If you are looking to expand your company or have a business where you can offer products or services to international customers, then you may need to adapt your web content to tie in with common keywords used on international websites. Even if the copy is still required in English, variances in translation or alternative meanings can have a negative effect on your keywords if you are not careful.

When using English web content for targeting other countries such as the US or Australia, consider double meanings for words carefully and also familiarise yourself with local slang terms. Often just changing the tone of your content or adapting a few crucial words can make it more effective in other English speaking countries. Remember the issues are not so much with the consumers understanding your content, but more to do with a search engine misinterpreting the keywords and your website losing out in search rankings.

If your company is looking to cater for international countries where foreign languages are involved, this can be quite daunting in terms of your search engine optimisation. There are some good SEO tools you can use to aid the effectiveness of your searches, all require a bit of time and effort but are well worth it for good search engine ranking.

Although there are some good translation websites and tools online to help you with content, it is always a good idea to get professional advice or SEO services when it comes to web content for international purposes. Although words can be easily translated, phrases do differ and order of words is crucial within international web copy. It is quite common for professional translators to be knowledgeable in a specific industry or sector, which can be helpful in various ways in terms of producing web content.

We have stressed previously the importance of researching your customer needs and identifying the trends in the market, and this is particularly important in terms of international customers. It will take more time and effort to get to know a foreign market and apply this knowledge in SEO; however, it is worth it to have a high search ranking from an international search engine. If you can get a contact within the required market then this can really help as it will give you inside knowledge into what is required.

As with all search engine optimisation, checking out your competition is crucial. In a UK market we generally know who our main competitors are, but when looking for a search presence in other countries there may be competitors which you have never even heard of. Do some constructive and in-depth research and identify the companies who offer the most similar services to you and who are top of their game. It is also a good idea to browse through their web pages and see what sort of angle they use for their content.

Tackling international search engines can seem like a big step to take for your SEO campaign, but they all work in the same way ultimately. As long as the knowledge and translation is correct, you can easily succeed.

Keyword research is one of the most important parts of an SEO strategy. Along with link building strategies and social media marketing, it’s one of the most important things to get right. For SEO, content for each individual page across a whole website hangs off the plan of what keywords will be used where.

Choose keywords for relevance and have primary keywords planned out in a tree with the core ideas of your site on the main page which uses the main keywords, the next layer down having a second layer of slightly different keywords. For example, an online pet shop might have pet supplies, pet accessories, and pet food as keywords for the main page, with lower section pages with collections of keywords like cat food, cat toys, cat collars, and so on.

Plurals often aren’t important. Neither are linking words that don’t bring added meaning like ‘by’, ‘for’, ‘a’, ‘of’, and ‘the’. There are exceptions to the last rule but mostly the searcher has to explicitly enforce searching on a complete phrase to bring these words into play. Search engines know that if a person searchers for cat foods, the cat food keyword phrase is just as relevant. So is food for cats. Search for how to train a pony and you’ll get websites about training ponies. For search purposes, these keyword phrases hold the same meaning. Include one in each of your groups, not all variations on the theme. Use the variations in your content but consider them occurrences of the single parent phrase.

Keep in mind how popular your chosen keywords are. For ‘pet food’, say, competition is high and there are a lot of people out there selling it. Don’t rely on your main keywords bringing in all the traffic. Often it’s the less frequently searched by less contested keywords that bring the most value to your search engine optimization campaign.

Content absolutely must be written for real people, not web crawlers. It has to look natural and read smoothly, and say something worth saying. If it’s not providing value in some way, either by giving background information, helping users navigate the site, or providing them with some kind of resource, it looks like spam and won’t help your site’s SEO or win friends among users.

After you’ve made a sensible plan of what keywords will go where, there are two main traps to avoid. First is not to get keyword density too high. Stuffing your optimised content full of keywords looks like keyword spamming and is bad SEO, right? It’s difficult to read and search engines see right through it. Remember that they aren’t looking for the most highly optimised websites. They are looking for the best websites, and the best websites have a natural distribution of keywords throughout good quality content.

The second SEO trap is less obvious, but it’s easily avoided by having a tree of related but distinct keyword combinations on each page. If you use the same group of a few keywords on every page on your site, search engines get a little confused and you end up with the individual pages of your site competing with each other in the rankings. This is called keyword cannibalisation and is a significant issue. But, as we’ve said, easy to prevent. A good SEO Company can offer you a range of comprehensive search engine optimization services to help your website reach it’s online profile potential and bring a huge boost in traffic and conversions.

A successful search engine optimization campaign will begin at the drawing board, and will have a clear idea about the where it is going and how it will get there. It is essential, therefore, that before a single word of content is created or a single link built that you not only have an awareness of the basic methodology of SEO, but that you have an awareness of SEO in relation to your business, or to put it in simpler terms, if you want your optimization campaign to be successful you need to choose the right keywords!

