Artificial Intelligence (AI) has revolutionized how marketers approach their strategies for a long time. From IBM’s Watson and Google’s RankBrain, AI has revolutionized how search engines work, and how marketers utilize AI-led technologies. The introduction of ChatGPT is now bringing conversational elements of AI direct to the consumer.

Whether we realize it or not, AI touches consumers – running in the background – every day. AI is everywhere, from virtual assistants such as Siri and Alexa, to smart home devices that control lighting and temperature, to recommendation systems that personalize shopping and entertainment experiences.

Today, AI technologies are being used by marketers across all industries to provide insights and business intelligence, automate processes and improve decision-making. The current focus in AI is on developing systems that can think and act like humans. 

The evolution of AI and conversational applications 

Advancements in natural language processing, data science, and machine learning algorithms have enabled AI to understand and respond to human speech and behavior. 

ChatGPT is now allowing people to have a direct interaction with AI 

ChatGPT is a language generation model developed by OpenAI. In essence, it is a chatbot based on Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) architecture and is trained on a large dataset  to generate human-like text. 

For so many, the introduction of ChatGPT is the first time people are interacting with AI directly.  So, it is no surprise that the mass adaption of ChatGPT has been record-breaking. In the first 3 months, ChatGPT  reached one million users.

What does ChatGPT mean for business and marketers 

No marketer will be able to ignore this technology and we anticipate more demand for guidance on when and how to use it. AI is becoming integral for marketing and can help marketers through insights and automation, and when utilized correctly with human supervision, it can also, with help with content ideation and generation.

Businesses and developers have been embracing ChatGPT, with an increasing number utilizing it to streamline their content operations, enrich customer service experiences for clients and prospects, and upgrading marketing strategies with insights and content development.

McKinsey highlights some important use cases for business below:

• "Marketing and sales—crafting personalized marketing, social media, and technical sales content (including text, images, and video); creating assistants aligned to specific businesses, such as retail
• Operations—generating task lists for efficient execution of a given activity
• IT/engineering—writing, documenting, and reviewing code
• Risk and legal—answering complex questions, pulling from vast amounts of legal documentation, and drafting and reviewing annual reports
• R&D—accelerating drug discovery through better understanding of diseases and discovery of chemical structures"

What are the benefits and limitations to digital marketers 

Benefits 

ChatGPT provides valuable content-generation capabilities to help build out digital marketing campaigns. 

• Ideation: It can help generate new and unique ideas for content, which can help differentiate your business from your competitors.
• Personalization: Marketers can generate personalized content based on customer data, which can improve the relevance and effectiveness of the content.
• Time and Resource:  ChatGPT can quickly generate large amounts of high-quality text, improving efficiencies for content marketers.
• Multilingual generation:  It can generate text in multiple languages, which can help reach a wider audience and expand into new markets.
• Versatility: ChatGPT can be used by marketers for digital and content marketing tasks such as emails, blog posts, product descriptions, social media posts, and more.

Limitations

With any new technology, it is important to consider limitations also.

• Limited specific knowledge: ChatGPT is trained on a large dataset of text but may not have detailed knowledge of a particular domain. This can lead to inaccuracies or inconsistencies.
• Bias in data: Results may contain preferences, which may be reflected in the content generated.
• Creativity limitations:  While it can generate human-like text, it may not be able to generate truly original content. The output is based on patterns and structures learned from its data sources, which can lead to repetitive or formulaic content.
• Quality of the generated content: Although the text quality is high, it is not always perfect. It may contain errors, inaccuracies or inconsistencies, especially when the model is not fine-tuned to a specific task.
• Ethics: Using such models raises ethical considerations, such as the possibility of creating fake news, impersonation and spreading misinformation.
• Accuracy: ChatGPT is still limited to 2021 data, which means it can't answer current/topical questions. However, this limitation will change over time.

In summary, ChatGPT can help marketers  by offering features like text data for generating eBooks, informational content, and infographics – as well as providing the advantage of handling high demands tasks such as FAQs.

