Google Search’s market share in the UK weakened this year, with user reach dropping to 83% from 86%, according to Ofcom’s Online Nation report.
This decline comes as concerns grow over AI-powered search results, with only 18% of users confident in their accuracy.
The Rise & Fall of AI Search Adoption
Microsoft’s Bing gained popularity after adding ChatGPT in February 2023, peaking at 46% reach in the UK in April.
By May 2024, it settled at 39%, still above pre-AI levels.
This suggests the initial excitement about AI search tools is fading, and users are now more cautious with AI-generated results.
Trust Gap Emerges
Despite the widespread adoption of AI search features, trust remains a concern:
Only 18% of UK users believe AI search results are reliable
Younger users (ages 16-24) show marginally higher trust at 21%
A third of users express neutral confidence in AI-generated results
Men show higher confidence in AI search results than women
Demographics & Device Usage
The report reveals variations in search behavior across age groups and devices:
Google maintains 83% reach across smartphones, tablets, and computers
Google maintains 49% daily active users
Bing sees 39% reach, primarily driven by desktop users
Alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo show modest growth (3% reach)
Bing shows stronger performance among older users (43% of 65+ vs. 36% of 25-34-year-olds)
Mobile search dominates, with Google capturing 84% of mobile searches
Desktop usage remains stronger for traditional search engines like Bing and Yahoo
69% of UK online adults visit at least one search engine daily.
What This Means
As we approach 2025, search is changing with AI integration, but user trust remains essential.
Key points for search marketers and content creators include:
Many users still prefer traditional search methods despite the rise of AI.
Trust issues create both challenges and opportunities for content improvement.
Different age groups affect how people accept and use AI in search.
A successful strategy blends AI tools with established methods.
View AI search as an added layer rather than a replacement for current practices.
Focus on quality content and reliable information, optimizing for AI wisely where it adds value.
Methodology
The Online Nation 2024 report combines two main data sources:
Online Experiences Tracker:
7,280 UK internet users aged 13-84
Fielded May-June 2024 via YouGov panel
Standard demographic weighting applied
Ipsos iris Panel Data:
Passive tracking of 10,700 UK adults
Monitors actual device usage across mobile, tablet, and desktop
Continuous measurement through May 2024
Covers in-home and out-of-home usage
Worth noting: Some year-over-year comparisons, particularly around time spent metrics, may be affected by methodology updates. Apple News tracking began in October 2023, which impacts certain platform comparisons.
The data focuses on UK users, so global markets may show different patterns. All population estimates have standard margins of error.
Google is beginning a test that will change hotel search results for users in Germany, Belgium, and Estonia.
This test will remove features like the map and hotel listings, replacing them with regular blue links to hotel websites and comparison sites.
The experiment will only affect users in these three countries, whether searching locally or internationally.
It won’t impact users outside these countries or when searching for a specific hotel.
Compliance With The Digital Markets Act (DMA)
Google is testing these changes to follow new rules in Europe called the Digital Markets Act (DMA).
In the past year, Google has made over 20 updates. These updates include new sections and formats to make comparison sites for flights, hotels, and shopping more visible.
The results of these changes have been mixed.
Major travel aggregators and comparison sites have gained visibility. However, other businesses, like airlines, hotel operators, and small retailers, have seen a drop in free direct booking clicks by as much as 30%.
Purpose Of The Test
Google will run this test in Germany, Belgium, and Estonia to see how proposed changes affect user experience and website traffic.
Google is hesitant about this decision. The company maintains that reverting to a “ten blue links” format would disadvantage both users and businesses.
Gary Illyes, Analyst at Google, emphasized that the test is temporary and websites need not take any action during the experimental period.
Looking Ahead
The results of this test results could influence future decisions about how search engines operate in Europe and potentially shape regulations worldwide.
Google says normal search functionality will resume after the test concludes, although the timing of the conclusion is unclear.
A critical vulnerability was discovered in the WPML WordPress plugin, affecting over a million installations. The vulnerability allows an authenticated attacker to perform remote code execution, potentially leading to a total site takeover. It is listed as rated 9.9 out of 10 by the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) organization.
WPML Plugin Vulnerability
The plugin vulnerability is due to a lack of a security check called sanitization, a process for filtering user input data to protect against the upload of malicious files. Lack of sanitization in this input makes the plugin vulnerable to a Remote Code Execution.
The vulnerability exists within a function of a shortcode for creating a custom language switcher. The function renders the content from the shortcode into a plugin template but without sanitizing the data, making it vulnerable to code injection.
The vulnerability affects all versions of the WPML WordPress plugin up to and including 4.6.12.
Timeline Of Vulnerability
Wordfence discovered the vulnerability in late June and promptly notified the publishers of WPML which remained unresponsive for about a month and a half, confirming response on August 1, 2024.
Users of the paid version of Wordfence received protection eight days after discovery of the vulnerability, the free users of Wordfence received protection on July 27th.
Users of the WPML plugin who did not use either version of Wordfence did not receive protection from WPML until August 20th, when the publishers finally issued a patch in version 4.6.13.
Plugin Users Urged To Update
Wordfence urges all users of the WPML plugin to make sure they are using the latest version of the plugin, WPML 4.6.13.
They wrote:
“We urge users to update their sites with the latest patched version of WPML, version 4.6.13 at the time of this writing, as soon as possible.”
Running and maintaining global websites is not an easy task.
