Within Europe, the Netherlands is one of the most advanced digital countries. This leading position provides an excellent starting point for internationalization. More and more Dutch companies are therefore choosing to expand internationally and thus continue to grow.

Growing internationally with the help of SEO

To gain a foothold internationally, you need to do more than just translate your website or webshop. People often think too simplistically about internationalization and becoming internationally findable. Your target group in countries such as Germany and France probably searches differently than in the Netherlands.

Moreover, the mentality in other countries often differs considerably from that in the Netherlands. It is important to respond to this with your entire website, including your content. A good and thorough approach ensures that you lay a solid foundation for international growth and become increasingly findable internationally.

With an international SEO strategy, we work with you to ensure that your website connects with your target audience, builds topical authority in the right way, and contains the right technical implementations. This is the only way to take the best steps internationally.

Samenwerking met Payta
โ€œSince 2020, SmartRanking has been Payt's SEO partner for international SEO. Payt has major international growth ambitions in the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, and the United Kingdom.โ€

The importance of international SEO

If your company has sustainable plans for international growth, it is important to diversify. As a company, you don’t want to be dependent on just one marketing channel. This is important for every type of company, regardless of whether you run a platform, B2B company, or online store. By implementing an SEO strategy focused on all the countries you target, you will become easier to find. And this, in turn, will benefit your business and company growth.

The first step to growing internationally is usually to use advertising, for example via Google Ads. Are you gaining traction with this? Then it is important to use international SEO to avoid two major risks of advertising:

The advertising drip

In the online world, we see that many companies are heavily dependent on Google Ads. This means they are literally hooked on Google’s advertising lifeline. If you stop advertising, you will suddenly receive no orders and your business will collapse.

Dependence on a single channel

With advertising, you can easily be outbid by someone with deeper pockets. A good example is Amazon: what if they suddenly increase their bids on search terms that you also target?

This will be at the expense of your margin and, in some cases, you will be forced to stop advertising. This will then be at the expense of your turnover and therefore your profitability abroad.

We are definitely not against the use of advertising. But it is important not to be dependent on a single (advertising) channel. So diversify your marketing strategy.

The approach for an international SEO process

Do you want to become more visible internationally? With the Smarter Way of Ranking, we ensure a good start and well-thought-out implementation of an international SEO process. Based on a number of steps, we establish a solid foundation for your international SEO and let it grow together with you or your team.

1

Introduction

First of all, we would like to get to know you. This will allow us to learn about your company, but also discuss your objectives, needs, current SEO efforts, and internal capacity. During the introductory meeting, we will also be happy to take you through the latest developments in SEO, such as Navboost, E-E-A-T, and building topical authority.

2

Presentation proposal

A good match between an agency and your company is important for a successful collaboration. Is there a match between us? Then we will get to work on a proposal, without obligation, in the form of a pitch. During the pitch, we will explain how we will approach the project, what the opportunities are, and what the proposed division of tasks will be.

3

Strategy

Is the proposal approved? Then the first month of our collaboration will be devoted to developing the complete strategy. During this strategy month, we will work on the following, among other things:

  • Keyword research.
  • Setting up a tracking project.
  • Drawing up a content plan.
  • Performing a technical analysis.
  • An impact mapping session.
  • An E-E-A-T analysis.

These analyses and studies form the basis of your findability. Based on this strategic month, we will gain insight into how the market works and what the next steps are to make your website findable.

4

Presentation strategy

It is important to take you through the findings from A to Z, the exact status of the project, the further opportunities we have identified, and the proposed schedule for the coming months. We will prepare this presentation based on the strategy month and go through it with you.

5

Optimization

Once we have agreed on the proposed approach, we will start working on the monthly optimizations. The optimizations are prioritized based on impact versus effort and scheduled in monthly optimization sprints. Each month begins with an SEO meeting to discuss the results and activities together. This way, you are always up to date on the KPIs and scheduled activities. We believe that a pleasant collaboration is the basis for good results.

Interested in an international SEO program?

Feel free to contact us for an introductory meeting. During this meeting, we will discuss your goals, your current approach to improving your findability, developments in the field of SEO, and your growth opportunities.

