If you want to start ranking and selling in other countries, you are going to have to make sure that you are effectively configuring and localizing your online store. In this article, we will talk about how you can optimize your online store for audiences from other countries.
Although the concept of online selling prevailed much in the US, people from other countries have also started preferring this way of buying and selling. For a business to be a successful seller in this regard, it has to work on entirely different measures than the ones used in conventional marketing. The fact of the matter is that the concept of selling in other countries lies almost entirely with the online option. It makes it necessary for a seller to work on technical aspects of a website to make it responsive to international web traffic.
To start with, you can use SEMrush to identify the traffic volumes generating from different regions of the world. You can also consider using Google Market Finder to get suggestions about potential opportunities in other countries’ markets.
Things to consider when going global
As the first thing, you are going to have to do an appropriate validation, analysis, and research with your data. You should know the potential traffic volume generating from each country that you target. You will need to make sure that you have an internal capacity to support different audiences. You will also need to pay attention to acquiring the capability to send your products and handle multiple currencies.
Targeting international audiences will require you to work on factors beyond SEO. For instance, it is crucial to verify and validate the potential traffic and conversions that you will be able to attract from those countries. You will need to consider factors such as difficulties, costs, investments, and challenges. It is undoubtedly a challenge to deliver the best-localized search experience in a language you don’t speak, but that is one of the critical milestones that you will need to achieve to be successful.
Based on this assessment, you can go abroad and see things yourself to setup up your business. The preparations that you may need to make in this regard include:
- Buying and securing your ccTLDs
- Creating custom alerts so that you get a notification when it becomes appropriate to target new markets
- Test selling to analyze the audience behavior
International SEO implementation challenges
There can be challenges related to international SEO implementation that you might face. To be able to address these challenges, you will need to answer the following questions.
- What is the best website structure to communicate with the international audience?
- How are you going to scale the localization of categories to make it easier for the audience to browse through your online store?
- What will be the right way to implement hreflang to rank with millions of URLs without facing any errors in the process?
Answering these questions can be tough. But it is exactly how you can identify your potential to grow in any other region outside your country. The most notable advantage of working this way is that you will be able to avoid any constraints present in other popular online stores. The key is to know whether working on those constraints will help you get better conversions in a particular country or region. That’s where you can take help from your team of developers and marketers.