The good news is there are new AI tool solutions available that ease some of the work that goes into website management as well as assisting with SEO efforts.
AI technology is advancing rapidly and has been adopted into different work streams and all areas of marketing.
However, AI is not perfect and still needs refinements and human interaction. But that should not stop us from exploring and testing it out.
Here are ways you can benefit from AI to make your work with global websites more efficient and productive in areas including content, SEO, research, and management.
Global Website Content
Creating relevant content and publishing it on multiple websites in different languages requires plenty of resources. This is one of the big challenges and unavoidable tasks with global websites.
Content Translation and Localization
In the past, I always advised against using machine translation to translate original content to other languages. I hadn’t found any translation tools that produced satisfactory quality output, especially for Asian languages.
I’ve been testing different AI-powered translation tools lately and found their quality to be much improved. However, it is still not the same quality as the work of skilled human translators.
My suggestion is to use the AI tools as “go-between” solutions. Because this is one area where a lack of resources (both manpower and budget) holds the entire project back, I think it’s worth a try.
Text Translation And Localization
Let the AI tools handle the initial translation work. It still needs to be edited by humans, especially if the content covers specific industry knowledge, but at least it is in the correct language.
Before you deploy it site-wide, create the prompt based on several tests.
Prioritize the content (by type, category, dates, etc.) for human editing.
Duplicate Content
Use AI to check for duplicate content in the CMS. You can then decide whether to keep or kill reported content.
Having duplicate content is not necessarily a negative issue. Many global websites have content in the same language but each targeting a different country.
In this case, AI tools can help quickly localize the content for each target country by changing the spelling, currency, measurements, addresses, etc.
Image ALT Text Creation And Translation
The image ALT tag has been overlooked for many years. Many websites don’t use it.
Even if the main site uses it, the regional sites don’t have translated text in ALT tags. There are multiple solutions available now with AI tools baked into the image file management systems.
Some use Google’s Vision API to identify the key elements of an image and create appropriate text for the image to be auto-localized.
User Generated Content (UGC) Translation:
Because of the nature of the UGC, it is a huge challenge to translate the content as it is created.
The machine translation with an AI-powered review process is perhaps the best option out there.
Content Creation
Having content that is designed for the target audience in a specific country/region is one of the keys to a successful business.
You sometimes see a small company beat a large corporation in the online realm because a small business has an advantage in its deeper understanding of its local audience.
With the AI-assisted research project, you could quickly identify content gaps and content that satisfies the local audience’s needs.
Content Topic And Opportunity Research
AI tools can help shorten your local audience research process. It can identify the locally unique search demand and different types of information people look for in different countries or regions.
The research may also be used to identify the content gap between your site and competitor sites and give you an idea for locally unique FAQ content. You may also learn that unpopular items on the main site could perform much better in another country.
Other Ways To Improve Content
Localized Images
Images on websites support the understanding of products, corporate messages, and more. You may want to replace some images with more acceptable ones in some countries.
For example, create images with Asian models for websites targeting Asian countries.
Video Transcription And Translation
Transcribing the videos and translating them are other items I often see on the to-do list, but they are always pushed down on the priority list.
International SEO
In addition to content-related work, AI tools can support other international SEO action items.
From the technical SEO standpoint, AI tools can help in many areas, including the below:
Hreflang tag URL mapping review.
Tags and codes auto-generation review – language tag, title tag, meta description, canonical tag, etc.
Schema markup review.
Finding broken or unnecessary codes.
Depending on the size of the websites, these tasks could take many resource hours, especially for multinational and multilingual sites. With the help of AI tools, you can focus on improving the sites rather than finding them.
You can also let the AI tool analyze site crawl reports to find patterns in broken links and broken redirects and even suggest where to set redirects based on relevance and other technical SEO issues across the sites.
Data Analysis And Global Website Management
If you manage global websites or international SEO work, you know how important it is to have the same data points, KPIs, report templates, and best practice guidelines across countries.
Strengthen the governance of your global website management with AI tools.
Example Tasks
Add visualization of data in the performance reports.
Competitors analysis in each country and language.
Research local regulations.
Create visualization of task process and guidelines.
Audience analysis to create local personas.
Conclusion
We should embrace technologies such as AI tools to make our work more efficient and cost-effective. However, remember that AI tools are supporting tools and should not completely replace the work of humans.
As mentioned previously, AI tools are not perfect, and you should not let them auto-run. It is important to test the quality of their output prior to deployment.
Because of its dynamic learning capability, you want to test and improve prompts, requirements, etc., especially at the beginning.
Human reviews should be part of the process, and the settings should be updated or modified as needed.
In the latest episode of Google’s “Search Off The Record” podcast, a member of the Search Relations team suggested that Google may be moving towards automatically detecting language versions of web pages, potentially reducing the need for manual hreflang annotations.
Google’s Stance On Automatic Language Detection
Gary Illyes, a Google analyst, believes that search engines should rely less on annotations like hreflang and more on automatically learned signals.
Illyes stated during the podcast:
“Ultimately, I would want less and less annotations, site annotations, and more automatically learned things.”
He argued that this approach is more reliable than the current system of manual annotations.
Illyes elaborated on the existing capabilities of Google’s systems:
“Almost ten years ago, we could already do that, and this was what, almost ten years ago.”
Illyes emphasized the potential for improvement in this area:
“If, almost ten years ago, we could already do that quite reliably, then why would we not be able to do it now.”
