You may be an expert internet marketer, but has it ever occurred to you that you might be missing out on a more global marketplace if you only focus on English-language SEO? The world is a big place, and although it seems as though everyone speaks English, the vast majority of the world's population does not. These are people who will never land on you page, and who will never help you boost your rankings.

There are two basic ways to do your SEO in a foreign language. You can either target the language itself or do it individually by country. Both approaches are equally valid.


Language-Specific SEO

The obvious reason this method is incredibly effective is that you're killing multiple birds with one stone. If you research powerful keywords in Spanish, you're not only targeting Spain, you're targeting every Spanish-speaking country on earth, from Venezuela to Mexico. You can try Dutch, Portuguese, French—every country that once had an empire, essentially. It is a wonderful catch-all method of doing powerful global SEO.

Unfortunately, this is not where the story ends. Global SEO cannot rely on a simple translation of certain keywords. Even within one language, there are dialects and different ways of saying things. This is why you must also specifically target countries individually. You have to take into account local ways of saying things, which means that you have to have a method in mind.

The Method Explained

The first thing you have to realize is that this is not out of your reach, no matter how daunting it may seem. Just as you would in any other case, your first step is to build a good keyword list. Google has a wonderful tool built in, aptly called Google Keyword Tool, that allows to you build a powerful keyword list. You've probably used it. You enter a URL into it and it pulls out relevant keywords. If the website is in a foreign language, Google is smart enough to generate a target language keyword list.

Of course, you can build your keyword list in a more structured fashion by writing it out in English and using a translation service such as Google Translate to come up with the keywords in your target language.

What to Do with Your Keywords

The most important thing you do with the keywords you generate is to build sites with a URL based in the countries you're targeting. Of course, in the end, you'll need to populate the sites with content. You could go the Google Translate route, which will certainly work, but the quality of the content might not be good enough to get past Google's algorithms. In the end you might find that you'll need to employ a translation service.

It is not a requirement to spend the money, but a one-time investment can really pay back by building up your brand in a more global market.

Author Bio
Adrienne Erin is a freelance writer/blogger who is always interested in the latest developments in marketing. Catch up with her on Twitter to see her latest work: @adrienneerin