Inbound Marketing Insights

Are you looking to market your product or service to a global audience? Remember, anyone in the world can find your company and potentially do business with you if you have a website. Many different tactics go into getting more traffic to your website. But, there are even more unique strategies to consider when looking to reach a global audience. Here are five tips to consider when optimizing your website to reach a global audience.

1. Use country extensions, or set up redirects
If you have the resources, build language-specific or country-specific sites at each domain extension (.co.uk, .nz, etc.). An alternative to creating separate domains for each country or language is to simply purchase the domain extension and redirect it to a subdirectory.

2. Set up cross-domain canonical tags
Google supports using the rel=” canonical” link element across different domains. What does this mean? You can have similar content on both the .com and .co.uk extensions of your site. The canonical link element will indicate the exact URL of the domain you are indexing. This will make duplicate content a non-issue and is a time saver for any marketer. Google does not consider foreign-language translations to be duplicate content.

3. Ensure proper geo-targeting in Google webmaster tools
Google Webmaster Tools allows webmasters to geographically target certain websites or sections of your website to specific locations. This is available when you log in to your Webmaster Tools account and look at Site Configuration. There, you can change the geographic settings in your Settings tab.

4. Essential for local and global marketers – make your website load quickly
Less than 10% of the users in the most active internet countries have broadband. The faster your website loads, the better your site will rank on Google and other major search engines. 

5. Add Google Translate to your site
You may not have the resources to create local sites for each country or language you want to target. If that’s the case, as with most startups and small businesses, add Google Translate to your site to ensure that your website visitors can see your content in their language view. (The translation may not be perfect, but it is better than the user leaving your site because they cannot read it in the current language).

As you can see, a lot goes into optimizing your website to reach a global audience. You need to consider your audience, target market, and the resources you have to market globally.

Looking for more information to launch your website and optimize for a global audience? Schedule your complimentary website assessment with us, and we will discuss some tips to help you reach your desired international audience!