Cross-border SEO can help you build brand awareness and increase sales in international markets. Here’s how to build a strategy for your ecommerce business.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a powerful tool for ecommerce business owners, especially when selling products globally. When implementing a cross-border SEO strategy, you must consider language and cultural differences, increased competition, and the technical challenges of hosting multiple versions of your site for different countries. But the rewards can be great. Cross-border SEO strategies can serve a vast audience with content tailored to their specific needs. Here’s what you need to know to get started.

What is Cross-Border SEO?

Cross-border SEO is the process of optimizing the content and structure of your website to improve search engine rankings in countries other than your business' home country.

Using international search engine optimization (SEO) strategies, you can tell search engines that your content is designed for customers who speak a particular language or are located in a particular country. You can also optimize your site content (or on-page SEO) to suit the needs of specific international audiences. For example, you can create pages that target relevant keywords that are most popular in a particular country.

8 Key Steps to Building a Cross-Border SEO Strategy

1. Identifying target countries using current performance
2. Conduct market research
3. Tailor your strategy to the most popular search engines in each country
4. Creating localized content
5. Conducting keyword research
6. Create a dedicated URL
7. Building local backlinks
8. Using hreflang tags

The main difference between domestic SEO strategies and cross-border SEO strategies is that domestic SEO focuses on one country or specific region, while cross-border SEO targets multiple countries or regions.

For this reason, cross-border SEO practices include all domestic SEO best practices, as well as elements related to targeting multiple international audiences. Below is an outline of the steps you should follow to successfully execute your cross-border SEO efforts.

1. Identify target countries using current performance

The first step in starting a cross-border SEO strategy is to decide which countries you want to target. Many business owners create an initial list of countries based on their current international sales, anticipated market demand, and logistical considerations for increasing sales in a particular region.

You can use Google Analytics and Google Search Console to gain insight into your current international ecommerce audience. To see data on your international performance, log in to Google Analytics and go to 'Audience', then 'Geo', then 'Location'. The dashboard shows you the countries with the most user sessions on your website, in a color-coded map.

After you’ve identified the countries that are generating your site traffic, use Google Search Console to evaluate the quality of traffic from each country. Log in to the platform, go to “Search Performance Report,” and use the country filter to select the countries that are generating significant traffic. This report shows you the top 1,000 search queries that drive clicks to your site. If popular queries indicate that your site visitors are converting or likely to convert, you can decide to target those countries.

2. Market Research

Market research involves gathering information about your target audience, competitors, and relevant trends within a particular market. To successfully expand internationally, business owners must conduct market research in every country (or region) where they intend to do business.

The results of international market research will help you identify your competitors and develop marketing, sales, and SEO strategies tailored to the needs, preferences, and decision factors of each local audience. For example, you can learn which search engines are most popular with a particular local audience, what percentage of searches are on mobile devices, and what the demographics of users who use products like yours are.

3. Tailor your strategy to the most popular search engines in each country

The success of SEO marketing depends on how well your site performs on the search engines your audience prefers, and different countries have different popular search engines. For example, in the United States, Google is the most popular search engine, while in Korea, Naver is used, in China, Baidu is used, and in Russia, Yandex is the most popular search engine.

Cross-border SEO strategies involve identifying the most popular search engines in your target region and tailoring your content and technical settings accordingly. For example, a business targeting Chinese users may want to pay attention to image alt tags. Baidu’s image AI is different from Google’s and relies more on alt tags and image metadata to identify images.

4. Localized content

Creating localized content involves using localized keywords, local language and idioms, local currency, time zone, phone number, and address.

If you plan to target customers who speak different languages, you will need to translate your content into one or more foreign languages. Since translation is not done literally, most companies hire professional translators instead of using machine translation.

You can also tailor your content based on your market research. For example, if you sell pre-made meal kits, you might highlight the time-saving benefits in countries with particularly high workweeks.

5. Keyword research

A direct keyword translation is unlikely to match search queries in international markets. This can also apply to markets that share a native language, such as Canada or Australia. While English is the primary language in the United States, Canada, and Australia, differences in local culture and idioms affect the terms customers use when searching for your products. For example, what is called “cotton candy” in the United States is called “candy floss” in the United Kingdom.

You can use keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner, Moz, and Semrush to conduct location-based keyword research. These tools show you keyword search volume and difficulty by country, and can help you choose new keywords for each region and refine your SEO content using popular local search terms.

6. Create a dedicated URL

If you want to target multiple markets, you’ll need a dedicated URL for each market. There are several ways to create a region-specific URL. Here’s an overview of some of the more popular options.

Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs)

Some companies use the unique code for each country as the final section of their domain name, also known as the top-level domain. For example, a US site might use www.feltedsheep.us, a French site might use www.feltedsheep.fr, and a German site might use www.feltedsheep.de . This strategy provides an intuitive user experience, but has the disadvantage of requiring multiple domains to be purchased and maintained.

Subdirectories

To create a dedicated URL using subdirectories (or subfolders), simply change the URL path for each market. For example, a French site might be located at www.feltedsheep.com/fr . This URL structure allows you to keep all your content within one domain. You can target local markets while building domain authority with a single website.

Subdomains

A subdomain is an extension of a traditional domain, appearing at the beginning of a website’s domain name. For example, “fr” in www.fr.feltedsheep.com . Subdomains are customizable and can be used to target specific languages ​​or specific regions within a country. The main disadvantage of this approach is that search engines treat each subdomain as a separate website, meaning that subdomains do not benefit from the SEO authority of the root domain.

7. Building local backlinks

Local backlinks have a greater impact on search results than links from other markets, which is why many businesses invest in local link building strategies such as contacting journalists, guest posting, or asking for product reviews in each market.

Content marketing, the process of creating and distributing valuable content to your target audience, can also help you gain local backlinks in international markets. To maximize results, tailor your domestic content marketing strategy to the specific needs of the local audience in each market.

8. Using hreflang tags

The hreflang tag is a piece of HTML code that tells search engines that the content of a page is written for a specific local audience. It allows for language and country targeting, allowing search engines to display appropriate language pages to users in different countries or regions.

Search engines penalize duplicate content. To avoid penalties for having two or more pages written in the same language (e.g. English pages for the UK, US, and Australia), use hreflang tags to differentiate each page to search engines. For example, if you edit a US product page to appeal to UK readers, you can use the hreflang tag “en-gb.”

Here is an example of using hreflang tags:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-gb" href="https://www.shopify.com/uk/website/builder” >

Cross-Border SEO Strategy FAQs