The Current State Of Hreflang Implementation
The discussion also touched on the current state of hreflang implementation.
According to data cited in the podcast, only about 9% of websites currently use hreflang annotations on their home pages.
Stay tuned for any official updates from Google on this topic.
What This Means For You
This potential shift in Google’s language detection and targeting approach could have significant implications for website owners and SEO professionals.
It could reduce the technical burden of implementing hreflang annotations, particularly for large websites with multiple language versions.
The top takeaways from this discussion include the following:
It’s advisable to continue following Google’s current guidelines on implementing hreflang annotations.
Ensure that your multilingual content is high-quality and accurately translated. This will likely remain crucial regardless of how Google detects language versions.
While no immediate changes are planned, be ready to adapt your SEO strategy if Google moves towards more automatic language detection.
If you’re planning a new multilingual site or restructuring an existing one, consider a clear and logical structure that makes language versions obvious, as this may help with automatic detection.
Remember, while automation may increase, having a solid understanding of international SEO principles will remain valuable for optimizing your global web presence.
In a recent episode of Google’s Search Off The Record podcast, Gary Illyes, a Google’s Search Relations team member, addressed concerns about incorrect hreflang implementation and its potential impact on SEO.
Specifically, he addressed scenarios where a page might be incorrectly labeled as one language while containing content in another.
Illyes stated:
“As far as I remember, I worked on the parsing implementation plus the promotion implementation of hreflang, and back then, it didn’t cause problems.”
However, he also noted that his direct experience with this was from around 2016, adding the following:
“That’s a few years back… since then, we changed so many things that I would have to check whether it causes problems.”
Language Demotion & Country Promotion
Providing further context, Illyes explained Google’s approach to language and country relevance:
“When I spelled out LDCP, I said the language demotion country promotion. So, for example, if someone is searching in German and your page is in English, then you would get a negative demotion in the search results.”
This suggests that while incorrect hreflang implementation might not directly cause problems, the actual language of the content still plays a vital role in search relevance.
Exceptions To Language Matching
Interestingly, Illyes pointed out that there are exceptions to strict language matching:
“It’s less relevant to the query to the person unless you are searching for something like ‘how do you spell banana’… Because then it doesn’t really matter… well no it does… it still matters but… because you’re searching for something in English, so we would think okay you want some page that explains how to spell banana in English, not German.”
While Google’s systems appear to be somewhat forgiving of hreflang errors, the actual language of the content remains a key factor in search relevance.
Here are the top takeaways:
While incorrect hreflang implementation may not directly penalize your site, it’s still best practice to ensure your annotations accurately reflect your content.
The actual language of your content appears to be more important than hreflang annotations for search relevance.
For specific queries, like spelling or language-learning topics, Google may be more flexible in presenting content in various languages.
As Illyes noted, Google’s systems have changed over time. Continue to monitor official Google documentation and announcements for the most up-to-date best practices in international SEO.
E-E-A-T is a mix of factors that help Google determine if the content is relevant and helpful for users in order to prioritize it in their search results.
However, there is still one very important area to cover within the E-E-A-T family: Trust. Although it is the last one we approached, it is certainly not the least important. Quite the contrary.
As Google’s search quality rater guidelines indicate, Trust, which considers the extent to which the page is accurate, honest, safe, and reliable, is the most important member at the center of E-E-A-T.
No matter how experienced, expert, or authoritative a website is, if it is untrustworthy, it will have low E-E-A-T.
Image from Google’s search quality rater guidelines, May 2024
Showing trust is incredibly relevant for “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) topics. These are the ones that can have a significant impact on an individual’s or society’s health, finances, safety, security, knowledge, or well-being.
But what happens when we want to create international strategies? How can we leverage E-E-A-T to boost our international expansion and especially show that we are honest and reliable to users from all around the world?
Let’s discover some detailed actions that can be implemented to achieve these international results.
How To Show Trust To Users From All Around The World
Accessibility And Usability
One of the first steps in trying to sell a product or service internationally is to ensure that users in each region can properly access the site.
This means the website must be fast, secure, display correctly, and be usable for them. It should allow users to easily search for relevant information and purchase the product or service.
International Brand Name
Beyond making the site accessible, it is also highly recommended that consumers can find the brand easily.
Whenever possible, it is advisable to have an “international” brand or domain name that is easy to remember, spell, and look for online for users from any country worldwide, even though they don’t speak the local language.
Localization: The Key Element To Show Trust
Localization is fundamental to demonstrating to users from different regions around the world that your site is reliable and trustworthy. Each country, language, or region has its singularities.
We cannot try to sell our product with the same message and strategies to users from all target markets, as we won’t transmit enough confidence for them to see that we are the most expert, experienced, and authoritative website in our sector.
For this, when we want to sell internationally, it is very important to:
Analyze the languages spoken in each region to evaluate how and if it is a priority to include them on the website.
Transcribe, not just translate. The knowledge users have about our products or services may differ in each region. Therefore, it is key to adapt the message to each market.
Make sure that the language is displayed by default when users search for it from their location. That’s why it is very important a proper translation, and also an hreflang configuration on the site.
Understand the local buying habits of the product or service in the region and the cultural customs with its use.
Study how users search for products or services to define the best type of content to create: text, videos (e.g., tutorials or how-to’s), images (e.g., demonstrating and teaching the product’s use).