The reason why keywords are so pivotal to an SEO campaign need not be explored here, but knowing what your customers are looking for is the difference between success and failure, and that is why choosing the right keywords to focus your SEO campaign on is so crucial.

The genius of Google is that it doesn’t hire out its organic results real estate to the highest paying bidders, and instead makes an attempt to devote its most prominent rankings to the most relevant pages. This should not be confused with Google Ads, which are the pay per click adverts that you see under sponsored search results whenever you make a search request in an engine. Search engine optimisation all boils down to authority with the engines and how good they think your website is for users. Online reputation management can form part of this, as can your offline reputation (for example the BBC website – which is also an incredibly valuable resource for users of course) but for businesses who aren’t big and famous, your SEO can make the difference between making money or not from your online presence.

When it comes to keywords, your competition is key and if you are a news website then bear in mind that popular keywords such as ‘news’ will inevitably have large entities such as the BBC near the top of the page. Instead of throwing your marketing budget at SEO keywords like this, which you never have a hope of ranking on the first page for, you are much better off doing some keyword research which specifically looks at your area of the market e.g. local council news in Newcastle-Under-Lyme.

Remember that some of the biggest brands will also be investing in an SEO company who will be using the traditional methods of search engine optimization, so on a small scale basis, therefore, you should attempt as much research as you can afford, this could begin with talking to friends or customers or creating word association lists; you should also visit the pages of rivals, and note what keywords they are focusing on by checking the source code of their sites, but of course you should never plagiarise as this will have a negative effect on your ranking.

Of course you don’t have to go for the most popular keywords, and often trying to compete with a bigger rival in this department isn’t the best idea; for example, if your product is a specific item, that has a technical or uncommon version of its name e.g. a ‘break-away bike’ versus ‘folding bike’, it may be a good idea to target this keyword; by doing so you will less likely have a huge amount of keyword competition and your page viewers are more likely to be serious visitors who are likely to convert to customers. Adopting a realistic approach is essential if you want to achieve your SEO goals.

One of the most important things to get right, keywords and keyword phrases are a strong determinant of just how well it is possible to optimise any website. Keyword research is one of the most important pieces in the SEO puzzle. It’s well worth your time to look into it in detail, especially when starting a new site from scratch.

The first item under the microscope is the business plan. What is on sale? Do people want it? Is it unique or are a lot of people already selling it? If the latter, what’s going to set your website apart? Come up with a list of words and phrases you would like to lead people to your website. They should be terms you would put into a search engine, let’s say Google, if you happened to be looking for the particular products or services that will be available on your website. Make it a long list, it can always be narrowed down later as your search engine optimisation gets more focused.

Let’s take the example of a shop selling SCUBA diving equipment. Some items from the basket of keywords might be scuba, scuba diving, scuba gear, diving gear, diving equipment, scuba equipment, diving, scuba tanks, wetsuits, fins, snorkels, dive masks, and dive computers. Ignore plurals, punctuation, and capitals- wetsuit and wetsuits are treated as the same item for most purposes, and so are SCUBA and scuba, but think about synonyms. Where one searcher might use scuba tank, another might use dive tank or oxygen tank. Alternative spellings from British or American English are worth adding to the list, and even popular misspellings.

Your keyword basket should cover the whole website, not just the main page. Each page should have some primary keywords. At the top level entry page, the keywords to concentrate on are the focus of the business. In this case, maybe scuba diving and scuba equipment. From there, create links to a second level that has pages about snorkels, pages about fins, and one with a combination of keywords from the scuba tanks, dive tanks, oxygen tanks group.

There are SEO tools available to help you assess keywords. They can tell you how many searches with those terms happen (in relative terms, not in real numbers, and with varying degrees of accuracy) and also suggest similar or nearby keywords that might be worth adding to your list. This is a great way to research what internet shoppers are looking for.

There is a potential pitfall here. The strongest keywords are also most likely to be the ones other websites target. There are likely to be a large number of websites with scuba diving as a primary keyword. This means a lot of competition, probably from some fairly serious established players who use very good search engine optimisation in combination with social media campaigns and other methods themselves. It will be harder to rank well and keyword based advertising will cost a lot more. You might be better off choosing keywords from the ‘long tail’ of the distribution of search terms. These are the less common but less contested terms. For example, the diving gear site might go for rescue diving equipment as a keyword phrase, or nox tanks rather than oxygen tanks.

The other advantage to choosing keywords from the long tail is that the people searching on very specific terms are more likely to be looking for something pretty exact, and know pretty well what they want. As customers, they’re more likely to be closer to making a purchase.