July 22, 2009 by Matt Thomas
Let’s say you run a business. Your SEO’s great, you’re ranking well for all your major keywords and doing well, well enough that you decide to expand your business to Canada. You immediately buy the web address www.examplecompany.ca and set about building your new website, but what about the SEO? How do you maintain your position now that you have a range of international domains?
Well, there are a number of international SEO tricks you need to master if you’re to maintain your advantage in your new overseas adventure and helpfully, I’ve decided to list them.
1.Location of Hosting
Hosting a site in the location it serves is a well recognised technique for SEO, as Google uses IP data to discern where a site is based. If that data is the same as the URL address, it appears that they view that site as relevant to the national market and adjust its position accordingly.
However, there are two things you need to make sure of. Firstly, some hosting companies have their servers in different locations to their main offices, so it’s important to make sure your server is where you think it is. Secondly, Google appears to also lend weight to the geographic location of the Domain Name Server (DNS) record, so try to buy your domain name from a local provider, even if it’s a little more expensive.
2.Duplicate Content
Okay. Obviously duplicate content is bad and ideally you should be rewriting all the content from your old site onto the new one with lots of references to the new country to increase relevancy. Unfortunately, for bigger websites this just isn’t realistic – can you really ask your PR department to redraft 3000 pages of content?
If you have a big site, it might be an idea to simply duplicate the whole site onto the new domain, maybe with new homepage copy and a site wide footer that contains your new address, this will get lots of location specific words into every page of the site.
As far as the duplicate content penalty goes, don’t lose too much sleep. The downside won’t be too severe; stuff like this is a natural part of expansion and will most likely be viewed as such by Google.
3.Link Neighbourhood
Just as with regular SEO, link building is the most critical part of international SEO. It’s crucial that you get a good number of inbound links that are relevant to your region in order to get you up the local search listings. A good source of these kinds of links is a location specific directory.
4.Use Webmaster Tools
You can use webmaster tools to demonstrate to Google that your intentions are honourable (or at least white hat). What you need to do is manage both domains with the same Webmaster Tools account and use the programme’s functions to identify each site’s targeting – that way Google will get a clear idea of what you’re up to and silence any alarm bells.
If you are expanding internationally then good luck to you, it can be a complicated process, though the potential rewards are huge. The above tips should help you to manage the international expansion of your website without too many SEO hitches along the way. So that’s one less headache.
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