Taking your E-commerce business global is no piece of cake. While the digital medium removes some of the barriers that a physical store would bring in, the online world also comes with its fair share of difficulties, and overcoming them can often seem like a daunting task.
Tips to Optimize Your Online Store
However, owning a multinational business is also an extremely exciting journey, and you will be presented with a multitude of opportunities to make the process a little easier for you.
SEO plays a very important role in all of this since being discovered through organic searches is one of the most cost-effective ways of promoting your digital store. So, here is a comprehensive guide to getting you started on making your E-commerce business an international one, and all the SEO tips you will need during the journey.
Things To consider
Before delving into the realm of multiple geographical boundaries, there are a few considerations to keep in mind to ensure that this is indeed the right move for your business. Conducting a feasibility test can be quite helpful since it can tell you if your digital store is ready to take on the technical challenges that come with such a level of upscaling. Take your forecasted ROI into consideration, and see whether the same can be maintained as you encounter changes in cultures and languages. Conduct ample market research to determine if the potential volume of traffic is indeed worth all the technical difficulties. If you come up with a positive result, then you may go ahead with the process. If not, then it might be time to slow down and see if this is what your business needs at the moment.
Common SEO Challenges And Ways To Fix Them
Encountering challenges while implementing the SEO plan you devised is an expected issue, but how you deal with them can be the defining factor for your online store.
- Not keeping local cultures in mind – Business owners who are taking their store global often forget to infuse the essence of the local culture into their site. The same strategy that worked for the domestic market may not function here, so you will have to do ample research into the current cultural trends and try your best to incorporate them into your site, so that the users feel comfortable on it.
- Optimizing local sites – In quite a few cases, local sites are not properly optimized since they usually launch it before the entire content has been effectively translated. As a result, what comes out of it is a half-baked website that garners no real results.
- Keyword research – Most business owners make the mistake of directly translating keywords and using them in their site. This is a sure-fire way to ensure the website doesn’t succeed. To rectify it, you will have to research on what the local keywords are, and then make use of them.
- Having multiple sites – Global sites usually have content similar to the original ones, which means that them interfering with each other is a high possibility. In order to fix this, geo-targeting and making use of keywords specifically designed for the local market to ensure there is no duplication.
Optimizing your online store
You can optimize your global E-commerce store by ensuring that you divert your focus towards important aspects that help in driving foot traffic. This includes conducting very thorough keyword research that can help boost your rankings, picking the right architecture for your website, so that you encounter no technical glitches, and are provided with easy scalability options. Lastly, local SEO is an important point for retailers to keep in mind, along with optimizing your on-page SEO plan.
Hreflang
While running global sites, you may have a lot of duplicate content in different languages. Hreflang is a neat tool that gives Google the signal regarding which language you are making use of, so only users that make use of it can see it. You may implement this through HTM head, XML sitemap, or even HTTP header.
Conclusion
International SEO can often force you to wade through some tricky waters, but as long as you keep in mind the local cultures and steer clear of direct translations, you should be fairly safe in terms of an optimized SEO strategy.
