Expansion across geographies is the natural progression for a business. However, along with business operations, the marketing strategies of a business – whether internet-based or consumer-based – must also expand and evolve.
This is what makes international link-building so important when it comes to targeting audiences that speak different languages and follow different cultures. In a survey, link building emerged as the most challenging aspect of SEO, with 52.3% of the respondents expressing concerns about this aspect.
[Poll source: X]
Let’s address this challenge once and for all.
What is International Link Building? Why Does it Matter?
International link building is the process of creating a network of backlinks from international sources to your website. This activity helps your business gain recognition across borders. In turn, this helps drive visitors to your website and other digital channels from other countries.
In addition to giving you exposure to a new audience pool, international link building is a great way to get your website to rank higher on search results – even for local searches. Depending on the quality of the backlinks you get, it helps your business establish itself as an authoritative source of information in your niche.
Is it Prudent to Create Backlinks for Each Website?
For businesses with global operations, it is standard practice to provide different subdomains for different countries. For example, your website company.com may have a subdomain company.com/in for India or a subdomain company.com/kr for South Korea. Since these pages are presented separately to the audience, they have their own ranking on search results. It, therefore, makes sense to create backlinks for your website and all the subdomains that it has to help increase the opportunity to rank better on global searches. It may even help your page rank higher on local searches for your international audience.
How to Prioritize Pages for International Link Building?
Trying to gather backlinks for all the pages of your website is a monumental task. It is, therefore, prudent to first prioritize the pages that have the best potential of bringing the most traffic back to your website.
It is important to keep in mind that the pages that are popular with the audience in one country may not be accessed as much in another country. You can check your Google Analytics data to check the number of visitors and interactions on each page and use that as the starting point.
5 High-Yield Tips for International Link Building
Backlinks form the literal backbone of organic traffic on your website. According to a study conducted by Ahrefs, about 66% of the websites on the internet have absolutely no referring domains.
You can begin by understanding TLDs (Top Level Domains). TLDs play a major role in helping you build links in an international market. Registering your website with a “.com” domain makes it much easier to find willing sources to provide referrals for your website.
With that said, it is important to study the international market that you are seeking referrals from. In certain regions (like Germany and Austria), websites follow an unshakeable nofollow policy, which doesn’t benefit your international link-building SEO in any way.
1. Understand How Your Competitors Get Backlinks
The best tip to get international websites to link back to yours is to understand how your competitors are doing it.
You can employ several SEO tools at your company to help you gain insight into the backlink data of your competitors. Alternatively, you can hire the services of professional SEO link builders who provide vetted and high-quality backlinking opportunities for your website through their network of niche professionals.
2. Use Contextual Anchor Text
Backlinking is all about giving your visitors more resources to check out that are relevant to the topic or subject they are interested in. In a recent LinkedIn advice post, the authors recommend using local keywords in your articles as they deliver higher intent that far outweighs the lower search volume.
Consider adding local value to the international operations of your business in the anchor text. This way, you would have a robust network of authoritative content that search engines find easier to rank higher internationally.
3. Register With Local Directories
If you are planning to set up business operations in an international location, register your business in all the relevant local directories online. Chances are that clients or customers that have high intent are searching for services on these directories and making referrals to their online network.
The quality of referrals received from local directories is far higher than the generic listings found on Yellow Pages and such.
4. Leverage Social Media
According to the SEO expert Neil Patel, social sharing and links in social media profiles were the two top-ranking and the most efficient methods to build links when he surveyed SEO professionals:
Long story short, the more presence your business has on social media accounts, the more international traffic and references it is going to generate.
5. Create Links from Related Websites
If you are interested in reading about robotics, would you be willing to follow an anchor link to an article about cyclones? Most probably not.
Whether you are looking for international backlinks or local ones, your website would build a more authoritative network if every referral came from a professional outfit in the same niche or a complementing niche.
What if the Marketing Prospect is Limited?
If your target market is proving to be challenging to crack, try a roundabout strategy to enhance your brand’s presence:
- Try to build backlinks to your website from businesses in the USA. Since this is a big market, backlinks from this source will get you a higher ranking.
- Try guest posting (translated to native language) to the websites of your target market. Once local blogs and businesses recognise your brand, it will become easier to get backlinks.
- Remove the language barrier by providing translated resources and live chat in native languages.
Links Aren’t Built in a Day!
International link-building is a task of immense patience. Not only does it require careful examination of your referrals, but it also needs a clear-cut strategy and consistency to achieve the goals.
The six handy tips discussed here are merely the starting point to get you rolling. You can consider partnering with a professional SEO service like InfiDigit to get assured results and guaranteed quality for international backlinks.
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