Within Europe, the Netherlands is one of the most digitally advanced countries. This leading position provides an excellent foundation for international expansion. As a result, more and more Dutch companies are choosing to expand internationally in order to continue growing.

Growing Internationally with SEO

To gain a foothold internationally, you need to do more than just translate your website or online store. People often underestimate the challenges of internationalization and becoming discoverable internationally. Your target audience in countries like Germany and France likely searches differently than they do in the Netherlands.

Furthermore, the mindset in other countries often differs significantly from that in the Netherlands. It’s important to adapt to this with your entire website, including your content. A sound and thorough approach ensures that you lay a solid foundation for international growth and become increasingly discoverable on an international scale.

With an international SEO strategy, we’ll work with you to ensure that your website resonates with your target audience, builds topical authority effectively, and incorporates the right technical implementations. This is the only way to take the best steps toward international success.

Samenwerking met Payta

“Since 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. ”

The Importance of International SEO

If your company has long-term plans for international growth, it’s 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 business, whether you run a platform, a B2B company, or an online store. By implementing an SEO strategy tailored to all the countries you target, you’ll become easier to find. And this, in turn, will benefit your business and drive its growth.

The first step toward international growth is usually running ads, such as through Google Ads. If you start seeing results, it’s important to implement international SEO to avoid two major risks associated with advertising:

In the online world, we see that many companies are heavily reliant on Google Ads. This means they are literally on Google’s advertising “life support.” If you stop advertising, you’ll suddenly stop receiving orders, and your business will collapse.

With ads, it’s easy to get outbid by someone with deeper pockets. A good example is Amazon: what if they suddenly raise their bids on search terms that you’re also targeting?

This will then eat into your margin, and in some cases, you’ll be forced to stop advertising. This, in turn, will negatively impact your revenue and, consequently, your profitability abroad.

We are by no means opposed to using ads. However, it is important not to rely on just one (advertising) channel. So make sure to diversify your marketing strategy.

The Approach to an International SEO Project

Do you want to improve your international visibility? With the Smarter Way of Ranking, we ensure a strong start and a well-planned execution of your international SEO strategy. Through a series of steps, we lay a solid foundation for your international SEO and work with you or your team to build on it.

First and foremost, we’d love to get to know you. This way, we can learn about your business, but we’ll also discuss your goals, needs, current SEO efforts, and internal capacity. During the introductory meeting, we’d also like to walk you through the latest developments in SEO, such as Navboost, E-E-A-T, and building topical authority.

A good fit between an agency and your company is essential for a successful partnership. Is there a good fit between us? If so, we’ll get started on a proposal with no obligation—we’ll present it in the form of a pitch. During the pitch, we’ll explain how we’ll approach the project, what the opportunities are, and what our proposed division of responsibilities looks like.

Is the proposal approved? If so, the first month of our collaboration will be dedicated to developing the full strategy. During this strategy month, we’ll get to work on the following, among other things:

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

These analyses and studies form the foundation of your online visibility. Based on this strategic month, you’ll gain insight into how the market works and what the next steps are to make your website more discoverable.

It’s important to walk you through everything—from A to Z—regarding our findings, the exact status of the project, the further opportunities we’ve identified, and the proposed schedule for the coming months. Based on the strategy month, we’re preparing this presentation and will go over it with you.

Once we’ve agreed on the proposed strategic approach, we’ll get started on the monthly optimizations. The optimizations are prioritized based on impact versus effort and scheduled into monthly optimization sprints. Each month begins with an SEO meeting to discuss the results and planned activities together. This way, you’ll always be up to date on the KPIs and scheduled tasks. We view a productive collaboration as the foundation for strong results.

Interested in an international SEO project?

Feel free to contact us for an introductory meeting. During the meeting, we’ll discuss your goals, your current approach to improving your online visibility, the latest developments in SEO, and your growth opportunities.

