your website, creating useful content, building high quality inbound links and analyzing results. No matter what country, language, or search engine you are targeting, you will focus on these four activities to one degree or another. The devil, as they say, is in the details.
Language
It might seem obvious that one needs to communicate with customers in their native language, but it can sometimes be challenging to know how to best go about this. Whatever you do, dont put your websites text into Google Translate and then slap that up on your foreign language website. The results will be bad for your visitors, not to mention your SEO efforts. Hiring your nephew who participated in a study abroad program in Peru for a summer and learned some Spanish isnt good enough either. One can find professional language translators on websites like oDesk, but quality and price can vary greatly.
Use hreflang annotations to specify your language, and alternatively, the country targeting of your pages, says international SEO consultant and founder of Orainti, Aleyda Solis,This is key in order to avoid country or language misalignment in search results.
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Basics Of International SEO