Ready to get to work? To learn how to use the chart, see the quick guide below the graphic. For further explanation and exploration, check out the link bundle here with a slidedeck & more good stuff from our International SEO Webinar.

Overview

International SEO is a tricky subject, and every brand has a unique situation to consider. While Google provides some very high-level documentation on how to structure your site(s) and implement hreflang, there isn’t a lot of information about how to choose the best approach for structuring your site(s) in a way that makes the most sense for your brand.

That’s what I love about International SEO – the challenges of consulting are always fresh and interesting. It’s also why I created this flowchart – to lend clarity to the thought process that stakeholders need to go through before rolling out international sites. It’s part of mapping out the right strategy before you begin technical implementation.

It’s important to note this flowchart is designed to be simplistic; It does not account for every scenario or every consideration. To include every scenario would mean sacrificing clarity. The important thing is to focus on a chain of questions that will help you determine your strategy. On that note, I’d like to give a shout out to @blakecscott, who gave me great feedback and helped me with the design.

Here’s a text summary of how to use the above graphic when planning your International SEO strategy:

Step-by-Step Strategy

The first question to ask is whether there is significant search volume for the countries or languages that you are interested in targeting. Would it make sense to target a language-country combination where there are hardly any people in that market? No, not really. Be judicious and set realistic expectations about what markets you really want to expand into, before you go over-extending your empire like Alexander the Great. If there isn’t significant volume, and/or if traffic from certain countries doesn’t convert well, then those markets may not be worth pursuing.

The next question to ask is whether you honestly have the resources available to manage international content. Do you have design & development resources to handle multiple sites? Do you have writers to develop unique, localized content and professional translations? Do you have the budget and savvy marketing team capable of doing regional link outreach, to help your international sites build up authority? These are some of the determining factors in deciding whether to go with separate sites or not. If you don’t have the resources to accomplish all that, then sub-folders on one domain is your best bet, and you will benefit from a consolidated link profile.

The third question to ask is whether you have a compelling business reason to justify building multiple sites. If you are going to create significantly disparate sites, such as with different product catalogs or different information architecture, then separate sites is a good option. Choosing ccTLDs requires significant investment upfront, but it can be the right choice for larger companies, such as well-known retail or e-commerce brands. ccTLDs benefit from having the clearest geo-location signals and from receiving higher click-through rates.

Note: this flowchart doesn’t recommend sub-domains, because sub-domains are generally viewed as separate domains, so they suffer from the same disadvantage as top-level domains: separate backlink profiles. They do allow for the easy separate of sites and allow for different server locations, but these are not strong enough advantages to make sub-domains a better option than ccTLDs.

Implement and Refine

Once you’ve chosen the right structure for your international site(s), it’s time to implement and refine. First, you need to make sure that hreflang annotations are implemented correctly across all of your sites. Whether you choose to add hreflang tags via XML sitemaps or via the page tagging method, make sure to avoid these common pitfalls:

Hreflang tags need to be added to all pages within the page grouping. For example, if page A, page B, and page C are all variations of each other and are targeted towards different audiences, all three pages need to have hreflang tags that mention all three of the pages in the group. Don’t leave any of the three out of the hreflang club.

It’s also important that if you use canonical tags in tandem with hreflang tags, you do it right. Hreflang tags need to reference self-referential canonical URLs. For example, page A should have a canonical tag pointing to page A, page B should have a canonical tag pointing to page B, and page C should have a canonical tag pointing to page C. All three pages should have hreflang tags as mentioned above. You do NOT want to canonicalize only one version of a page in a page grouping, as that would interfere with hreflang annotations.

The next step is to “regionalize.” It’s not enough to duplicate your content across multiple sub-folders or TLDs and then hope that hreflang markup will eliminate the problem of duplicate content; the whole purpose of creating international targeted sites is to create custom web experiences for your target markets. So, you also need to regionalize your content by using professional translators, regional vernacular, local currency and contact details, and custom meta data. These things aren’t just “nice-to-haves;” these are necessary signals of quality in a post-Panda era.

The last step is to make sure that it’s all working properly, and to adjust as necessary. In evaluating progress, some success metrics to look for include SERP tracking across your target regions with AWR or similar, monitoring Google Webmaster Tools for hreflang errors, and tracking the flux of traffic from your target regions in Google Analytics.

Share your questions and insights in the comments, and get in touch with our SEO specialists for help with implementing international SEO for your company. If you’re interested in getting more advice on international SEO strategy, check out the link bundle here with a slidedeck & more good stuff from our International SEO Webinar.