What does ChatGPT mean for content marketers

AI and ChatGPT are creating a new content explosion and battleground in the field of content writing. Many large websites are now using AI to write some of their content, such as BankRate.com and CreditCards.com. The latter even added a caveat in the footer of articles stating the content is auto generated. 

CNET has done this also, producing over 75 AI-generated articles since November. However, it is now having to review its AI-written articles after being notified of severe errors.

While we will see an increasing  amount of machine-generated content on the web, it is important to note that a machine cannot replace the art of human storytelling and emotional connection. 

“The best content writers can align business objectives and messages with the needs and wants of the user (the searcher).” – CEO Jim Yu, Mediapost Interview 

AI can assist in various aspects of content writing, such as ideation, copyediting, grammar, and spelling. It can also help with formatting and research, but with limitations. Human supervision will always be necessary at the front and end of the content production process.

ChatGPT is not here to replace human roles, but rather to assist and streamline tasks for them, allowing for more creative tasks that require a human touch.

What does ChatGPT mean for search  

Recent history has shown that with every transformative change, search has grown. This has happened with mobile, local, video, voice, and short-term formats. The job of a search engine is to make the most relevant and accurate content discoverable. 

Google also has an AI chatbot called LaMDA and plans to launch over 20 new AI products and showcase a version of its search engine with chatbot capabilities in the coming months. Google is also testing a chatbot called “Bard”.

Microsoft has announced it will be adding OpenAI's ChatGPT features to Bing search in the coming months, according to Forbes. In addition, according to Reuters, Chinese search engine Baidu is set to release a chatbot in March.  

It is expected that all search engines will accelerate their innovation in AI.

What does ChatGPT mean for SEO

The core fundamentals of SEO have not changed

1. Utilize insights for intent 
2. Focus on website and user experiences and infrastructure optimization
3. Create content that is helpful and balanced for discoverability on engines and is engaging ad valuable for the human reader 
4. Measure performance and utilize automation technology for efficiency and scale

Same as for content marketers. AI allows SEOs to focus on more creative tasks that require a human touch.

ChatGPT can help small sites create SEO-friendly content much faster. For larger sites, if utilized correctly, it will add an additional level of scaled automation. It can help with writing and suggesting meta descriptions and titles, keyword research, heading suggestions for your pages and posts, article ideation, and writing copy – but be aware of the limitations.

Regarding ChatGPT and AI-generated content, Google's Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, reiterated on SearchEngineLand that "content created primarily for search engine rankings; however, it is done, is against our guidance." But he added, "if content is helpful and created for people first, that's not an issue." 

ChatGPT is now helping marketers see the value in conversational search

ChatGPT is also providing a mechanism for the massive adoption of conversational search. As people are increasingly searching in a more conversational manner, marketers and SEOs must understand and utilize this trend. 

At BrightEdge, we recognized the importance of conversational search five years ago, and how it can enhance marketers’ overall search strategy, and made sure to account for this shift in our platform. 

BrightEdge recommendations

New technology, such as ChatGPT, is something you should try and experiment with. 

It has the potential to help content marketers and SEOs – but the limitations mean marketers should exercise caution and ensure human supervision. 

Many technologies, including Google, will be building and up-grading AI detection and spam systems. A combination of eyeballs and brains will be looking for content that is not factual, contains inaccuracies, and lacks human perspective. Always remember - don't produce content that is written just for search ranking. 

Ensure you follow Google's E-E-A-T and Helpful Content guidelines when using ChatGPT for content for SEO.

BrightEdge and AI 

We have been on a journey to become an Artificial-Intelligence (AI-First) company for over 14 years. We believe that it is essential for every business to have AI-First capabilities. This journey started with Data Cube. 

Since then, we have been the first to market with next-generation deep-learning technology, DataMind, using the same deep-learning best practices applied by Google in its voice and image recognition algorithms. AI has been woven into the BrightEdge platform to power search, content, and digital marketing solutions and to enable our customers on their own AI journeys.

BrightEdge Autopilot, used by thousands of large enterprises, has been helping organizations identify and perform SEO tasks that don't require a human touch. BrightEdge Autopilot uses GPT-3 in some cases to help fine-tune natural language tasks. 