For example, when we look for the keywords “Tió de Nadal” or “Caga Tió” – which have the same meaning – a local Christmas tradition celebrated in Catalonia, Spain, the results and the type of message we have to create are for local users.
Surely, this type of search will have an informational purpose, but it can also be transactional since the tradition is already well-known in the country.
Screenshot from search for [tio de nadal], Google, May 2024
On the other hand, if we search for the same in the United States, the keyword will have a more informational aim since users are not so used to the tradition, and with this type of search, what they want to discover is more information about this custom, before seeing transactional results.
So, the type of content will be more descriptive.
Screenshot from search for [caga tio], Google, May 2024
For all these reasons, it is essential to geolocate content in each region in order to transmit sufficient confidence to potential customers.
Transmit That You Are The Safest Site
One of the main factors that can make selling on an international scale difficult is failing to demonstrate that the website is sufficiently secure.
We must remember that when a user buys one of our products, they will not be able to make physical claims regarding legal aspects, reimbursements, etc. Therefore, it is essential to accurately and properly communicate all aspects related to payment methods and shipping so users know that we are a reliable, safe, and trustworthy site.
To achieve this, it is highly recommended to:
Include the currency of each country on the product page.
Incorporate the most common payment methods used in each country. Whether it is by credit card, Bizum, or PayPal, we should include not only the payment methods we are accustomed to but also those familiar to users in the target region.
Detail the shipping system. From delivery time to return conditions, shipping company, and tracking code, we must provide all necessary information to instill confidence in a person who may live thousands of miles from where the products are located.
Screenshot from author, May 2024
Tell Who You Are With A Detailed “About Us” Page
For companies with a local focus, explaining who they are is very important. When selling on an international scale, it becomes essential.
We have to consider that the user who wants to buy our product or service may not have any prior knowledge of the business, the product we sell, or who we are.
That’s why we need to create a highly detailed “About Us” page, including information such as:
Company location and origins, with images or videos.
The manufacturing process and product creation details.
Detailed information about the team members, including links to other platforms, if possible, such as social networks.
Demonstrate knowledge of the subject matter through awards, certifications, quality seals, etc.
Include ratings and opinions from third parties.
Screenshot from author, May 2024
Reliable Customer Service
Finally, to encourage users to purchase a product or service on an international website, it is essential to demonstrate that there is reliable customer service.
We need to communicate that there are real people behind the website.
To show reliable customer service on a site, some actions we can take include:
Include a FAQ page with a focus on international questions, such as those regarding international shipping.
Provide direct and human contact options. Whether via chat, WhatsApp, phone, or email, offering users the opportunity to get their questions or doubts answered quickly by a human representative will help build confidence.
Include your location. Link it with Google My Business, complete with a detailed profile including images and information.
Display reviews of your customer service on your site so users can see the experiences of others.
Screenshot from author, May 2024
Link To Other Platforms And Sites
Finally, another action we can implement to build trust with users from around the world is to show them that we have profiles on other social networks and demonstrate how others talk about us.
To do this, we can:
Create and link to other social network profiles.
Get mentions from local influencers or sector leaders.
Get featured on local relevant websites.
Get listed on relevant directories in our sector.
Screenshot from YouTube, May 2024
Leverage Trust To Boost International Strategies
Trust is very important for YMYL topics.
However, we shouldn’t forget how important it is in other sectors or sites, such as for when we want to sell internationally.
Showing that a site is accurate, honest, safe, and reliable is also a key element in building trust with users worldwide – along with showcasing that we have experience, authority, and expertise related to our sector, products, and service.
Getting your international SEO strategy right can be an elusive feat.
There are a lot more factors at play than people give credit for, and it’s often a thankless job.
A successful international SEO strategy requires a deep knowledge of your company’s commercial strategy as well as technical SEO knowledge, cultural sensitivity, and excellent data skills.
Yet the industry often regards international SEO as just your hreflang setup.
In this article, I will distill the complexities of international SEO success into an actionable step-by-step list that will take you from beginner to advanced practitioner. Let’s begin!
Part I: Be Commercially Aware
1. Understand Why Your Company Is Going International
Companies can grow by expanding their products and services, focusing on gaining market penetration or expanding into new markets.
While your team’s goal might be traffic, leads, or revenue, the leadership team is likely working under a different set of parameters. Most of the time, leadership’s ultimate goal is to maximize shareholder value.
In founder-owned companies, growth goals might be slower and more sustainable, usually aimed at maintaining and growing profitability.
VC-owned companies have high growth goals because they must provide their investors with a return that’s higher than the stock market. This is what is known as the alpha, or your company’s ability to beat the market in growth.
Publicly traded companies are likely aiming to grow their share value.
Startups, depending on their maturity stage, are likely looking to prove product-market fit or expand their reach fast to show that their operations are scalable and have the potential to be profitable in the future. The goal of this is to aid in raising further capital from investors.
Understanding why businesses go international is essential for informing your SEO decisions. What’s best practice for SEO isn’t always what’s best for business.
You must adapt your strategy to your company’s growth model.
Companies choosing to grow sustainably and maintain profitability will likely expand more slowly to a market that resembles their core market.
VC-owned companies will be able to invest in a wider range of countries, with a smaller concern for providing their users with an experience on par with that of their core markets.
Startups can try to beat their competitors to market by expanding quickly and throwing a lot of money at the project, or they might be concerned with cash flow and try to expand fast but cut corners by using automatic translation.
