Kelsey Jones talks with Bill Hunt, President of Back Azimuth Consulting, during Pubcon Las Vegas about HREFLang.

Learn More about HREFLang & International SEO

Watch this interview with Aleyda Solis to learn more about international SEO and the specific challenges brands face when implementing it. https://youtu.be/5zSXdp9nbHk

Read this post by Saijo George titled “Getting A Better Understanding of HREFLlang” to understand more about what HREFLang is and when you should be using it. http://bit.ly/Zw6CSW

For more news and interviews from marketing experts around the world visit us at https://www.searchenginejournal.com/.
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Bastian Grimm, Director of Organic Search at Peak Ace, talks about what is currently going on with Google and some of the key things to think about when managing SEO for large websites.

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(00:31) A big topic at the moment is Google’s mobile-first index and the switchover from desktop to mobile indexing. What do you think are the most important things happening with that at the moment? What are the key things that all businesses should be doing?

(05:55) Google has said that it has started to move some websites over to mobile-first indexing. But does that actually work? The search engine is still producing just one SERP for a certain keyword, but some of the websites might be ranked on mobile-first and others might be ranked on desktop-first. Are the websites that are ranked by mobile-first indexing going to have a ranking advantage?

(07:51) You mentioned that one of the challenges of working on website that has both mobile and desktop versions is that you have to make sure that all of the tags and connections are working properly. For international websites that’s an even bigger deal because they use hreflang in many cases. In your experience, how well is hreflang working? What are the biggest mistakes that websites tend to make with hreflang?

(12:14) You mentioned that having a lot of code can slow down website speeds. Website speed is important and it is only going to get more important with the roll-out of mobile-first indexing. What has changed regarding website speed in the last year or so? What are the most important things to focus on from a website speed point of view?

Large scale SEO-test: How does hreflang work and is it effective for international SEO? When should you combine it with canonical? Read more here (danish) http://www.onlinepartners.dk/blog/test-af-hreflang-og-canonical-til-international-seo or (english) http://www.stateofsearch.com/hreflang-canonical-test/

Videoproduktion af http://videofabrikken.dk

You may not want Google to rank your site in all countries. The other day on Reddit, someone asked, “I have just added a new domain property to Google Search Console. I want to specify the country where my website should be visible because it’s an e-commerce website. How do I add targeting country and robots.txt from my new website?” A Google employee named Gary Ellis responded with, “Generally, there’s no need to specify geographic targeting in Search Console. Google can just figure out from all the other signals such as different parts of the url or let’s say even if people are bouncing.” And then Gary went on to say, “You should look at how other companies like Amazon do things from a SEO perspective when it comes to international SEO.”

RESOURCES & LINKS:
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Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/
Google Search Console: https://search.google.com/search-console/about
Ubersuggest: https://neilpatel.com/ubersuggest/
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So why am I bringing this up? It’s because International SEO is huge. Did you know that I get over 82% of my traffic to the neilpatel.com NP digital website from outside of the United States?

In other words, don’t take the rest of the world for granted because it can help you generate a lot of revenue. But here’s the issue. Translating and transcribing your content for every language you want to target whether you’re e-commerce site or B2C site or a B2B site, is a bad idea. You should only target regions where you want to be helpful. Here’s why. If you expand into other regions just to get traffic but you don’t really offer great products or services or even a great experience within those regions, it’s going to hurt your overall SEO.

How you may ask? No matter how good your website is or your marketing is, or even your bounce rate is people are not going to go back to your site or even click on your listings if they know your products and services aren’t tailored to them. In other words, it’s going to hurt your overall SEO.

So only focus your website, your content, your products, your services on the languages and regions you want to target. And here are some tips when it comes to international SEO.

First, transcribe your content. Don’t just translate it. When you want to go after new regions and languages, you have to adapt your content to what people in that region expect. With culture being different all over the world, you’ll find that translating your content word for word just won’t work. You’ll have to customize it to each region.

Second, you’ll have to use hreflang. Hreflang tells search engines and browsers that pages on your website are countries and languages. If you’re wondering how to use hreflang, this tool by Aleyda Solis will help you. And with this tool, it’ll give you the code that you need to put on your website. That code goes into the head part of your website.

Third, you need to build links within the region you’re targeting. You can hire someone from Upwork who knows marketing and they know your space within that region. They can reach out to your websites, build relationships, beg for links. It works. It’s a numbers game, but it really does work. Or if you want more skill, you want to grow faster, you can hire agency like mine, NP Digital where we are awarded Agency of the Year to reach out and build you links throughout the whole world which we do for hundreds of clients. Without back links, you won’t get much SEO traffic.

Fourth, you need to consider generating PR. PR creates brand queries, which is when someone searches for your company name on Google or your website name. This helps with your rankings and traffic. Just think about Nike. Did you know over 7 million people in the United States are searching for Nike each and every single month on Google? Less than 2 million people on a monthly basis are searching for shoes. Nike has a bigger brand than the term shoes. What does that tell Google? Nike’s powerful, people recognize them and they should rank them higher.

► If you need help growing your business check out my ad agency Neil Patel Digital https://npdigital.com/

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