International SEO: 5 Basic SEO Issues You Should be Considering |  |
- International SEO: 5 Basic SEO Issues You Should be Considering
- Understanding & Optimising Your Organic CTR With Markup
- Win tickets to BrightonSEO!
| International SEO: 5 Basic SEO Issues You Should be Considering Posted: 20 Aug 2015 06:55 AM PDT The number of businesses that now ship or trade in multiple countries is growing by the day. No longer is it just the large corporations that have the ability to ship their products at competitive rates and increase their returns. Although many have increased their international revenue streams, the majority of brands large and small neglect to think of implementing basic SEO best practice for internatioanlisation. Below I have provided 5 basic SEO issues that you should be considering when it comes to international SEO. Choose the right URL StructureDetermining which URL structure to use is a big decision, and should be a business decision rather than solely an SEO decision. There are three different options when it comes to choosing the URL structure and they all have different pros and cons. Sub-domainWith search engines treating sub-domains as new entities, any sub-domain will be treated as a separate website. This would mean that you need to build the authority across each new sub-domain. Examples: Sub-folderSub-folders is my preferred method, and one that is used widely throughout the world. Sub-folders allow you to use the power of the existing domain and filters through to the country specific versions. A great example of this being used is Apple.com Examples: ccTLDIf you have the right infrastructure and you have ALL the domains for the markets you are currently operating in, as well as the ones you want to move into, this can be a good fit. With the ccTLD route, you are providing the search engine with the biggest hint that it is local to the specific region, whilst the above doesn’t provide that. A great of example of this being used is Amazon. Examples: Any of the above will work, which is why it becomes a business decision as much as an SEO one. Localise the languageIf you are marketing to multiple countries it is essential that you are either translating the content or at the very minimum you are using local language. The more specific you are to your target audience, the better the search engines will understand who you appeal to; showing the correct sites to the correct audiences at all times. A good example is the UK and the US where both countries speak English, however there are obvious spelling differences. Examples (UK then US):
Alongside the obvious spelling differences, the search terms that are used also differ. One that we commonly come across is holiday (UK) vs vacation (US). These changes make a huge difference to both users and search engines, and should be a priority. This can also be extended to the UX of the website with different countries being accustomed to different options, specifically throughout the payment gateway. I was listening to a talk at UX Oxford recently where the presenter was telling us how credit cards are not commonly used in Germany. She proceeded to say that by split testing, they found that removal of the credit card option from the German payment gateway actually increased conversion. They were being specific to the audience. When you are creating a website that targets multiple languages and regions, you need to ensure that it is as targeted to the audience as possible. Use the Href Lang tagWhen having the same content across multiple countries, you are more likely to have an issue with duplicate content and potentially having the incorrect region visible in the search engines. To reduce the potential for this, search engines have adopted the Href Lang tag to allow webmasters to give them an indication of target audience. You can implement the tag in three ways:
More information about how to implement Href Lang can be found here. Other resources for Href Lang include: Separate Countries within the Search ConsoleI am assuming that you are already using Google’s Search Console, but have you created a profile for each country location? Creating a new profile for each separate country will allow you to become more granular with your targeting and understanding of the performance. To do this, you will need to create a new property and include the regional URL as shown below.
Split your XML Sitemaps by CountryXML Sitemaps are a basic SEO requirement for any website and should be seen as even more important for websites that have an international presence. The big difference for international websites is that you need to split the XML sitemaps by country or region. This will allow you to then submit to the correct profile within Search Console. For me, there are two ways that you can split the XML Sitemap. The first is to create a single sitemap index that contains the sitemaps for each of your countries. The second, and my preferred method is to create a sitemap index for each country. This way you can be granular with your sitemaps down to product, service or article level. This method will allow you to more accurately identify where any possible indexing gaps are. That’s it! What basic SEO issues are you considering when you look into international SEO? I’d love to hear your comments either below or over on twitter @danielbianchini. The post International SEO: 5 Basic SEO Issues You Should be Considering appeared first on White.net. |
| Understanding & Optimising Your Organic CTR With Markup Posted: 18 Aug 2015 01:10 AM PDT Sometimes having that top 10 ranking isn’t enough – you need to look at your competitors, edit and evolve in order to enjoy the effects of a good organic CTR; gaining greater traffic volumes, exposing your brand to a greater volume of people and taking traffic away from your competitors. In this blog post I’m going to examine way that you can optimise your click through rate with the help of markup. Be aware of your environment; Your website does not exist in a vacuumYour success is not always down to what you’re doing. Sometimes its down to what your competition is doing as well. An example of this can be drawn from a popular UK beauty blog essiebutton.com. A quick poke through SEMrush reveals some of the most visible keywords for this popular beauty blog:
Whilst the focus of the blog is beauty, we can see that this particular blog post on Easy Banana Bread is a popular one:
http://www.essiebutton.com/2015/04/01/easy-banana-bread-recipe-bakingwithbutton/ So let’s take a look at all of the keyword terms this post is ranking for. Overall this post has a good level of visibility, but it looks like there there is opportunity to capture a lot more traffic than is currently achieved. The post ranks in second page SERP positions for most of its keywords.
