5 Steps to International Technical SEO

Are you ready to take your SEO strategy internationally? If you and your team members are highly proficient in another language, then there is promise of success. But if you are not sure you are ready, check out this other post that I wrote on how to know if you are ready for international SEO.

If you know you are ready, this article addresses the technical SEO considerations for an international marketing focus. This post will look at how to change your top-level domain, subdomains, tagging, schema markup, and geo-targeting.

(1) Get A Country-Coded Domain

Option 1: Country-Coded Top Level Domain

The letters after the period of a domain will point to what country or sovereign state the site is optimized for. For example, https://example.com points to the U.S., https://example.fr points to France, and https://example.de points to Germany. This means that the most effective way to adjust your technical SEO is by acquiring a top-level domain for the new country you are targeting. This is called a ccTLD, or a country-coded top-level domain, and is strong branding for those who prefer to click on a top-level domain that they recognize and are accustomed to. However, this means that you’d have to purchase domains for each country you are marketing to, and this…