2. Stack Rank Your Target Markets To Prioritize Your Investment
I promise I’ll get to hreflang implementation soon, but so much about international SEO has to do with commercial awareness – so bear with me; this will make you a better professional.
Many companies have different market tiers to reflect how much of a priority each market is. Market prioritization can happen using many different metrics, such as:
Average order value or lifetime customer value.
Amount of investment required.
Market size.
And market similarity.
American companies often prioritize developed English-speaking countries such as the UK, Canada, or Australia. These are most similar to their core market, and most of their market knowledge will be transferable.
After that, companies are likely to target large European economies, such as Germany and France. They might also target the LatAm market and Spain in the same effort.
The last prioritization tier can vary widely among companies, with a focus on the Nordic, Brazilian, or Asian markets.
Part II: Know Your Tech
3. Define Your International URL Structure
When doing international SEO, there are 4 different possible URL structures, each with its pros and cons.
ccTLD Structure
A ccTLD structure is set up to target different countries based on the domain type.
This structure is not ideal for companies that target different languages rather than different countries. For example, a .es website is targeting Spain, not the Spanish language.
An advantage to this kind of structure is that the ccTLD sends a very strong localization signal to search engines as to what market they are targeting, and they can lead to improved trust and CTR in your core country.
On the other hand, ccTLDs can dilute your site’s authority, as links will be spread across domains rather than concentrated on the .com.
gTLD With Subdirectories
This is my personal favorite when it comes to international SEO.
These URL structures can look like website.com/en if they’re targeting languages or website.com/en-gb if they’re targeting countries.
This configuration aggregates the authority you gain across your different territories into a single domain, it’s cheaper to maintain, and the .com TLD is widely recognizable by users worldwide.
On the other hand, this setup can look less personalized to people outside the US, who might wonder if you can service their markets.
gTLD With Subdomains
This setup involves placing international content on a subdomain like us.website.com. While once popular, it’s slipping in favor because it doesn’t bring anything unique to the table anymore.
This setup offers a clear signal to users and search engines about the intended audience of a specific subdomain.
However, subdomains often face issues with SEO, as Google tends to view them as separate entities. This separation can dilute link, similar to the ccTLD approach but without the geo-targeting advantages.
gTLD With Parameters
This is the setup where you add parameters at the end of the URL to indicate the language of the page, such as website.com/?lang=en.
I strongly advise against this setup, as it can present multiple technical SEO challenges and trust issues.
Hreflang reminds me of a multilingual form of a canonical tag, where we tell search engines that one document is a version of the other and explain the relationship between them.
I find hreflang implementation very interesting from a technical point of view. Because development teams mostly manage it, and it can be very much hit or miss.
Often, hreflang is constructed from existing fields in your content management system (CMS) or content database.
You might find that your development team is pulling the HTML lang tag, which follows a different ISO standard than hreflang, leading to a broken implementation.
Other times, there is a field in your CMS that your development team pulls from to build your hreflang setup.
Finding out how your hreflang tags are generated can be extremely helpful in identifying the sources of different issues or mitigating potential risks.
So speak to your engineering team and ask them how you’re currently generating hreflang.
5. Implement Hreflang Without Errors
There are three ways to implement hreflang on your site:
On your sitemap.
Through your HTTP header.
On your HTML head.
The method most of us are most familiar with is the HTML head. And while you can use more than one method, they should match each other perfectly. Otherwise, you risk confusing search engines.
Here are some basic rules for getting it done correctly:
In your hreflang implementation, the URL must include domain and protocol.
Hreflang tags must be reciprocal. If the page you’re listing as a language alternative does not list you back, your implementation won’t work.
Audit your hreflang regularly. My favorite tool for this, since it added the hreflang cluster analysis and link graphs, is Ahrefs. For the record, Ahrefs is not paying me to say this; it’s a genuine recommendation and has helped me a lot in my work.
You should only have one page per language.
Your hreflang URLs should be self-canonicalizing and respond with a 200 code.
And if you’re interested in the technical SEO aspect beyond hreflang, I recommend reading Mind your language by Rob Owen.
Part III: Invest In Content Incrementally
6. Translate Your Top-performing Content Topics
Now that you have the basic commercial and technical knowledge covered, you’re ready to start creating a content strategy.
You likely have a wealth of content in your core market that can be recycled. But you want to focus on translating high-converting topics, not just any topic; otherwise, you might be wasting your budget!
Let’s go step by step.
Cluster Your Website’s Content By Topic
Crawl your site using your favorite SEO tool and extract the URL and H1.
Use ChatGPT to classify that list of URLs into topics. You might already know what you usually write about, so include those topics in your prompt. You don’t want to have a classification that’s too granular, so you can prompt chatGPT to only create groups with a minimum of 10 URLs (adjust this to reflect the size of your website) and class everything else as other. This is an example of what your prompt might look like: “I will provide you with a list of article titles and their corresponding URL. Classify this list into the following topics: survey best practices, research and analysis, employee surveys, market research and others. Return this in a table format with the URL, title and group name.”
Start a spreadsheet with all your URLs in the first column, titles in the second column, and the group they belong to in the third column.
Measure Your Performance By Topic
Export your GSC data and use a =VLOOKUP formula to match your clicks to your URLs.
Export your conversion data and use a =VLOOKUP formula to match your conversions (leads, sales, sign-ups, or revenue) to the right URL.
