International SEO lets you expand your company's reach to international markets. In the below I talk about how to quickly perform keyword research for that. I assume you already have a keyword strategy that is working domestically in at least one language to be on this guide.
Similar to normal SEO, international keyword research involves identifying key phrases and terms used locally, understanding the intent behind these searches, and then crafting content that aligns with these patterns.
Review Search Profiles in the Target International Market
I'd suggest you get a head start by reviewing the keywords used by a few websites who are slightly ahead of you in the target market. Let’s assume you’re a real estate software company with an offering in the UK, but are looking to expand to Germany.
Find a few companies online already catering to the German market and look up their SEO profile: what keywords do they rank for, and what content are they producing? From this you can discover both
1) how specific terminology translates into German - as tools such as Google translate may often miss context, and
2) discover what resonates with the local audience.
This sort of analysis provides the foundation upon which to build a localized SEO strategy that caters to the specific preferences and needs of the German market.
If you’re not familiar how to perform keyword research, you can do so using tools such as SEMRush or Ahrefs to speed up the process. We also offer keyword research as a service.
Let's take a look at some of the keywords that https://www.immowelt.de/
Similar to English SEO for real estate, it consists of a combination of location-specific terms with verbs and nouns (buy = kaufen, property = immowelt, etc).
Consider International Search Competitiveness
As we’ve discussed before in the context of running SEO audits, understanding the level of competition in the target market is important in SEO. You will only rank for content that is within your domain’s reach.
For the real estate sector, this might mean looking into how competitive keywords like “immobilien” (real estate) are and then narrow down – generally it is not viable to target broad, highly competitive keywords; instead it is worth focusing on long-tail, niche keywords that will offer quicker smaller, wins. Usually for smaller websites there is no prospect of ranking for highly competitive keywords. You can get of keyword competitiveness again using tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs.
Remember Technical Aspects of Internationalisation and SEO
When internationalising a website there are a few ‘technical’ things to consider; two that frequently come up are the choice of whether to use a new website entirely (or to use the existing website and localise it), and the implementation of canonical language tags.
There are advantages and disadvantages to both, but usually businesses want to make use of their existing domain authority and so keep their original domain.
Internationalising a page while keeping the original domain involves using canonical language tags to help search engines understand language variants of content and deciding between setting up a subdomain or a subfolder for each language or country. These are called hreflang tags, which are pieces of code that usually sits in the backend of a page (it can also be done via sitemaps).
Some people choose to build the new website and search profile on an internationalised domain entirely (eg mydomain.de, rather than mydomain.com/de or de.mydomain.com).
Your new international domain can then link to your main language website, which in practice is often helpful to mutually boost both websites’ authority. But note the new international domain will have no existing search profile, and generally takes longer to set up. An example of a real estate company that have done this is Savills – https://savills.de/.
If you want help with the strategic or technical aspect when doing international SEO – including keyword research – feel free to book a call.