ChatGPT is being looked into to improve existing and create new platform use cases.

Learn how a leading beauty retailer tripled traffic and revenue for its key e-commerce pages using BrightEdge Autopilot.

Read more about AI at BrightEdge

BrightEdge Data Cube : the industry's largest content repository and ore complete data set for tracking performance across the web

BrightEdge Insights : AI-powered solution that acts like marketers' personal data analyst

BrightEdge Instant : Allowing marketers to conduct real-time research and optimize content within a single platform

BrightEdge Autopilot: Helping organizations identify and perform SEO tasks that don't need a human touch, including duplicate content issues, broken links, mobile issues. page performance and Infrastructure issues

BrightEdge SearchIQ : Combines deep and machine learning to simply research and workflows

BrightEdge and Oncrawl Create Industry's First Intelligent System for SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a channel embraced by organizations of all sizes, and according to recent surveys, it's one of the channels most prioritized by CMOs for 2023. Companies rely on various technologies to help them achieve positive traction in organic search results. These technologies help them understand where their website ranks for keywords they care about, what fixes need to be addressed to ensure search engines see all the content on their site, and how competitors stack up to them, among many other things.

To execute SEO, there are hundreds of providers that offer tools that either do specific tasks or pull data sets from multiple 3rd party sources together. Additionally, there are SEO platforms that consolidate these functions into a single stack. Whether a company should do SEO with multiple single-purpose tools or leverage a comprehensive platform depends on several factors. While budget is often a primary consideration, it's important to remember that a platform can save you time and money.

Before we go further, let's define a point solution and an enterprise platform. 

Point solutions are tools that perform a specific function. That may be crawling a website and producing data points on the performance of the crawl. Another point solution may collect keyword rankings for your website, while  another may measure the conversions and on-site performance. It then falls to the organization to aggregate and analyze this data so they can then execute against it.

Enterprise platforms bring several functions together under one solution and interface.  Many times, enterprise platforms allow for the creation of workflows and connect data through integrations.  This allows users to create new ways to customize the data and generate new insights that would be difficult to gain without integration. 

Do any of the following scenarios sound familiar to you? If so, it may be time to invest in an enterprise SEO platform. 

1. You have limited resources or need to scale your SEO work quicky

Do any of these scenarios sound familiar to you?

• You've just been made the main SEO person for your company and now everyone is coming to you for help
• You have a small team and you're trying to balance SEO with many other projects.
• You're being asked to do more SEO work without  more resources to help you.

These are common cases where enterprise SEO platforms are transformative for you and your organization.  They deploy automation on repetitive SEO tasks so you can be freed up for higher value work.  They also consolidate multiple tools into one solution, simplifying how you track and manage your SEO. A typical SEO without a platform will leverage four to six tools and spend up to two hours per day analyzing this data. This can create significant bandwidth barriers to effectively executing SEO.  If you need that time back and need to quickly activate, then an enterprise SEO platform could be beneficial for you. Within the BrightEdge platform, users can leverage Content IQ, Keyword Reporting and Autopilot to automate many day-to-day activities such as site crawls, ranking reports, and on-page optimizations. This allows teams to focus on more strategic work and reduces time spent proving their strategies are sound.

​2. You need to report on organic performance to different teams

Are these scenarios familiar to you?

• You're trying to show multiple teams or departments how your SEO campaigns are performing, but it's difficult to pull and distribute the information
• Your stakeholders have different ideas of what SEO success looks like. Some people in your organization are heavily involved in SEO, while others only need a high-level overview.

90% of surveyed companies expect SEO to have greater emphasis in 2023. This will inevitably lead to more stakeholders in the organization taking interest in the impact of SEO work.  This easier it is to communicate how the campaign is performing and how it benefits them, the more buy-in and advocacy the SEO programs receive.  Enterprise SEO platforms are designed to make it easy to communicate across an organization. With a platform like BrightEdge, users have dashboards designed for executive, technical, and content teams, and can automate communication about specific or immediate needs. Another differentiation between a point solution and an enterprise platform is that platforms support multiple users with different permissions. With BrightEdge, organizations can assign administrators, standard users, and different degrees of read-only access for contractors and stakeholders throughout the organization.