The post International SEO Strategy Guide – Plus a Flowchart! appeared first on Portent.

So we have done our due diligence warning you about the dangers of duplicate content. But, there is another side to the story. There are instances where we’ve seen clients fear the duplicate content plague so much so that they go to extreme lengths to avoid it, and end up preventing their sites from performing optimally.

Let’s take Portent client www.RealTruck.com for example. This large e-commerce site in the competitive aftermarket truck accessories market had taken several measures to prevent their site from falling prey to the problem of duplicate content. They had implemented:

• nofollow, noindex attributes on hundreds of thousands of pages, including filtered category pages
• nofollow attributes to footer links and other internal links
• canonical tags to several sub-category and product pages that pointed to the main category pages
• canonical tags to categories with multiple pages, instead of rel=”prev” and rel=”next” pagination link elements

The client was worried about pages competing with each other, or cannibalizing each other. For example, a sub-category page such as Front-Mount Snow Plows would compete with the main Snow Plows category page. But in taking these measures, they simply weren’t ranking for long-tail keyword terms like “front-mount snow plows,” or search results for long-tail terms were going to the wrong landing pages.

We recommended that they remove noindex, nofollow attributes on filtered pages and internal links. By opening up the flood gates to sub-category and filtered pages, the main category pages were not losing out; rather, additional keywords were won.

We also recommended removing the canonical tags that were on sub-category and product pages that pointed to main category pages, using correct pagination for categories with multiple pages. With correct pagination, all pages reference the first page. Using the canonical tag, however, tells search engines that these pages are the same and prevents all but the first page from ranking, which is usually not what you want.

Once these recommendations were implemented, their top 20 keyword rankings nearly doubled in less than a year. Organic unique visits increased 102% between August 2013 and August 2014 – and continues to grow. Organic revenue increased 113% during that same time frame.

The Moral of the Story Is…

For RealTruck.com, much of their success comes from the fact that they are dedicated to search engine optimization. When we make a recommendation, their team whole-heartedly commits to implementing it. They’ve spent considerable time ensuring that their pages are unique and do not have duplicate content. Here are some of the additional tactics they’ve taken to make sure every page of their site provides unique value:

• All Meta Titles, Meta Descriptions, and H1 Tags are unique. They use templates within their CMS to vary these across the site, which reduces the risk of duplication at scale.
• All pages, especially main category and important sub-category pages, have at least 200 words of unique content prominently featured above (and below) the fold.
• Boilerplate info was eliminated or consolidated.
• An in-house designer creates unique banner images for important pages.
• Paginated pages now have with rel=”prev” and rel=”next.” Here’s the Google article explaining how to do this.
• For any pages that were true duplicates of each other, those were canonicalized or 301 redirected to the preferred page.

These things improved search engine optimization dramatically and, even more importantly, they provided a better user experience. Each page is not a cookie-cutter duplicate of the last, but rather is crafted and personalized depending on the filters selected.

In case you didn’t already know, Portent won Best SEO Campaign of 2014 at the US Search Awards for this campaign. Read more here about my colleague Ken Colborn and our team winning this awesome award.

How to Tell a Real Duplicate Page from a Fake

Duplicate content is a huge can of worms in itself, but the real problem here was an over-extension of the definition. There’s a difference between real duplicate content and fake duplicate content.

See if you can spot the duplicate page here:

Duck Image provided by Florentijn Hofman

I tried to make it painfully obvious but just in case you didn’t notice, Page B is definitely the duplicate. Printer-friendly versions of pages, by definition, have absolutely no unique content from the original page, and so those should be noindexed or should have a canonical tag pointing to the original page. Page C however, even though it has a similar image and layout as page A, has some unique content, so it should be allowed to stand on its own.

Duplicate Content is Not the Devil

Many people worry about duplicate content, but Google has never said that it would directly cause a penalty. “Something like 25-30% of web content is duplicate content,” Matt Cutts of Google said in this video:

Google doesn’t treat duplicate content as spam by default. You have to do spammy things with that duplicate content, like set up an auto-generated site based off an RSS feed, in order for Google to take action against your site.

The problem with duplicate content is not that it will get you a slap on the wrist from Google; it’s that it confuses the hell out of the search engines and forces them to choose which one of your duplicate pages is the best to show in search results. And sometimes they’ll choose the wrong one.

If you need help strategizing how best to address duplicate content issues on your site, check out our SEO services.

The post Is Duplicate Content Really a Problem? appeared first on Portent.

