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HGA Takeaway: Driving International Traffic with SEO
HGA Takeaway
Driving International Traffic with SEO
Want customers, buyers and distributors in new markets to find your brand online? We joined a recent Export Academy session to explore how SEO can help businesses build international visibility without burning through their marketing budget.
Taking your brand international is exciting. It can also feel slightly overwhelming.
Suddenly, your potential audience is enormous. There are new countries, new customers, different search habits, different languages and plenty of decisions about where to focus your time and budget.
For Home & Gift businesses, this might mean trying to reach overseas retailers and distributors, growing direct to consumer sales internationally or building awareness ahead of entering a new market.
We joined Tom Wardman, Head of Market Growth at ICS-digital and ICS-translate, for an Export Academy session on Driving International Traffic with Search Engine Optimisation. The session explored how businesses can build organic visibility internationally, where to focus their efforts and how search is changing as AI becomes a bigger part of the customer journey.
International SEO isn't about trying to appear everywhere at once. It's about making it easier for the right people, in the right markets, to discover your business.
First things first
You don't need to target the whole world
One of the most reassuring messages from the session was the importance of prioritisation.
When you're looking internationally, it's easy to see a world full of potential customers and immediately want to target everyone. For most businesses, particularly SMEs with finite budgets, that isn't realistic or necessarily helpful.
Instead, think about where there is a realistic and achievable opportunity. Consider how cost effective the market is to reach, whether your approach will be sustainable and, importantly, what you actually want customers in that market to do.
Pick the right markets first. Then build your visibility from there.
The foundations
The three pillars of SEO
SEO can become very technical very quickly, but the session broke it down into three main areas. You don't need to become an SEO expert overnight, but understanding how these pieces fit together makes the whole thing much less intimidating.
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Pillar 1 Technical SEO Making sure your website is fast, accessible, mobile friendly and easy for search engines to understand. |
Pillar 2 On-Page SEO Creating useful website content that answers the questions your customers are actually searching for. |
Pillar 3 Off-Page SEO Building authority beyond your own website through relevant links, coverage and mentions elsewhere online. |
Takeaway 1
Get the basics right before chasing rankings
You can have beautiful photography, brilliant products and pages full of useful information, but if your website is slow, difficult to use or hard for search engines to understand, you're making life unnecessarily difficult for yourself.
Technical SEO is the foundation underneath everything else. For an ecommerce or wholesale Home & Gift website, that means paying attention to the experience your customers have when they arrive.
Start with the basics:
Speed: Do your product images and pages load quickly?
Mobile: Is your website genuinely easy to browse and buy from on a phone?
Navigation: Can visitors quickly find the products or information they're looking for?
Accessibility: Can people use your website comfortably across different devices?
Structure: Can search engines understand how your website and its pages fit together?
Mobile deserves particular attention. Google uses a mobile first approach to indexing, so the mobile version of your site isn't an afterthought. It's a fundamental part of how your website is understood and ranked.
Going international?
Help search engines understand who each page is for
If you create different versions of your website for different countries or languages, the structure matters.
The session explored technical considerations such as subfolders, canonical tags and hreflang, which help search engines understand the relationship between different international versions of your content and show the appropriate page to the appropriate audience.
You don't necessarily need to implement these yourself, but if you're asking an agency or web developer to build international versions of your site, they're worth having on the conversation list.
Takeaway 2
Don't just translate. Think local.
One of the biggest lessons for any brand expanding internationally is that translation and localisation aren't necessarily the same thing.
Sometimes translating existing content makes perfect sense, particularly when the topic and customer intent are broadly the same in both markets.
Other times, you'll get better results by creating or adapting content specifically for that country because the phrases people search, the questions they ask and the things they care about can be different.
Think beyond language.
A customer in Germany, France or the US might describe and search for your product differently to a customer in the UK, even when they're ultimately looking for the same thing.
For Home & Gift brands
Search like your customer, not like your business
You might describe something internally as a "decorative home fragrance vessel". Your customer might simply search for a "candle."
The same applies internationally. A literal translation of your preferred product term doesn't automatically mean that's what customers in another country are typing into Google.