3. You need to collaborate across teams to execute initiatives

Do you recognize these situations?

• To execute your SEO strategy effectively, you need different teams such as content, technical, and management to work together.
• Different teams within your organization have different tools or methods of organizing and prioritizing their work.
• You need to bring all your SEO projects together and see how they are contributing to your business outcomes overall

If a SEO team is using several point tools, it can be difficult to share data across teams. They may not have access to all the tools, or they may need to do their own mashups of data to arrive at the insights they need.  This requires more time, and in many cases, it simply doesn’t get done.  In this scenario, an enterprise SEO platform can save you considerable time and effort. Enterprise SEO platforms support multiple logins and views of data. They also have collaboration tools that are difficult to replicate without a platform underpinning everything. For example, BrightEdge's Task Manager allows SEO teams to assign tasks to different groups, push them to their project tool of choice (Monday.com, Wrike, Jira etc.) and track the task against organic performance.

4. You need to measure performance as market conditions shift, while adhering to the latest compliance requirements

Do any of these challenges sound familiar?

• You are being asked to achieve more with less budget, maybe because PPC spend is decreasing and organic search needs to compensate
• You work in a highly regulated industry or a region where data privacy laws are strict
• You have multiple websites or work across different regions, and need to compare performance over time

Enterprise SEO platforms, like BrightEdge, offer built-in analytics and reporting tools that make it easy to measure the impact of your SEO efforts against other channels and relative to market conditions. For example, if you are decreasing PPC budgets, it's crucial to measure whether and how much the organic channel is compensating. A platform will provide valuable insights into how your website is performing, where you need to improve, and what strategies are working. Additionally, enterprise SEO platforms can also help ensure compliance with regulations such as GDPR and CCPA by providing features such as data management, consent management, and data subject rights management. By leveraging these features, you can better measure your SEO performance and make data-backed decisions to drive more traffic and conversions through the organic channel.

5. You need more flexibility in how you slice and dice your data

Have you found yourself in one of these situations?

• You are tracking different types of conversions such as sales and video views or signups for your SEO effortt
• Your organization has specific quotas, personas or journeys that you need to tailor your metrics to
• Your analytics team needs a simple way to push metrics into a data visualization tool

Point solution tools are designed to address specific, singular issues. While they may integrate with some analytics offerings, they are limited in the different connections. Enterprise platforms, on the other hand, allow for greater customization options, and flexibility in how data is ingested from other marketing tools. For example, with BrightEdge, dashboards are fully configurable to pull modules from anywhere in the platform and integrate web analytics and search console data. They can also create filtered views throughout the platform to create views of data or segments of search that are relevant to specific groups in the organization. These visuals can then be sent to a data visualization resource like Tableau or Google Data Studio for further customization without stitching together incremental data sources. BrightEdge customers can also use the platform as a repository for historical data. For example, with the upcoming migration to GA4, BrightEdge not only seamlessly connects your UA Google Analytics to your new GA4 data, but it also archives your historical GA data (Google will not support historical UA accounts after December 31, 2023).

If any of these five signs and corresponding scenarios sound familiar to you, it may be beneficial for you to consider  an enterprise SEO platform such as BrightEdge. The value in time savings and the democratization of SEO insights throughout your organization can help you scale and execute more efficiently, while also reducing the amount of manual work required.

 

As the deadline for the Google Analytics 4 (GA4) update approaches, many organizations are faced with the decision of whether to switch to another analytics tool or upgrade to GA4 before the official sunset date. The new iteration of Google Analytics will sunset Universal Analytics (UA) on June 30, 2023, meaning that after July 1, 2023, no additional data will be collected in UA. Users of Google’s enterprise version, GA360 will have until June 30, 2024 to make the switch.

What is GA4 and how does it differ from the previous version?

GA4 is the latest iteration of Google's analytics platform and is a completely new analytics solution designed to support the future of Google's analytics reporting. It collects both website and app data and uses event-based data instead of session-based data, providing a more comprehensive and user-centric approach to analyzing website performance, thus improving the customer journey. GA4 also includes privacy controls, enhanced reporting capabilities, and support for cross-device measurement at the property level.