How to unGoogle Yourself:

I used to manipulate the search query string itself in the URL bar to make it do what I wanted. Now, I’m too lazy for that, and there are ways to automate the process. But first, let’s look at the search query bar to learn what all the moving parts are:

You could technically just play around with this search bar until you get the results for the country and languages you’re targeting. But not everyone knows what the country and language codes are, and so here are some work-arounds.

There are a few methods to manually set this up:

• Sign out of all your Google accounts
• Clear your browser’s cache and cookies
• Change your location in Google using the Search Tools box. Note: you have to set your location according to the country-coded top-level domain that Google is currently using. So if you are on google.com, you can only select a location within the USA.
• Use the Incognito Browsing mode in Google Chrome. When you fire up Chrome, click the icon on the far right of the search box that looks like three horizontal bars, and then select Open New Incognito Window. You’ll know you’ve done it correctly when you see:

One of the easiest ways to automate this process is to go to http://www.impersonal.me, put in your site, and then select one of the presets that matches the country you want to target, or select Options in order to change the interface language, the TLD, and the location of the search. Then impersonal.me does the rest. An alternative is http://isearchfrom.com.

A more advanced option is to use a proxy, or alternatively, a VPN. Make sure you are using a trusted proxy, not one of the freebies.

Let’s Just Talk About Daniel Day-Lewis for a While

Why the British Daniel Day-Lewis was the unbelievably perfect role for Abraham Lincoln, my American brain will never understand. Anyway, I did some digging around between the US and UK Google search results to find some interesting results on my favorite actor.

The first thing I noticed is that, regardless of whether I was signed in or out of my Google accounts, nothing in the search results changed. This means that no one in my Google+ circle cares about Daniel Day-Lewis and hasn’t shared anything about him that Google thought I might like to see. In other words, my Google+ friends need to focus more on what really matters in life, like fine method acting.

The second thing I noticed while searching on Google.com, is that the 11th result (below the in-depth articles) was an article from the http://www.dailymail.co.uk titled “Daniel Day-Lewis to receive a knighthood,” which shouldn’t have surprised me because if Sir Elton John is a knight, Day-Lewis deserves to be one too.

This search result is puzzling because the rest of the first page results all come from US top-level domains, but not too puzzling when we remember that Day-Lewis is British so there’s bound to be some British articles that float to the top, even in the US.

Sure enough, when I switched over to GB (Great Britain) as my location, the dailymail.co.uk result was #2, behind the British newspaper The Guardian, which had also made an appearance at #7 in the In-Depth Articles section on the US results. The Guardian is a bit of an interesting exception because they recently migrated from .co.uk to .com, so I am assuming that Google thinks they swing both ways.

So, the 2 British sites that made it onto the first page in the US also dominate the search results in the UK. But other than those two results (and the resource box on the right), there is no other overlap in organic listings.

The US results:

The UK results:

The most important thing to notice here is that if you are searching from the US, you get a fairly different set of search results than if you search in the UK for the same thing. Also, it appears that in the US, search results are more oriented towards Daniel-Day Lewis as an actor, while in the UK, the search results are more oriented towards him as a person. Intriguing.

Tools for Tracking Keyword Rankings Globally

There are some great tools for tracking keyword rankings in different locations across the globe. Advanced Web Rankings and SEMRush are two that come to mind.

In Advanced Web Rankings, or AWR, you can use their online web app or their desktop tool to create custom reports. You can create a project in which you can designate websites to track, such as your website alongside your competitors, your targeted keywords, and specific search engines.  You can target search engines by country or by region, such as Google Organic USA (loc: salt lake city, ut), which means that AWR will look at keyword rankings specifically as if they were located in Salt Lake City. You can also select different languages for the search engines. For instance, German search results in Switzerland as opposed to French results in Switzerland.

In SEMRush, when you login to your online account, you can view the organic positions report and then click through the different country tabs to view your rankings in those regions. But you can’t select different languages, so you don’t have as much flexibility as with AWR.  SEMRush has 26 countries to select, while AWR has hundreds, including major search engine indexes in the main regional languages for each country. Besides, in AWR you can select multiple search engines per project, while in SEMRush you have to create a separate project for each search engine you want to track. So AWR wins this battle.

Parting Thoughts

People all over the world might be searching for your product or service and are probably seeing very different results based on their location. It would be a false sense of security to think that your global rankings are as good as the results in your neighborhood. In order to determine what your customers are most likely seeing on Google, you need to go incognito. This is just the first step in evaluating and tracking your SEO success on a global scale, but it’s a crucial one.

The post How to Go Incognito for International Search Queries – and Why appeared first on Portent.