International SEO Strategy (Get Started NOW)

hey everyone is Neil Patel here for another QA Thursday I'm here with Adam Liddell Jay from viewership hello everyone and this week's question is thank you so much for all your questions we've been loving them so please leave that question below if you have any questions for future episodes like this this one is from Jason aka Kay Mitchell and basically the question is how do you get started in international SEO I want to start getting my content in the hands of Germany India China Brazil Japan so on and other spanish-speaking countries of course I want global domination but what are the practices or resources to get started sure so I've done a lot of international SEO and I've made a lot of mistakes the first thing you need to keep in mind is yes there's people all around the world the markets much bigger than the English market or the United States United Kingdom I love the u.

s.

love all the countries but in general when you think about global expansion you have to really understand where your clients are coming from for example if you know my services and my companies start around a hundred and twenty thousand dollars now I love India I'm Indian descent I've been to India many times if you look at India there's tons of people and I can expand my content many different languages although technically a lot of Indians speak English the market there yes there's a lot of wealthy Indians who can afford my service but there's not as many as let's say within the United States or the UK India is still developing five ten years from now it'll be a much bigger business opportunity but you have to look at the markets just because a market has a lot of people or just because the market has decent GDP is there enough business for you within that market if not you shouldn't consider expanding right now take your time go after the regions that you know there's gonna be money there's gonna be customers and the reason I say this isn't to talk crap on any of the countries out there right all of them are developing at their own pace hopefully they all succeed and you know prosper and do well and have low crime and you know global issues whatever maybe I wish the best up on everyone but the point I'm trying to make is it costs money to expand for example I spent well into the million plus dollar mark in global expansion we have a huge team in Brazil we have a team in Germany we have a team for all of spanish-speaking right from Spain to Mexico to Uruguay to Peru wherever it may be right to speak Spanish there's tons of different places but what ends up happening that a lot of people forget is you have to translate your content manually if you just take a tool like Google Translate and someone comes to your website and you translate it into German and Mandarin and all these things we just what do you think's gonna happen with the auto translation bounce exactly because it's not that great for example I want to auto translated my site into I think it was like 30 something popular languages I just went down the most popular languages and there's two things that happen people would email me saying there's profanity on my homepage in German looks like what are you talking about and the auto translation made me look really bad yeah second is my balance rate went through the roof right you guys are all familiar with the Google Panda update it's old we're all familiar with it they're looking at like content quality user metrics bounce rate there's tons of algorithm update since then like rankbrain which encompasses a lot of these algorithm changes if your bounce rate is really high your user metrics suck because you've Auto translated your content it's gonna hurt your overall site when it comes to any rankings so what you should be doing is manual translation you're gonna have to find people from places like upwork or within those regions recruit them do the manual translation then you're gonna have to use a truffling what HR playing is it tells Google hey this is English content you know targeted towards Australia or the UK and here's Spanish content targeted towards Mexico or Spanish content targeted towards Spain and you can target your content based on a language like Spanish and saying hey this is well done for anyone who speaks Spanish or you can say hey this is Portuguese just from Brazil because you know Portuguese in Portugal is quite a bit different so you want to make sure that when you're leveraging translations you use href link to tell Google what that content is relevant for and you'll want to upload it on your site using subdomains I know a neil patel comm i use sub directories you're better off and it's easier to get ranked as if you sub domains such as de dot neil patel comm I on the other hand use Neil Patel comm /de wouldn't have I would have done better if I did de dot neil patel comm from all the tests we ran and then you have to start building press within that region you got to start building backlinks you have to get social shares so you could end up boosting post on facebook to the audience but it's not easy as you can see all these things cost money so unless you know that these regions can produce income for you because you're already starting to get a customers from these regions and the majority do their google searches and languages that aren't in english you can consider expanding but keep in mind it's a very expensive endeavor alright would you recommend maybe testing the waters of pay-per-click in those regions to see if it's even worth their while before that means that's a smart idea if you're unsure test out pay-per-click you can even do targeting on facebook and do ads within that region if you don't know how to run Google AdWords ads and by testing that out you can quickly see if you're gonna be able to collect leads and sales from that but when you're testing that pay-per-click campaigns or Facebook ads you want to make sure you translate your landing page yeah and you need make sure ad is within that language for that region and see the kind of results that you get great but in general a lot of people who are looking to expand internationally they have it even dominated or done that well within the region they're in so before you really expand internationally try to dominate the region your RT in and then expand from there that's it for this week's Q&A Thursday video if you have a question leave a comment below I'll answer it or if you want your question on next week's Q&A Thursday video leave a comment below I'll still answer it and it may show up on next week's video awesome thank you for watching subscribe like share the video tell other people about it thank you.