A couple important things to note is that while all metrics collected from UA will be available in GA4, there may be differences in how the data is measured. For example, in UA, goals are counted only once if a user completes more than one conversion in a session, while in GA4, goals are counted for each time a conversion occurs, even if there is more than one conversion in the same session. This means that goal metrics may be higher in GA4 than in UA. 

Additionally, visits and page views may also vary between the two versions. While a page view is recorded the same way in both versions (every time a page on a website is loaded or reloaded), the definition of a session has changed. GA4 defines a session as a group of interactions that take place on a website within a given time frame, but now also includes other factors such as engagement and user behavior. For example, if a user visits a website and views 3 pages, interacts with some of the content on the website, and spends a significant amount of time on the website, that would be counted as 3 page views and 1 session.

While the metrics reported by UA and GA4 will be different, when comparing metrics provided by UA and GA4, it’s best to review all settings for each to ensure they are aligned in order to minimize the differences between the two versions. Settings to review may include IP filtering, other filters implemented in UA, how subdomains are included or excluded in the reporting, usage of referral exclusion lists, and session timeouts.

How can GA4 help my business analyze and improve website performance?

The integration of machine learning in GA4 allows for automatic identification of patterns and trends in website data, making it easier for businesses to spot opportunities and make data-driven decisions. For example, businesses can create segments for high value customers which may include users who have made a purchase or completed a specific action and analyze their behavior and preferences to improve their user experience and conversion rates.

For those who use BrightEdge, there is an updated GA4 integration currently available in the platform. BrightEdge Page Reporting helps businesses make the most of their GA data by providing valuable insights into traffic, revenue, conversion metrics, and other analytics metrics about user activity on their website, allowing them to identify areas for improvement. Integrating GA4 with BrightEdge is simple and requires only valid credentials for the GA4 account. If you encounter issues updating the integration, please contact your Customer Success Manager for assistance. 

 

One of the biggest challenges of international SEO is that search engines like Google often display different results to users in different countries. There are several signals that search engines analyze that help them determine where your pages should rank and what languages it should appear for. Read our latest article to learn more about international SEO and the key factors that should be considered when developing your global strategy.

What is international SEO?

International SEO is the process of optimizing your website so that it can be easily found and ranked by search engines in different countries. It also involves making sure that your site appears in the correct language for each target country.

How does international SEO work?

Search engines like Google will take into consideration several different ranking signals to determine which pages should appear for users in different countries or languages. Some of these signals include:

• Country-specific domains, pages, and localized URL structures
• Local keyword and content optimization
• Hreflang and HTML language tags
• Internal linking and dedicated localized sitemaps
• Backlinks from local authorities in the target region

The benefits of international SEO

There are several benefits that come with optimizing your website for international audiences:

• Increased traffic from multiple countries
• Improved user experience
• Greater brand awareness and reach
• More opportunities for conversion

Best practices for international SEO

Below are key best practices to follow for international SEO implementation:

Identifying which markets to target

It's important to determine if the main goal is to target specific languages; target specific countries; or a combination of both, as this will inform your overall international SEO strategy. The first step is to ideate which international markets you would like to target. The most common way to do this is by looking at your current customer base to see where they are located. You can also use Google or Adobe Analytics to see where your website traffic is coming from. If you have a large amount of traffic from a particular country, it may be worth targeting that market with international SEO efforts.

There are three types of approaches to consider when analyzing your market:

1. If you have an audience in multiple languages, consider segmenting your website by language to better reach each individual group. This involves having different versions of your website that are optimized for specific languages. An example would be targeting both English and Spanish-speaking users within the United States.
2. If you offer various items or services in distinct national markets, you should address each country separately. You'll need to set up country websites with their own unique international SEO tactics. An example would be if you have a website in English that you want to target toward users in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. While all three countries use English as their primary language, the nomenclature in each country can be quite different.
3. Leveraging a combination of both approaches. If you have distinct markets, with users that speak multiple languages in each market, you'll want to have different versions of your site that are optimized for these specific languages within those different regions.