You can then copy your topics column onto a new sheet. Remove duplicates and use the =SUMIF formula to aggregate your click data and conversion data by topic.
Choose What Topics You’ll Be Translating First
Using this data, you can now choose what topics are most likely to drive conversions based on your core market data. Choose how many topics or pieces of content you’ll be translating based on your budget.
Personally, I like translating one topic at a time because I’ve found that generating topical authority on one specific topic makes it easier for me to rank on an adjacent topic that I write about next.
7. Localize Your English Content
Once you’re set up with all your key pages and a few content topics, it’s time to evaluate your investment and see where you could be getting a bigger return.
At this stage, many companies have translated their content into a few different languages and likely copied the US content into their UK and Australian sites. Now that you’ve done some translation, it’s time to work on localization.
If you’ve just copied your US content into your UK and Australian sites, your Google Search Console indexing report might be screaming at you, “Duplicate, Google selected a different canonical than the user.”
A very easy fix that could yield great returns is to localize your English content to the nuances of those English-speaking markets.
You will want to instruct your translation and localization providers to adapt the spellings of certain words, change the choice of words, introduce local expressions, and update any cited statistic for the US with their local equivalent.
For example, if I’m targeting a British audience, “analyze” becomes “analyse,” a “stroller” becomes a “pram,” and “soccer” becomes “football.”
8. Invest In In-market Content
Once you’ve got the basics in place, you can start tackling the specific needs of other markets. This strategy is expensive, and you should only use it in your priority markets, but it can really set you apart from your competitors.
For this, you will need to work with a local linguist to identify pain points, use cases, or needs exclusive to your target market.
For example, if France suddenly made it mandatory to run a diversity and inclusion study for companies with over 250 employees, I’d want to know this and create some content on DEI surveys at SurveyMonkey.
9. Integrate With Other Content Workflows
In step six, we evaluated our top-performing content, chose the best articles to translate, and got it all down. But wait. Some of these source articles have been updated. And there is even more content now!
To run a successful international SEO campaign you must integrate with all the other teams publishing content within your organization.
Usually, the teams creating content in an organization are SEO, content, PR, product marketing, demand generation, customer marketing, customer service, customer education, or solutions engineering.
That’s a lot, and you won’t be able to integrate with everyone all at once. Prioritize the teams that create the most revenue-generating content, such as SEO, content, or product marketing.
Working with these teams, you will have to establish a process for what happens when they create a new piece, update some content, or remove an existing piece.
These processes can differ for everyone, but I can tell you what I do with my team and hope it inspires you.
When a piece of content that’s already been localized into international markets isupdated, we get the content in a queue to be re-localized the next quarter.
When they create a new piece of content, we evaluate its performance, and if it’s performing above average, we add it to a localization queue for the next quarter.
When theychange the URL of a piece of content or delete it, all international sites must follow suit at the same time, since due to some technical limitations, not making the change globally would create some hreflang issues.
Wrapping Up
International SEO is vast and complex, and no article can cover it all, but many interesting resources have been created by SEO pros across the community for those who want to learn more.
Navigating the complexities of international SEO is no small feat. It’s an intricate dance of aligning commercial strategies with technical precision, cultural insights, and data-driven decisions.
From understanding your company’s core motives for global expansion to meticulously implementing hreflang tags and localizing content, every step plays a crucial role in building a successful international presence.
“Experience” is the latest (but not the least relevant) addition to “E-E-A-T,” which stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness – a component of Google’s search quality rater guidelines. This concept is a mix of factors that help Google determine if the content is relevant and helpful enough for users, thereby prioritizing it in search results.
E-E-A-T plays an important role in “your money or your life” (YMYL) topics.
But what happens when you want to create international strategies? How can you leverage E-E-A-T to boost your international expansion?
In my previous article, I discussed how to demonstrate expertise and authority on an international scale, using a case study on selling a local product from Barcelona.
Now, let’s will explore how to leverage experience to boost your international expansion.
How To Show Experience
As Google defines, “experience” is the extent to which the content creator has the necessary first-hand or life experience for the topic.
In this case, there will be two main ways of demonstrating experience with a product or in relation to a topic.
One is through your own experience as a creator of the product; the other is through the experience of consumers.
So, how can an international ecommerce company leverage its experience to differentiate itself from others and compete internationally?
Which actions that demonstrate experience are more likely to influence users’ purchase decisions on international websites? Let’s explore some actions you can take.
Demonstrate Your Experience Through Your Consumer: Product Reviews
Whether locally or internationally, getting product reviews from consumers is a key factor in demonstrating the experience of using the product or service.
Providing a good experience during the purchase process, as well as a quality product or service, will help boost reviews with better ratings from users – whether within the website, in directories, or Google Business Profile.
Include A Testimonial Page
One option to make it easier for potential new consumers to find user review content is to create a “testimonial page.”
On this page, the web creator can collect users’ experience and opinions regarding the product in different formats, such as text, image, or video.
Screenshot from www.tiodenadal.online, February 2024
In international ecommerce, providing and sharing cross-border user experience is also key to conveying confidence to users from other countries, regarding the veracity of the store.
Which Reviews Influence The Users’ Purchase Decisions On International Websites?
To create product review pages and show users the ratings, you must achieve a certain number of reviews demonstrating the user’s experience with the product.