In cases like this it’s important to remember that your website does not exist in isolation. You compete against specific websites which rank above and below for the same terms and its important to look to these in order to assess your own position within the SERP landscape. Lets look at the competition for the essiebutton.com banana bread recipe:
By doing this we can assess that the blog post fails to capture to capture the traffic of its competitors for two main reasons:
Takeaways:In this case, the video based format of the blog post doesn’t do it any favours when competing with other recipe results. However, the video resource could be turned into an asset by employing Schema VideoObject markup. This would provide valuable visual real estate for the post and set it apart from other results in the SERPs. Likewise it would be useful to add the recipe in written form below the video in the post in order to help those who want to watch the video upfront but then follow a written recipe as they bake (after all, navigating through a video on your iPad with floury hands isn’t exactly ideal) and many people like to print recipes to re-use again later. Hansel was a geniusOne of my favourite pieces of mark up from the last few years (yes I’m sad enough to have a favourite!) is breadcrumb markup. Breadcrumbs have been used on-page on websites for many, many years, but only in recent times have they become standard in Google search results. When there is no structured data to refer to, Google will display whatever structure it feels best represents the way that page fits in your site and it bases this on:
You can see in the essiebutton.com example above that Google has failed to find an effective way to parse the URL into breadcrumb format, which is holding back the result compared to others around it. If your website has a sensible and/or user friendly hierarchy, then its likely that Google will understand the structure of your website and thus assign the correct crumbs to the page in SERPs, such the example below from the Guardian.
However, if your website’s structure is very old or wasn’t designed with much thought, you might suffer from unhelpful breadcrumbs in search results, which may actually dissuade searchers from clicking on your search result. Take the example of Colanders cook shop (below). There are two issues here:
Ah pages - my favourite part of the site Be clear, concise & creativeAs you can see below, having a shorter domain name really pays off on mobile SERPs, as searchers can view more of the breadcrumb and use this to judge if the page is relevant to them. If you’re website is one with a high (or indeed growing) proportion of mobile visitors, its worth thinking about how you can optimise your search results for mobile customers.   You can find more about breadcrumbs and how you should aim to display them in search results in this post by Paula Allen from April 2015. Takeaways:Don’t just look at title and meta description when thinking about CTR from SERPs, there are other elements that you may have previously glossed over. Often its not a case of your website doing it super-wrong, but that your competitors are doing it much better. If your competitors breadcrumbs are super-helpful and user-friendly, then don’t rely on Google to get your websites right – show it how with markup. You can find a guide to implementing breadcrumb markup in the link cited above. The post Understanding & Optimising Your Organic CTR With Markup appeared first on White.net. |
| Posted: 14 Aug 2015 02:22 AM PDT
One of our favourite events in the calendar, BrightonSEO is a fantastic chance to educate yourself in the latest SEO tactics, be inspired to try something new and rub shoulders with some of the UK’s elite digital marketers. The only problem is, its so popular that getting a ticket can be a little tricky – tickets for September sold out in only a few minutes. But, don’t despair, we can help; we have two tickets to give away! We’re also giving away a selection of some of our favourite books on the topics of SEO and creative content creation – making this a veritable bundle of SEO inspiration. So, to be in with a shout of winning one of these tickets, a set of books and some White.net paraphernalia such as a (very comfy) hoodie or t-shirt, we want you to unleash your inner creative side. We’d like you to tell us the everyday challenges you face in creating content for your online campaigns. And just like much of the content we have to create for SEO, the more fun, playful and eye-catching your entry, the better! At Brighton we’re hosting a roundtable discussion on the difficulties of creating content that works for SEO, and want to hear about the problems and questions you have on the subject. Your entry can take any format – you could try:
Submit your entries using the hashtag or subject line #99contentproblems to Twitter, Vine or email info (at) white dot net. For inspiration, we are going to create a few videos, featuring LEGO, Scrabble letters, sticky notes and anything else in our office, all to get your creative juices flowing! In the meantime, check what your office cupboard hides and how you can reuse it to put together a winning message. Closing date for entries is the 31st of August, and we’ll be picking the winners by the 4th of September. By submitting your entry via Twitter, Vine or email, you agree to the image being used by us to further promote the competition and to reproduce them on our website and social media. You can also purchase one of the premium BrightonSEO tickets for the range of training courses on the 17th September (the day before the conference), which also give you access to the main conference – well worth it if you want to pack every bit of learning into your trip to the south coast. Let us know what content problems you have that you’d love some fresh ideas to solve and why you want to go to BrightonSEO, and we’ll hopefully see you there! The post Win tickets to BrightonSEO! appeared first on White.net. |
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