Competitor research

Once you have determined your international markets and approach, the next step is to research your competition if they’re performing well in the search results to see what tactics they’re using.

For example, if you're targeting the French market, look at how competitors are using hreflang tags and country-specific domains. If you're targeting the Spanish market, look at their website content to see if it’s been translated into Spanish, or how they have their menu navigation set up to segment regional / translated content on their website.

You can also use the BrightEdge platform to research your international competitors by entering their domain in the "Content Research" tab and filtering keyword rankings by country / language. This will show you all the keywords and pages that they rank for. You can then use this information to improve your own international SEO strategy and determine what pages you need to create or optimize to rank for those keywords.

Adjusting content for each unique region

Once you've decided on the right international audiences to target and performed your competitor research, it's time to start thinking about a few of the following items for each of your pages:

• Target language
• Locations (country / region)
• Search engine(s) used in each region (i.e. Bing, Google, Baidu, Yandex)
• Local customs and culture
• Changing price to reflect national currencies
• Date formats
• Time zones
• Phone numbers / address / contact information (NAPU)

These factors will help you determine the best way to reach your target audience and ensure that your international SEO efforts are successful.

Language targeting

To ensure that your pages rank highly on search engines, you will need to use the right language for each page, depending on where you want them to rank. For example, if you have a website dedicated to users in France, most of your content should either be translated in French or English.

If you have a website in French that you want to target towards users in France and Belgium, both countries speak French as their primary language. However, unique pages should be created to specifically target each country with hreflang tags properly implemented.

Hreflang tags

Search engines use hreflang tags as a primary signal when determining where to serve localized results.

Hreflang tags are a code that resides in the backend of a website (or sometimes via sitemaps) and helps to translate pages between search engine language versions. It's essentially a mapping procedure, giving search engines information about URL language variants for specific pages.

This information allows search engines to understand the target market of the current page as well as any potential alternative options that might be available to users in other markets. Additionally, this provides them with a default version to serve should anyone search from a market without its own dedicated page.

Not only will implementing hreflang tags improve user experience, but your rankings will also benefit from informing search engines that close duplicates are meant to serve specific regions. This helps to ensure that users see the most relevant version of your content and prevent near-duplicate content issues.

For hreflang tag implementation, it's important that the target page includes a reference to itself, as well as references any other translated alternatives of it that exist on the website, to give search engines a full view of what translated content exists. This also ensures that the content is served to the right language / regional audiences.

Google supports ISO 639-1 format for language codes, and ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 format for which regions you're targeting.

Below is an example of hreflang tag implementation if your website is localized using a subfolder structure:

<link rel="alternate" href="https://example.com/en-gb" hreflang="en-gb" />

<link rel="alternate" href="https://example.com/en-us" hreflang="en-us" />

<link rel="alternate" href="https://example.com/en-au" hreflang="en-au" />

<link rel="alternate" href="https://example.com/" hreflang="x-default" />

 

Additionally, hreflang tags can be implemented in one of three ways:

• Within the <head> section of each of your site pages;
• Via HTTP Headers;
• Through XML sitemap hreflang implementation.

Meta tags for language

Although Google prefers hreflang tags for international SEO, other search engines - like Bing - use meta language tags to decide the language on-page and where the content should be served.

The meta language tag should be added within the <head> code section of each internationalized page, and takes the following form:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us">

The value of the 'content' attribute is a hyphen-separated combination of a two-letter ISO 639-1 language code, and an optional two-letter ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 country code.

For example, to indicate that a page is in French as spoken in France, you would use 'fr-fr'. To indicate that a page is in French as spoken in Canada, you would use 'fr-ca'.

The meta language tag should be used in conjunction with hreflang tags, as not all search engines read meta language tags.