On an international scale, there will be reviews that help not only demonstrate the users’ experience during the purchase process but also encourage new users to do the same.
Which reviews carry more weight in influencing users’ purchase decisions on international websites? And what specific actions should international businesses prioritize as a result?
Reviews For International Ecommerce Sites
When venturing into global markets, consider the user shopping experience ratings that tend to predominate and significantly impact purchasing decisions.
Case in point: high shipping costs and long delivery times.
The most common reason online U.S. shoppers abandon their carts is additional costs like shipping, taxes, and fees (47%). Also, 24% of consumers drop out of an online shopping session because shipping is too slow.
Changing the cost of shipping or delivery time from one country to another is usually not in the hands of the business but of external factors.
However, you can take these actions to get positive reviews related to shipping or delivery time – or at least prevent damaging reviews related to these factors.
Include actual shipping times and explain them to buyers. Don’t try to risk getting more sales.
Watch out for high-demand seasons (like Christmas and Black Friday).
Stay up-to-date on the global international logistics situation.
Follow up on carrier and logistics situations in your potential countries.
Be aware of customs borders in each country.
Screenshot from author, February 2024
Reviews For International B2B Or Saas Sites
While long delivery times and high shipping costs impact international sales across the board, B2B, industrial, and SaaS companies face unique challenges in achieving global competitiveness.
Factors that influence purchase decisions on international B2B/SaaS websites:
Platform language: Lack of local language support can make it difficult for consumers to use the product.
Price: Service or platform prices not adjusted for regional purchasing power can hurt market penetration.
Customer support: The absence of local customer support or a contact person may impact the buying process.
Customer service hours: Adapting to local schedules and holidays in each country is key for a good experience.
Localization: Tailoring the product or platform to each country’s cultural characteristics or preferences helps enhance user experience.
Screenshot from author, February 2024
Screenshot from author, February 2024
Screenshot from author, February 2024
How To Create Content That Demonstrates Your Experience
You can go beyond encouraging users to share their experiences with the products on your website.
How-to guides: Develop step-by-step guides or tutorials that show how to use the product effectively.
Expert pages: Create engaging content (consider using photos and videos) that show how the product has been produced.
Influencer content: Partner with relevant influencers or bloggers to share content on how they use the product.
Forums and discussions: Build a vibrant community where users are allowed to share their experiences, ask questions, and learn from other customers about how they enjoy your product.
How To Generate Content Ideas To Showcase Experience Internationally
Developing content that reflects your product or service’s international reach depends on the type of project, audience, and potential markets.
However, there are key strategies to assist you in coming up with ideas and focusing on creating content that highlights your global experience.
Use Commercial Keywords For Your International Content Strategy
Including commercial keywords in your content strategy shows your experience with the product. Some of these keywords are important when the potential customer is interested in the product and wants to investigate more.
These keywords often include search terms for your product or service that combine concepts like:
Free.
Difference/vs.
Reviews.
Opinions.
Screenshot from Semrush, February 2024
Get Inspired By Marketplaces And Directories
Ecommerce marketplaces and B2B/SaaS directories are the go-to sites for inspiration and ideas. These sites offer insights to inform your content strategy and help demonstrate the product experience.
By analyzing marketplaces, such as Etsy and Amazon, you can learn what people think and say about you, and see how your product is perceived globally.
What are the most highly rated factors? What do they complain about the most? What can you differentiate yourself with?
Identify Key Purchase Decision-Making Factors
Analyze the top-rated and worst-rated reviews of your competitors and understand why. This will help you identify key purchase decision-making factors for your target consumers.
Screenshot from author, February 2024
Use Other Channels
Today, static content isn’t enough. You can’t just create text or image content to convey a product experience to potential consumers.
Utilize other channels, such as TikTok or YouTube, to create engaging content that showcases your experience – and expertise – with your product.
You can see it with the same Search Generative Experience (SGE), where demonstrating first-hand experience will play an essential role in creating useful, quality, and helpful content.
However, as of writing, it is still not very clear what the final model will look like.
Expanding Experience Internationally
Experience, expertise, and authority are key factors that will help you achieve success in your international SEO strategies.
But Google emphasizes another key element within the E-E-A-T framework: trustworthiness, which the search engine defines as the most important member of the E-E-A-T family.
We’ll delve deeper into this element in our next article.
Managing SEO-related work for a site is about much more than optimizing the content or fixing broken links on the site.
When it comes to managing SEO for multilingual and multinational sites, the amount of work not only increases due to the number of websites but also expands in order to coordinate effective activities and accomplish the many tasks and optimization efforts associated with multiple sites.
Whether you manage it as a team of one or with multiple teams, in-house, or with an external agency, each scenario has its own unique challenges.
In this era of fast-paced algorithm changes and ever-tougher competition, having a well-oiled and highly collaborative management structure is essential for SEO success.
In this article, I will focus on the elements of SEO that are unique to multilingual and multinational websites, and share some recommended and effective SEO management methods to maximize your overall performance.
As with anything prefixed with “multi,” there will be a lot of moving parts that may not always align.
In a follow-up article, I will go into more detail on implementing an effective SEO management structure through incremental change that will help facilitate adoption and overall program success.
SEO Elements Unique To Multilingual And Multinational Sites
While fundamentally, multilingual and multinational SEO is the same as SEO for a single language and market website, some additional challenges and complexities come into play – and they only increase as the number of sites and languages increases.