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Key Components of International SEO

Implementing international SEO requires a different approach than optimizing your website for the Netherlands alone. Effective international search visibility involves optimizations in the areas of technical aspects, content, UX, and authority. Key elements of your international SEO strategy include:

  1. Proper implementation of hreflang tags, so that crawlers can accurately understand the relationship between the various domains or groups of pages.
  2. Adding a reliable language switcher so that users can easily change languages.
  3. Improving load times, in part by using a CDN. This way, your website loads from various local servers.
  4. Localizing your content to address cultural differences.
  5. The correct use of punctuation: for example, in France there is a space between a word and an exclamation point, and in Germany the euro sign comes after the number.
  6. Gaining insight into how your target audience searches. For example, the way people search in the Netherlands is by no means always the same as the way a foreign visitor searches 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—after all, someone from England doesn't want to read German content.
  9. Relevant, high-quality international backlinks: if you have a page with Italian content, Dutch backlinks won't do you any good for 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 more quickly and index it more effectively. We recommend using subdirectories, subdomains, or country-specific domains.

We’d be happy to help you plan the site structure when setting up your international website. By giving this careful consideration from the very beginning, you’ll ensure a solid 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 on our own.

Is your website already live? In some cases, it’s a good idea to adjust the URL structure. If so, it’s important to properly redirect the old URLs to the new ones using 301 redirects. During the presentation of our proposal, we’ll discuss this if we recommend it.

Migration to an international website

Do you currently have a website that focuses on a single language, and are you planning to build an international website? In many cases, this will require changing the domain name or the URL structure. In that case as well, it’s important to carry out a proper SEO migration.

We’d be happy to advise your developer on how to migrate your website to the new site structure while preserving the authority your website has built up so far.

An SEO Migration in 7 Steps

For every SEO migration, we follow a 7-step process to ensure the migration is carried out properly and smoothly. We explain these 7 steps in our blog.

View the SEO Migration Roadmap

Other international search engines

Your international customers don’t just search on Google. Search engines like Yandex, Baidu, Bing, and Yahoo also have a wide international reach. So, understanding these different search engines is crucial. People often assume that all search engines work the same way. This isn’t true—Bing uses a different algorithm than Google, for example.

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

The Technical Aspects of Your International Website

Basically, search engines like Bing and Yandex are a few years behind Google’s algorithm. Still, for each of these search engines, your website’s technical aspects are the foundation of your discoverability. That’s why, when implementing international SEO, we pay close attention to technical SEO.

Implementation of hreflang tags

The hreflang attribute tells search engines where to find the different language versions of a page. It is therefore essential for good international discoverability. However, mistakes are often made when implementing hreflang tags, which in turn affects discoverability.

Our consultants understand that proper implementation of hreflang tags is crucial; they’ll advise you or your development team on how to correctly implement hreflang tags, including the x-default tag.

On-page optimization

In addition to your website’s technical aspects, your content must also be optimized for international search visibility. Many companies translate their content into other languages using machine translation tools like Google Translate or DeepL. This allows you to quickly establish a solid foundation for your international website, but a literal translation is often not sufficient.

Unfortunately, translation tools don’t understand how your target audience searches or what matters to them. So, improving your international visibility goes beyond simply translating content. Without proper localization of your website, you’ll never become the market leader internationally.

Keyword research is the best way to gain a solid understanding of your target audience’s international search behavior. It therefore forms the foundation for relevant content. Based on the keyword research, our specialists will get to work on your on-page optimization and localization efforts. If you have your own marketing team, we’ll support them with an SEO consulting program.

UX and Reliability

Your website’s UX is becoming increasingly important. A good UX is also part of your search visibility. It’s important that your pages align with your target audience’s expectations and match their search intent. In addition, E-E-A-T is becoming increasingly important, especially as you expand internationally. Your company name is likely still relatively unknown abroad, which makes elements like a well-crafted “About Us” page crucial.

International Link Building

In addition to content and technology, your website’s authority is also very important. International link building helps you build a strong link profile and further improve your international visibility.

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

Acquiring International Backlinks

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

  1. Guest Blogs
  2. Sponsorship
  3. PR
  4. Forums
  5. Relevant directories
  6. Online encyclopedieën

International SEO Combined with Local SEO

If you also have physical locations abroad, local SEO is just as important as international SEO. We have that expertise in-house as well. Local SEO ensures that your locations can be found in the right region—for example, via Google Maps.

Are you ready to implement international SEO?

Do you see opportunities for your business on the international stage? If so, our SEO specialists would be happy to help you with your international SEO. Feel free to contact us with no obligation and discover how we can contribute to your international growth.