Domain strategy (pros and cons)

Crafting a strong domain strategy is vital for international SEO. It's best practice to have dedicated URLs for each local content page. There are a few URL structures that webmasters can use to target countries, which we cover below:

ccTLD

Several websites employ the use of country code top-level domains (ccTLDs for short): example.de, example.fr, example.es, etc...

ccTLDs provide the clearest signal to search engines and are easy to rank locally, but they can be expensive to maintain. Additionally, existing domain authority isn’t passed between new ccTLDs and your global top-level domain (gTLD), which can hinder your ability to rank new ccTLDs quickly.

gTLD

Many websites often leverage their existing global top-level domains (example.com), with either subfolders or subdomains to break out language / regional content variants.

Below is a gTLD example that uses a combination of subdomains and subfolders: ca.example.com/fr; ca.example.com/en.

You can also set up dedicated subfolders to serve a similar purpose: example.com/fr-ca, example.com/en-ca.

Subfolders

Using this method, international content is placed in a specific subdirectory, or subfolder, of a global top-level domain. This method is easier to maintain compared to leveraging ccTLDs and passes existing domain authority from your gTLD to localized page variants, allowing these new pages to rank quickly and effectively in the search results.

However, subfolders are a weaker signal to search engines and users for local results, requiring additional SEO tactics (like hreflang tags) to ensure that these pages display in the right language / regions.

Subdomains

Subdomains are used to separate content into multiple "third-level domains," each with its own language or region, and are easier to maintain than ccTLDs.

Like subfolders, subdomains are a weaker signal to search engines for local rankings and require leveraging other SEO tactics (such as hreflang tags) to ensure that search engines are serving results in the right regions / languages.

Unlike subfolders, subdomains don't pass existing domain authority from your gTLD - Google treats subdomains as a separate entity, and users may prefer to click on "local" results, depending on the region (example.de instead of de.example.com).

gTLD with language parameters

A general top-level domain (like .com, .net, or .org) can be targeted to speakers of a specific language by appending a URL parameter to serve translated / local results.

This method is easy to implement, but can be difficult to properly optimize (subfolders, ccTLDs, and subdomains are preferred compared to parameters, because parameters can lead to unwanted spider traps / faceted navigation issues).

Organize the site structure

If you want to make it easy for search engines to understand your website's URL structure, be consistent throughout the site (using a comprehensive subfolder / subdomain structure or leveraging ccTLDs for all targeted regions).

For example, don't mix subfolders with parameters and subdomains with ccTLDs. Only use one primary method of organization.

Optimizing for the right keywords, regionally

When you're focused on global SEO, using the right keywords is crucial to your success. Make sure that you don't just translate your keywords, as each language / region has its own set of nuances to follow.

Depending on the keyword, some may be easier to ideate, while others might take more time. For example, in international industries such as medicine or IT, English terms are often used instead of the country's native language. As a result, translating these keywords would not be beneficial.

The number of total monthly searches for keywords can also vary from one country to another.

To ensure your translations are accurate, it's best to work with native speakers. You can use automatic translation tools for keyword research as a starting point, but because language nuances often aren't captured by translation programs, the outputs may not be accurate or properly optimized.

Localized content variants (don’t use machine translations)

Once you've identified your target audience, know what languages they speak, and have crafted your list of target keywords, you can begin creating content.

If you're targeting a multilingual audience, you'll need to decide which language to use as the default for your website. This is the language that will be used for all your content unless you specifically target a different language with an alternate version of your site.

To help capture nuances in language and region, you should use human translators instead of machine translation.

Machine-translated content is often not good enough to serve to users and can harm your site's organic performance based on recent updates released by Google, such as the Helpful Content Update.

Link building strategies per market

Link building is an important ranking factor for international SEO. The number of links, as well as their quality, can help you determine how well your website will rank in different markets.

Additionally, generating backlinks from local regional authorities is a great way to signal to search engines that your content should also appear prominently for searches in that region / language.

If many of your site's backlinks come from domain names that end in ".de," it implies that your website is relevant to people in Germany. As a result, your page may perform well within those local SERPs in Germany.

Sitemaps

You should also ensure that content variants are included within your sitemap.xml file, as this will help search engines understand the relationship between internationalized pages on your website.

For instance, if you have an English page targeting English speakers, with translated pages in German that target Germany and Switzerland, your sitemap might look something like this.

