Today, the global eCommerce market is valued at $6.1 trillion. eCommerce businesses must learn to harness the power of multilingual SEO to stay competitive and appear at the top of SERPs in multiple markets.
It’s easier said than done, right? Many wonder how they can get their slice of this ever-growing pie, especially with all of the changes to search in recent years. Paid is taking up more and more real estate on SERPs, then when you add the twist of managing SEO on an international scale – this can cause some marketers to pull their hair out!
Here are some ways you can take control, rank higher globally, and help increase your business’ visibility.
How to Rank Higher in Global Searches
Choosing the right Platform for your Website
There are many platforms that can host your eCommerce website. Some of the most popular platforms are Shopify, Square, WIX, GoDaddy, Squarespace, and WooCommerce.
The platform you choose will be the foundation for your SEO, so make sure you carefully consider which one best suits your needs, now and in the future.
Multilingual Keyword Research
Keyword research is an essential aspect of SEO. This is where you must identify the most relevant and high-traffic keywords your target audience is searching for.
This allows businesses to optimise their pages and products for the highest ranking and highest intent searches to increase visibility and sales.
Listed below are the benefits of multilingual keyword research:
- Increase visibility: Optimising your website by featuring high traffic, intent, and relevant keywords in your targeting and content will help increase your visibility and ranking.
Doing so will improve your position in SERPs and help increase user traffic from the right audience, leading to more sales further down the funnel.
- Understands User-Intent: Keyword research helps businesses understand user behaviour and help identify customer intent and what customers are searching for online.
Identifying the most used search terms in targeted regions will help businesses tailor content and product offerings to customer needs and help improve the overall user experience.
- Improved Competitiveness: Keyword research will also help identify the most competitive keywords your competitors are currently bidding on and areas that need improvement.
By optimising for these high-intent and high-traffic keywords, you will improve your business’ competitiveness.
Localised On-Page SEO
Targeting the right keywords is useless if the pages you’re directing to aren’t tailored or relevant for the intended users. Proper localisation breaks down language and cultural barriers and opens your business’ doors to the right audience in a new market.
To localise your pages, you must consider the following:
- Content, Keywords, and Meta Tags Language: Ensure that all aspects the target audience can access are localised to the native language. Ensure that the tone resonates well with the cultural preferences of the target market.
When targeting globally, you must also consider how users in different locations behave and the language they speak when searching. Even countries that speak the same language will behave differently—e.g., US users are more likely to use terms like ‘car tires’ vs ‘car tyres’ for British users.
- Domains: Search engines like Google consider the Country Code Top-Level Domains (ccTLDs) to be set to the appropriate market as they are used as an indicator for a specific country. This will make it easier for the website to be found by local users.
- User Interface & User Experience: Ensure the UI and UX suit local design. Certain languages and their characters are formatted differently (e.g., read from right to left or down to up). For a seamless experience, you must know the preference of your target location.
- Date and time Formatting can also vary depending on location. Ensure that date and time formats are designed to local preferences (e.g., DD/MM/YYYY vs. MM/DD/YYYY). The same goes for time. Be mindful when choosing between 12-hour or 24-hour clocks. This is important, especially when giving out important information on delivery, appointments, and deadlines.
- Customer Support: This is an important aspect of localisation as it impacts the customer’s overall experience and satisfaction. Communicating effectively with the local market builds customer trust and enhances brand reputation. If you use chatbots on your website, make sure they are localised for different languages!
High-Quality Backlinks
Backlinks are seen as endorsements from other websites. When highly regarded sources link to your page, it indicates to Google and other search engines that your website is a credible source. Good backlinks help increase your domain authority – which greatly impacts rankings.
Here are other benefits of high-quality backlinks:
- Enhance Ranking: Pages that rank higher get more traffic as they are most likely to be seen by users. High-quality backlinks help improve ranking, which contributes to more traffic.
- Trust and Credibility: Backlinks are a proven long-term benefit in driving more traffic over an extended period. As long as these backlinks remain active, the help contribute to prolonged SEO success.
- Expanding Reach & Visibility: Backlinks help with organic and referral traffic. These are users who click on your website from other sources. This helps increase your reach and the potential size of your customer base.
- Networking and Relationships: Other sources linking to your website create a relationship that attracts influencers in your chosen industry. Nurturing these relationships creates opportunities for further collaboration, partnerships, or joint ventures.
- Maintain a Competitive Edge: With a strong backlink portfolio, you can gain and maintain an edge over your competitors. These links will help you outrank in search results, attract more traffic, and establish your eCommerce site as a reputable vendor.
- Different sites for each language: Google and many other search engine sites recommend using different URLs for each language—e.g., .com for the US, .co.uk for the UK, .fr for France, etc. It is also recommended to use hreflang annotations to indicate to Google which site is for which language. Doing these will help Google identify and crawl your website and its pages faster.
Performance Analysis Across Countries
Tracking the performance of KPIs across your different target regions will help you optimise your eCommerce site for better performance.
Here are some of the KPIs you should keep track of:
- Keyword Rankings—Monitor the rankings of all target keywords across your target locations. Determine which generates the most traffic and optimise for high-search-volume keywords with lower rankings.
- Website Traffic – Measures the number of visitors to your website in any given amount of time. You can see which channels or keywords are driving the most traffic.
- Bounce Rate—the number of users who instantly leave your website only after visiting one page. A high bounce rate indicates issues with the user experience.
- Conversion Rate—calculates the number of visitors who take a desired action on your website. Tracking the conversion rate across different languages/locations can help identify success and areas for improvement.
- Mobile Optimisation—This is your website’s performance score for mobile devices. Ensure your site is mobile-friendly, which is key to improving your SEO score.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR): This calculates the percentage of clicks compared to the number of times your website’s search results are displayed. Improving this will help increase your website’s visibility.
As the global eCommerce market continues to grow, businesses must prioritise SEO strategies to gain or maintain their competitive edge. Leveraging keyword research, localising on-page SEO, building high-quality backlinks, and analysing performance across countries will help businesses significantly improve their visibility in international SERPs. Practising these will help ensure your eCommerce site resonates well with the intended audience, enhance global search engine rankings, drive more traffic, and help increase sales.