The following are some of those specific challenges that are unique to multinational SEO.
Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is a significant problem for multinational websites. There are a few types of duplicate content challenges.
There are obvious duplications for product pages in the same language markets like English, Spanish, and Arabic markets.
These are purposeful duplicates, which may have unique attributes like price, size, and contact information that may make them different enough from each other.
The more complicated duplicates happen when CMS systems automatically clone pages for each market.
For example, if a new page is created in the US, the CMS will automatically add one in English for every other market, even if the product is not available or the team does not have the resources to do the localization.
Unfortunately, teams are often unaware of this “feature” until they start seeing these pages listed in Google error reports or outranking the desired local page.
The Different National Site Appears In The Search Results
Search engines need to present the best result, and they may select a page from a different market to present to searchers.
A common problem in Australia is for US or UK webpages to rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs) than the local version of the page, especially for brand or product names.
To help solve this problem, Hreflang elements were introduced for site owners to designate the language and market for each website.
Unfortunately, implementing Hreflang can be an even greater challenge, as it requires collaboration across all markets, even those benefitting from cannibalized traffic.
Different SEO Processes, Skills, And Focus Areas
Markets and regions may have different priorities, approaches, and skill sets that may conflict with each other when there is no centralized governance of the website and SEO.
This can also be a challenge with multiple agencies responsible for specific markets.
Skills and focus may vary, with some focused on technical SEO while others focused on content creation or link building.
What Makes It Difficult To Manage?
As noted previously, the introduction of “multi” is a clue as to the challenges.
In addition to multiple languages and markets, there are often multiple management teams, development teams, SEO teams, and even agency teams – and they are often not aligned. Each focuses on its own market priorities and SEO processes.
Centralized Vs. Decentralized Management
The biggest challenge to overcome is when companies allow decentralized management of their websites.
When an organization is decentralized, this often means a true global SEO program will not be possible.
As the local team makes all of the decisions related to priorities and the content that goes on their websites, HQ may have little say regarding content and getting SEO initiatives prioritized.
Multiple Contact Points And Teams
With decentralization and market-based teams, you may be required to work with multiple points of contact.
At a recent conference with the Global Head of SEO for a large consumer products company, he indicated that nearly every decision had to be accepted by 70 stakeholders, making truly global changes and processes nearly impossible.
Another similar-sized company indicated it took nearly three years to get the buy-in, GSC access, and agreement on the method to implement Hreflang.
Communication Barriers (Languages/Time Zone)
In global SEO, there is always someone sacrificing sleep and free time to attend meetings due to time zone differences.
This is inevitable, but you can make friends if you can rotate the early-morning or late-night meetings to allow everyone to enjoy a beneficial time zone occasionally.
You should always record the meetings and share the video and action items so everyone can have access to the information.
This is also great for those without strong English skills as they can rewatch sections they don’t understand or, in some cases, translate the transcripts of the meeting.
Different SEO Skills And Knowledge
It is very common that the different team members have varying levels of SEO expertise.
Some may be well-versed in SEO best practices, while others may have limited knowledge or exposure, as SEO may be one of many roles they are required to perform.
Ensuring consistent quality across all SEO activities, especially the fundamentals, becomes challenging.
This is the perfect reason to recommend the use of standard best practice guides as a reference for everyone.
These guides not only explain how to undertake specific tasks but also why it is important and specific requirements for your organization.
These guides help standardize key tasks and reporting and can be an excellent way to help educate local development teams and agencies on your organization’s processes and practices.
Different Budget Allocations
Budget allocations can create challenges across markets, with limited funds for tools and resources forcing markets to get creative.
In many second and third-tier markets, there is often little or no budget for search activities.
Different SEO Structures (In-house vs. Agency)
It is likely that the organization will have multiple independent in-house SEO teams or multiple agencies managing SEO projects in specific markets with processes that may conflict with other markets.
These decentralized teams often have little or no collaboration between them and, in many cases, conflicting processes and priorities.
Local Only Content And Market Specific Website
Larger companies, especially those grown through acquisition, often have multiple content management systems (CMS) or even a single system with unique templates for each market that reduce the number of “fix it once” opportunities for the SEO team.
This also requires different development teams and different methods to implement SEO and prevents any real level of standardization.
You may have cases of “local only” content where there is a blog, product set, or other content that is unique to a local market that may siphon resources to optimize and manage at the cost of core content.
Websites may deploy language or location detection functionality to present the user with the website for their market or the language they prefer based on their browser settings.
While this can enable a good user experience, it can create several challenges for SEO.
Firstly, the logic and rigor of the implementation and how users are routed. I have seen many problems where users are taken to markets that don’t make sense. For example, users from Botswana were taken to the UK website rather than South Africa, or users in Malaysia were routed to Australia rather than to the Singapore website.
Additionally, teams must understand how the functionally handles search engine crawlers that crawl from specific markets.
How does the system handle a request from Google’s crawler from California when it requests your various market websites?
What happens if they don’t set a language preference? Does it default to English? It is critical that the logic for this functionally be reviewed for the correct handling of visitors.
Conclusion
While the “multi” in multinational SEO does bring unique challenges for the search marketers, the more aware they are of these challenges and their impact on local, regional, and global search performance, the easier they will be able to mitigate and minimize them.
In my next article, I will review those methods to foster collaboration and how to use a stepped approach to developing an effective global SEO management structure.
