How to identify and target international markets and grow your business using country and lingual specific searches?

Before you take your business to international markets, you should know the additional elements you need considering for success of your business expansion plan. It is important you understand what could make your business development plan a success and the resources you need to implement and execute the plan.

Identifying market is the first step before you start international SEO for your website. Research work has to be done to identify and target markets with high potential for business expansion and development.

1. The research

Market research should begin with the aim of determining potential of individual markets for your business expansion. Start the search by finding the present search results of your business.

What is latest organic search status of your business?

It is the first step in identifying your present international organic search visibility, website traffic and conversions. You need answering the following questions to find these details.

• Which are the countries or languages where your website is visible?
• What is the volume of traffic on those searches?
• Which are the keywords on which your site is visible?
• Which are the web pages that are more popular than others?
• What is the conversion volume of the traffic coming from international search?

Answers of these questions will show which are the markets where your business is visible, who are the customers and the volume of visitors. And also you can determine their behavior. If you find good visibility of your website in the targeted markets then take it as an opportunity to make an attempt to reach out to international clients.

If you find that your website has minimum visibility in those markets then you should study the search volume of the keywords targeted audiences are using to search information for the business like yours. If the search volume is high, you can capitalize in those markets.

What is the potential of organic search in your business?

Second step in identifying markets is to assess the potential of targeted markets. Keyword research will help in determining the potential.

• Search queries (keywords and phrases) visitors of those markets are using to find information for businesses matching with your business
• Organic search volume of each keyword and variation of volume between markets
• Competition on the keywords
• Current ranking of your website on those keywords

Collect data by answering these questions and identify your markets for targeting.

2. The targeting

Which are the countries or language markets where search volume of relevant keywords is high? These are the keywords that will help in identifying and prioritizing your markets.

Divide market in geographic and lingual for convenience. You can sell your product to people residing in a specific geographic area or to those speaking a specific language or both. You will see a very specific trend in your targeted market. Here you can take example of others.

Amazon is an ecommerce website or an online retail store that works worldwide. It relies on geographic search like UK, Spain, France and German. Similarly, there is Skype that is service software. Skype has nothing to do with geographic search as it targets customers speaking different languages.

If you don’t see enough potential in geographic search then you can focus on lingual search. But such things rarely happen. You can’t get different results from similar market. Here you can do one thing that is to start with minimum efforts and go on building your website traffic by capturing markets. It will help you in targeting traffic and convert the traffic from lingual market to country specific market as soon as the conversion rate grows.

What you will find that a web architecture perspective doesn’t work when you want to target international markets. On the contrary, a country or language specific website does well in international markets. Now come to the technical part that is transforming the site for targeted markets like country and language specific.

3. Optimization

Once the settings are made, you can start optimization process that includes increasing visibility of the website for search engine spiders. Make right moves that avoid misalignment issues with website.

Conclusion

Keywords research plays a crucial role in SEO and also in market identification. You can see which are the markets where potential to grow your business high by studying keyword volume and conversion rate of different markets.