International SEO: By Language or By Country?

Optimizing your website to rank well with international markets is a whole new challenge over traditional SEO.  Not only do you have the language barrier to contend with, but you also have cultural differences to take into account.  When meeting the needs of international customers, most SEO efforts choose to either focus on language or to consider the needs of each country individually.  In his article on Search Engine Journal, Christian Arno examines both of these strategies and weighs the pros and cons of each.

Optimizing by Language

No matter what the language, your SEO strategy should remain consistent—optimize for keywords, provide fresh content, obtain inbound links, etc.  However, once you do start optimizing for another language, you’re going to gain the attention of the search engines engineered for that language.  With this in mind, it’s worth doing a little research to find out which search engines are major players for the language and which are also-rans.

Advantages of SEO by Language

• It gives a “broad-brush” approach to reaching new customers.  For example, a site that’s optimized for English will already reach markets all over the world.  Optimize for Spanish as well, and you’ll be able to add Spain and most of South American to your list of markets.  French is good for several parts of Western Europe (including France), as well as some African nations.  Add Mandarin (Chinese) to the mix, and your potential audience expands by one billion.  In short, “[A]dding a few key languages to your SEO marketing can open up significant regions of the global market.”
• It’s an affordable and time-efficient approach, as your primary focus is on finding the optimal keywords for each language.  In some cases, these may be direct equivalents of the English terms.  In other cases, you may have to do a little digging to find out what folks are searching for on the Russian search engines.

Disadvantages of SEO by Language

• The wide-net approach may not work if you’re only interested in promoting your business to specific countries.  For example, if your business is well-placed to serve Brazil but not Portugal, then optimizing for the Portuguese language could be a wasted effort.
• Even if two nations speak the same language, there are liable to be regional differences that you’ll need to consider in your marketing.  For example, if you have an English website selling fine leather purses, your U.S. customers will be looking for handbags while your British customers will be expecting small pouches for storing coins.  As Arno points out, “Similar miscommunication can happen with any of the major world languages and can be frustration for customers.”

Optimizing by Country

Optimizing your website for a specific country is known as “geo-targeting.”  Basically, you’re localizing your content so that what folks see on your site depends entirely on where they’re located globally.  Language optimization may be a component of geo-targeting, but your focus will be much narrower (and culturally relevant).

Advantages of SEO by Country

• The narrow focus of geo-targeting can make it a more effective marketing strategy.  Rather than cast a wide net, you can deliver your online content specifically to those markets that matter to you.
• Optimizing by country is flexible, allowing you to deliver content to different nations that share a common language without having to mirror it on more than one top-level domain.  “With different pages geo-targeted for different country,” Arno writes, “linguistic and cultural differences can be allowed for and you can confidently quote local times, currencies and holidays.”
• By carefully geo-targeting your content, you can reduce the number of visitors to your website who hit the back button because they can’t find what they were looking for.  You may not see an overall increase in visitor numbers, but you should see a decline in your bounce rate.

Disadvantages of SEO by Country

• You could be inadvertently excluding potential customers, as those speaking the same language in other countries are unlikely to ever see your content.  For example, tailoring your website for customers in Mexico could be a bold move, but by doing so, you’d be excluding the 37 million folks who speak Spanish in the U.S.
• Optimizing by country can be difficult for nations with more than one official language.  For example, if you provide German-only content on a page optimized for Switzerland, you’re going to be excluding about a third of the Swiss population.

Ultimately, it all comes down to the needs of your potential international customers.  “Combining SEO with language that is both accurate and reads naturally to foreign visitors can be challenging,” writes Arno, “but get it right and you can make the leap from a national to a global customer base.”