Whether you are a local business looking for local international visibility or a multinational seeking a cohesive approach to your organic search strategy make sure you consider the following:

Keyword research:

Don't expect english terms to translate literally and deliver a. volume or b. relevant traffic. Your keyword research process should be similar but understanding and researching in the local market is imperative. Obtain briefings from employees and local suppliers. Understand how they would search.

Select your target search engine carefully:

Don't assume Google is the dominant engine. China is a case in point here where Google does not rule the roost.

Local competitor research is key:

Research the local competitors. Reverse engineer their back links, social strategy and onpage optimisation to get an idea of what terms they are targetting. Use these as starting points for your usual keyword research tools.

Local links equal local authority.

Of course an even and natural spread of links is important, but when trying to obtain local search visibility, make sure your off page equity have local IP ranges to the country being targeted. A good extension for managing this process is flagfox, a firefox browser plugin displaying a country flag for each site you visit.

Site infrastructure: Global domain or local domain extension

Possible site structures managing multiple languages typically take one of the following forms:

• Domain based: One site per geography. yoursite.com, yoursite.co.uk, yoursite.de, yoursite.fr
• Directory based: Yoursite.com/en, yoursite.com/fr, yoursite.com/de, yoursite.com/de

Things to consider when making this choice are:

• Your businesses capacity to manage multiple sites. How often will the content change, how much resource do you have at your disposal to manage.
• How competitive is the local market. The more competitive it is the more likely you will require a locally hosted local domain extension, i.e. yourdomain.fr hosted in france.
• Domain age: If you already own international domain's, how old are they and do they have indexed content published to them.

Site content: Automated translations vs Manual

Never automate translations. 9 times out of 10 they are are grammatically incorrect and will reflect badly on your business.