How to Optimise Websites for Your Global Business

So, you run a business which works on a global scale and are looking for search engine optimisation to promote your business. You’re probably wondering where you would even start with this. The mistake many businesses make is to buy a .com domain thinking that this will enable them to use the website to market all areas of the world. This is not the case, and so I have included some information on the basics to help you get started with reaching your global goal.

Firstly, you need to understand how search engines work. Search engines want the information they provide to be relevant and useful to the searcher. If that searcher happens to be German-speaking and based in Germany then obviously the most relevant results would be those provided in their native language, from within that country. Therefore, you need to look at having a multitude of websites, each aimed at providing information for each individual country you want to target.

This will involve the following:

• Buy the domain names relevant to the countries you want to target e.g. www.companyname.co.uk for the UK, www.companyname.us for the United States, www.companyname.fr for France and www.companyname.cn for China etc. This will help Google to recognise that the site is geo-targeted to a specific country.

• Another way to help the search engine to recognise that you are wanting to target users in a specific country is to ensure that the site is held on a server within that country. Therefore you will need to undertake some research into hosting companies.

• Include the website content in the native language of the country being targeted.

• Lastly, if you have global offices, mention the office address on the relevant website.

By creating sites in this way, search engines such as Google will recognise that each website is targeted at a different location. This will prevent the issues of duplicate content across the sites. For example, the UK and the US are both English speaking countries and will therefore contain the same content. However, because the sites are domains targeted towards different countries, Google will recognise this and will therefore not penalise either of the sites for duplicate content.

Gemma Neesham
Project Manager