International SEO

International SEO is optimizing content so that it begins to rank in web searches outside of the country it was published in, or in languages other than the one it was originally written in.

There are two components to international SEO:

• Multiregional SEO
• Multilingual SEO

If you’re trying to optimize your English language content to get more traffic from the US, the UK, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, you’re engaging in multiregional SEO.

If you’re catering to an audience in the southern United States with content in both English and Spanish, it is multilingual SEO.

If you’ve created both English and Spanish versions of your content, and are targeting English-speaking audiences in the US and the UK, Spanish-speaking audiences in Mexico, Spain and Argentina, and bilingual audiences in the Philippines, you’re engaging in multiregional multilingual SEO.

Since over 60% of all websites on the internet are in English, most publishers creating English language content often have their content accessed by English users across regions.

For instance, a user searching for the keyword “Bitcoin” may see a large number of results from the US, irrespective of the location they are in.

We can see that American portals such as Coindesk and Bloomberg appear in search results along with local content. However, this does not mean that these portals are necessarily multi-regional. Google defines multi-regional websites as those which explicitly target specific geographies.

A good example of targeted multi-regional SEO is the popular American business magazine Entrepreneur.com.

When we visit the magazine’s homepage, we see the American version, with the domain in the address bar reading www.entreprenur.com