Contact us

Important components of international SEO

Implementing international SEO requires a different approach than optimizing your website for the Netherlands alone. Good international findability consists of optimizations in the areas of technology, content, UX, and authority. Important aspects of your international SEO strategy include:

  1. Correct implementation of hreflang tags, so that crawlers properly understand the relationship between the different domains or page groups.
  2. Adding a well-functioning language switcher, so that users can easily change languages.
  3. Improving loading time, for example by using a CDN. This way, your website is loaded from different local servers.
  4. Localizing your content, taking cultural differences into account.
  5. The correct use of punctuation marks: in France, there is a space between a word and an exclamation mark, and in Germany, the euro sign is placed after the number.
  6. Providing insight into how the target group searches. For example, the way people search in the Netherlands is not always the same as the way foreign visitors search for your services or products.
  7. Preventing and resolving internal duplicate content, which causes Google to rank pages incorrectly or not at all in different countries.
  8. Grammatically correct content in the right language, because someone from England doesn't want to read German content.
  9. Relevant and high-quality international backlinks: if you have a page with Italian content, Dutch backlinks are of no use to that page.

An international website structure

For international search engine optimization, it is important that your website has a good site structure. A good structure ensures that crawlers understand your website faster and index it better. Our advice is to use subdirectories, subdomains, or country-specific domains.

We are happy to help you with the site structure when setting up your international website. By considering this from the outset, you ensure a good foundation and avoid having to make changes later on. Based on data and thorough research, we can work out the recommended structure, either together with you or independently.

Is your website already live? In some cases, it may be wise to adjust the URL structure. In that case, it is important that the old URLs are correctly redirected to the new URLs using 301 redirects. We will discuss this during the presentation of our proposal if we recommend it.

Migration to an international website

Do you currently have a website that focuses on one language and are you planning to build an international website? In many cases, this will change the domain name or URL structure. In that case, it is also important that you perform a proper SEO migration.

We are happy to advise your developer on how to migrate your website to the new site structure while maintaining your website’s current authority.

SEO migration in 7 steps

For every SEO migration, we follow seven fixed steps to ensure that the migration is carried out correctly and smoothly. We explain the seven steps in our blog.

View the SEO migration step-by-step plan

Other international search engines

Your international customers don’t just search via Google. Search engines such as Yandex, Baidu, Bing, and Yahoo also have a large international reach. Knowledge of these different search engines is therefore very important. It is often thought that all search engines work the same way. This is not the case; Bing has a different algorithm than Google, for example.

For Bing, for example, the HTML lang=โ€œโ€ attribute is still important, while Google only looks at the hreflang tags to understand the relationship between different languages.

The technology behind your international website

Search engines such as Bing and Yandex are several years behind Google’s algorithm. However, for each of these search engines, the technology behind your website is the foundation of your findability. When implementing international SEO, we therefore pay careful attention to technical SEO.

Implementation of hreflang tags

The hreflang attribute tells search engines where to find the different language versions of a page. This makes it indispensable for good international findability. However, the implementation of hreflang tags often goes wrong, which then has an impact on findability.

Our consultants know that proper implementation of hreflang tags is of great importance. They advise you or your development team on the correct implementation of hreflang tags, including the x-default tag.

On-page optimization

In addition to your website’s technology, your content must also be optimized for international findability. Many companies translate their content into another language using translation machines such as Google Translate or DeepL. This allows you to quickly establish a good foundation for your international website, but in many cases, a 1-to-1 translation is not sufficient.

Unfortunately, translation machines do not understand how your target audience searches and what is important to them. Building your international findability therefore goes beyond simply translating content. Without proper localization of your website, you will never become the international market leader.

Keyword research is the best way to gain insight into the international search behavior of your target audience. It forms the basis for relevant content. Based on the keyword research, our specialists will get to work on your on-page optimization and localizations. If you have your own marketers, we will support them with an SEO consultancy process.

UX and reliability

The UX of your website is becoming increasingly important. Good UX is also part of your findability. It is important that your pages match what your target group expects and match the search intent. In addition, E-E-A-T is becoming increasingly important, especially when you start to internationalize. Your company name is probably not well known abroad, which makes things like a good โ€œAbout usโ€ page crucial.

International link building

In addition to content and technology, the authority of your website is also very important. With international link building, you ensure a strong link profile and even better international findability.

It is important that the links to your website are relevant and authoritative. The domain extension of the referring website is also important here.

Obtaining international backlinks

There are countless opportunities to obtain backlinks internationally. It is important that only relevant and high-quality backlinks are obtained, on websites that themselves receive traffic from Google. Ways to obtain international backlinks include:

  1. Guest blogs
  2. Sponsorship
  3. PR
  4. Forums
  5. Relevant directories
  6. Online encyclopedias

International SEO in combination with local SEO

If you also have physical locations abroad, local SEO is important in addition to international SEO. We also have that expertise in-house. With local SEO, you ensure that your locations can be found in the right region, for example via Google Maps.

Are you ready to use international SEO?

Do you see opportunities for your company on an international level? Then our SEO specialists will be happy to help you with your international SEO. Feel free to contact us and discover how we can contribute to your international growth.