Fixing bad redirects, crawl issues, broken links

As you craft translated pages, you should also consider the following:

• Are translated pages pointing to the right regional pages? (a page targeting Spain shouldn't be linking to pages targeting China)
• Are your pages pointing to other regional variants?
• Are they pointing to broken links / pages on the site?
• Are there canonical / redirect chains in place that are diluting page authority / hampering crawl budget?

Resolving these types of issues before launching your international SEO strategy will improve a search engine's ability to effectively crawl your entire website, but also save your engineering team time fixing these issues now, rather than compounding them by launching large sets of regional pages that either cause redirect chains, or internally link to the wrong language variants within the page's content.

Other signals for international SEO

Below are a few other SEO signals to keep in mind for international SEO:

Hosting on a local IP

Some search engines, like Google, use IP addresses as a signal to determine where content should be served. Consider hosting on local IPs in your target region to help search engines contextualize where your content should be served.

Linking to localized content

Another consideration is to ensure that your website is linking only to local content in primary areas, like your menu navigation or site footer.

If you don’t have enough local content to link to via your header / footer navigation when launching your international SEO strategy, it's likely too soon to launch.

Implementing unique design approaches (UX)

It's important to consider culture when you're making your design and content because people from different regions often have varying opinions on things like color, layout, and what type of humor is funny.

For example, certain colors may be associated with death in some cultures.

If you want everyone who comes to your website to have a positive experience, it's crucial that you take these cultural and regional differences into account so that there are no misunderstandings.

Menu navigation to switch languages

Give users the option to change languages if they want a different experience on your website instead of assuming that everyone wants English content. For example, a French user may want to read content in English, not in French. There should be an option on the site for users to easily switch languages.

Using a CDN to serve content

If you have a lot of international users, it's important to serve them content as quickly as possible. The best way to do this is by using a content delivery network (CDN).

A CDN is a group of servers that are in multiple countries around the world. When a user visits your website, the CDN will serve them content from the server that is closest to their location.

This helps to improve website speed, which is an important ranking factor for both international and local search results. Additionally, it will improve the overall user experience by serving content that loads quickly for both mobile and desktop users.

Don’t redirect users based on cookies or IP address

When optimizing a website for international search, it is important to avoid redirecting users based on cookies or IP addresses.

This can result in a poor user experience, as users may be redirected to the wrong version of the site or may be unable to access the site altogether.

According to Google:

"These redirections could prevent users (and search engines) from viewing all the versions of your site. (...)Don’t use IP analysis to adapt your content. IP location analysis is difficult and generally not reliable. Furthermore, Google may not be able to crawl variations of your site properly. Most, but not all, Google crawls originate from the US, and we don’t attempt to vary the location to detect site variations."

If a user appears to be in the wrong location, you can prompt them to review the correct version of the site by navigation instead, such as showing a banner at the top or bottom of the page with a message and a link to the suggested page to notify visitors and search engines about an alternate version of a website.

Don’t use cookies or scripts to show different language versions

You should also avoid using cookies or scripts to show different language versions of your site. This can cause problems for users who have disabled cookies or have browsers that don't support JavaScript.

Additionally, it can make it difficult for search engines to index your content properly, because Google can't crawl dynamic content, and even human users may not be able to see the proper dynamic content changes.

Optimizing for local search engines

Once you know the location of your target audience, you can also determine which search engines they're using. Google is the most popular search engine worldwide, but there are other search engines that are more popular in specific countries.

For example, Yandex is the most popular search engine in Russia, while Baidu is the most popular search engine in China.

It's important to note that each search engine has its own ranking algorithm, so you'll need to optimize your content accordingly.

Conclusion

International SEO can be complex and challenging because search engines like Google often display different results to users in different countries. To overcome this challenge, it is important to understand the various signals that search engines analyze to determine where your pages should rank and in what languages they should appear.

By staying up-to-date with the latest developments in international SEO and using best practices such as using hreflang tags and creating country-specific content, you can ensure that your website is properly indexed and ranked by search engines in different countries, helping to drive targeted traffic and increase your organic reach.

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