International SEO – Paul Lovell
We talk with Paul about international SEO strategies. We ask him about the differences between international and local SEO, the best tools to create and monitorice strategies. We also reflect on using black hat SEO techniques or not, the importance of linkbuilding or what kind of people do you need in a good internacional SEO team.
How and when did you first get interested in international SEO?
I have been working in seo for many years now but my first international client was a french apartment letting site. That was in 2011 and from there, I’ve loved working with websites that have real scalability potential by hitting the global markets.
What are the main differences between doing local SEO and international SEO?
The basic elements of SEO remain within each of these types of SEO, in that you aim to improve your clients visibility by using there content to target a specific market. So really, the difference in the definitions between the two is very much what it says on the tin; local is aimed at the local markets while international is for the global ones.
Local SEO is usually for smaller businesses that want to target their main customer base to be within a specific area. This does mean that the keywords on the site need to be very targeted to help search engines target this location.
International SEO is for the businesses who want to offer their products to the international markets. Established e-commerce stores and publishing sites are a few examples.
What is your favourite international SEO tool?
Semrush as they have all the international data on websites and you can tracking the rankings in different regions for my clients.
“The basic elements of SEO remain within each of these types of SEO, in that you aim to improve your clients visibility by using there content to target a specific market. So really, the difference in the definitions between the two is very much what it says on the tin”.
What kind of clients do you have? What characteristics does a typical client have?
At the moment I have a few international e-commerce clients and some tech companies as well, Clients come in all shapes and sizes.
Generally my clients already have a understanding of what SEO is but, more importantly, the time seo takes. SEO is not a overnight fix. Yes, you can have some quick wins, but generally bigger sites usually take longer for the search engines to pick up the changes.
What people do you need in your team to do a good international SEO?
People that understand the more technical side of SEO is always great, but generally, good team players.
What tool do you use to do log analysis?
I like to use Kibana but i also use splunk and I have been testing Semrush’s new log analysis tool
You also do Growth Hacking, how does it work in international SEO? Are they compatible?
Growth hacking is great for launching in new regions for example DropBox’ s Incentivised ‘refer-a-friend’ scheme. PayPal also had a referral scheme back in the early 2000 which cost them about $60million.
The fact is these are not really SEO tactics but the content you can create around these growth tactics can really get you some organic visibility.
What advice would you give to a company that want to start doing inten?
Ensure you have your site technically correct in your main country first and make sure you use good quality translation when you launch your website in new regions and languages.
What is your opinion of using black hat SEO strategies to expand your domain internationally?
Using these types of tactics will usually end with your site being hit with a manual or algorithmic penalty of some sort so i would not recommend then at all.
Do you think that linkbuilding is important when you are doing internacional SEO? Why?
Backlinks are still an important part of google’s algorithm at the moment, but I would advise website owners to create link worthy content that really hit the pain point for there potential client/customer