Keyword and market research can help you understand what people are actually searching for before you spend time creating pages and content around the wrong terminology.
Takeaway 3
Create content because it's useful, not because you think you "need content"
More isn't automatically better.
There's little value in filling your website with articles purely because somebody told you blogging is good for SEO. Every piece of content should have a reason to exist.
The webinar highlighted Google's focus on useful, customer focused content and the principles of Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trust.
Before publishing something, ask:
Does this answer a question our customer genuinely has?
Does it make buying from us easier?
Does it demonstrate knowledge or expertise?
Is it useful for the particular market we're targeting?
Would we still think this was worth publishing if Google didn't exist?
Don't create content for the sake of feeding Google. Create something your customer will actually value.
Takeaway 4
Search is changing because of AI
SEO isn't just about a list of blue Google links anymore.
Customers can now move between traditional search, AI generated answers, social media, reviews, comparison sites and other sources before they ever reach your website.
That makes being clear and consistent about your brand increasingly important.
Help search engines and AI understand your brand:
Be clear: Who are you, what do you sell and who is it for?
Be consistent: Use consistent terminology and brand information across your website and wider online presence.
Be structured: Structured data can help machines understand your content more precisely.
Be credible: Relevant mentions and links from trusted third parties can strengthen the wider picture of your brand online.
A changing search landscape
Being distinctive matters too
SEO can sometimes become so focused on keywords and technical details that we forget there's a brand at the centre of it.
As AI increasingly summarises information and compresses the number of choices presented to customers, having clear and recognisable brand cues can become even more valuable.
For Home & Gift brands, where design, personality, story and visual identity can be a huge part of the appeal, that's an important reminder: don't optimise the personality out of your brand.
Takeaway 5
What other websites say about you matters
The third pillar of the session was off-page SEO, particularly links from other websites.
A useful way to think about a backlink is as a form of online endorsement. When a credible and relevant website links to yours, it can help search engines understand that your site is a useful resource.
When you're targeting another country, relevant links and mentions within that market can also help you establish a stronger local footprint.
Quality beats quantity.
One relevant link from a respected retailer, trade publication, industry body or media outlet can be far more useful than collecting large numbers of irrelevant links simply to make the total look impressive.
Takeaway 6
PR and SEO don't have to live in separate worlds
Digital PR combines many of the principles of traditional PR with SEO. The aim is to create stories, insight and campaigns that people genuinely want to cover and, in turn, earn relevant media mentions and links.
For Home & Gift businesses, there are plenty of natural opportunities here.
New product launches and collections
Original trend insight and retail data
Founder stories and business milestones
Collaborations and licensing partnerships
Seasonal campaigns with a genuinely interesting angle
Expert commentary on trends within your particular category
Takeaway 7
Put your effort behind the pages that matter
You don't have to optimise every page on your website at once.
If time and budget are limited, start with the pages most closely connected to your commercial priorities.
That might include:
Your bestselling product ranges
New or exclusive collections
Products with particularly strong margins
Key wholesale or trade pages
Pages that are already performing well and could potentially be pushed further
The HGA Takeaway
Start with the fundamentals and grow from there
1. Choose your international markets carefully rather than trying to target everywhere.
2. Make sure your website is fast, mobile friendly and technically sound.
3. Research what customers in each market are actually searching for.
4. Translate when it makes sense, but localise or create fresh content when customer behaviour is different.
5. Create useful content that answers genuine customer questions.
6. Be clear and consistent about your brand as AI becomes a bigger part of search.
7. Build authority through relevant coverage, mentions and links in the markets that matter to you.
One final thought
You don't have to do everything at once
International SEO can sound like a huge project when you start talking about technical optimisation, localisation, keywords, backlinks, AI and international website structures.
But for most Home & Gift businesses, the best place to start is much simpler: choose a market that makes commercial sense, make sure your website works properly, understand what those customers are looking for and create something genuinely useful for them. You can build from there.
This HGA Takeaway is based on the Export Academy session "Driving International Traffic with Search Engine Optimisation", presented by Tom Wardman, Head of Market Growth at ICS-digital and ICS-translate. We've pulled out the points we felt were particularly useful for businesses across the Home & Gift industry.
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