Getting your international SEO strategy right can be an elusive feat.
There are a lot more factors at play than people give credit for, and it’s often a thankless job.
A successful international SEO strategy requires a deep knowledge of your company’s commercial strategy as well as technical SEO knowledge, cultural sensitivity, and excellent data skills.
Yet the industry often regards international SEO as just your hreflang setup.
In this article, I will distill the complexities of international SEO success into an actionable step-by-step list that will take you from beginner to advanced practitioner. Let’s begin!
Part I: Be Commercially Aware
1. Understand Why Your Company Is Going International
Companies can grow by expanding their products and services, focusing on gaining market penetration or expanding into new markets.
While your team’s goal might be traffic, leads, or revenue, the leadership team is likely working under a different set of parameters. Most of the time, leadership’s ultimate goal is to maximize shareholder value.
In founder-owned companies, growth goals might be slower and more sustainable, usually aimed at maintaining and growing profitability.
VC-owned companies have high growth goals because they must provide their investors with a return that’s higher than the stock market. This is what is known as the alpha, or your company’s ability to beat the market in growth.
Publicly traded companies are likely aiming to grow their share value.
Startups, depending on their maturity stage, are likely looking to prove product-market fit or expand their reach fast to show that their operations are scalable and have the potential to be profitable in the future. The goal of this is to aid in raising further capital from investors.
Understanding why businesses go international is essential for informing your SEO decisions. What’s best practice for SEO isn’t always what’s best for business.
You must adapt your strategy to your company’s growth model.
Companies choosing to grow sustainably and maintain profitability will likely expand more slowly to a market that resembles their core market.
VC-owned companies will be able to invest in a wider range of countries, with a smaller concern for providing their users with an experience on par with that of their core markets.
Startups can try to beat their competitors to market by expanding quickly and throwing a lot of money at the project, or they might be concerned with cash flow and try to expand fast but cut corners by using automatic translation.
2. Stack Rank Your Target Markets To Prioritize Your Investment
I promise I’ll get to hreflang implementation soon, but so much about international SEO has to do with commercial awareness – so bear with me; this will make you a better professional.
Many companies have different market tiers to reflect how much of a priority each market is. Market prioritization can happen using many different metrics, such as:
Average order value or lifetime customer value.
Amount of investment required.
Market size.
And market similarity.
American companies often prioritize developed English-speaking countries such as the UK, Canada, or Australia. These are most similar to their core market, and most of their market knowledge will be transferable.
After that, companies are likely to target large European economies, such as Germany and France. They might also target the LatAm market and Spain in the same effort.
The last prioritization tier can vary widely among companies, with a focus on the Nordic, Brazilian, or Asian markets.
Part II: Know Your Tech
3. Define Your International URL Structure
When doing international SEO, there are 4 different possible URL structures, each with its pros and cons.
ccTLD Structure
A ccTLD structure is set up to target different countries based on the domain type.
This structure is not ideal for companies that target different languages rather than different countries. For example, a .es website is targeting Spain, not the Spanish language.
An advantage to this kind of structure is that the ccTLD sends a very strong localization signal to search engines as to what market they are targeting, and they can lead to improved trust and CTR in your core country.
On the other hand, ccTLDs can dilute your site’s authority, as links will be spread across domains rather than concentrated on the .com.
gTLD With Subdirectories
This is my personal favorite when it comes to international SEO.
These URL structures can look like website.com/en if they’re targeting languages or website.com/en-gb if they’re targeting countries.
This configuration aggregates the authority you gain across your different territories into a single domain, it’s cheaper to maintain, and the .com TLD is widely recognizable by users worldwide.
On the other hand, this setup can look less personalized to people outside the US, who might wonder if you can service their markets.
gTLD With Subdomains
This setup involves placing international content on a subdomain like us.website.com. While once popular, it’s slipping in favor because it doesn’t bring anything unique to the table anymore.
This setup offers a clear signal to users and search engines about the intended audience of a specific subdomain.
However, subdomains often face issues with SEO, as Google tends to view them as separate entities. This separation can dilute link, similar to the ccTLD approach but without the geo-targeting advantages.
gTLD With Parameters
This is the setup where you add parameters at the end of the URL to indicate the language of the page, such as website.com/?lang=en.
I strongly advise against this setup, as it can present multiple technical SEO challenges and trust issues.
4. Understand Your Hreflang Setup
In the words of John Mueller: hreflang can be one of the most complex aspects of SEO.
Screenshot from Twitter, May 2024
Hreflang reminds me of a multilingual form of a canonical tag, where we tell search engines that one document is a version of the other and explain the relationship between them.
I find hreflang implementation very interesting from a technical point of view. Because development teams mostly manage it, and it can be very much hit or miss.
Often, hreflang is constructed from existing fields in your content management system (CMS) or content database.
You might find that your development team is pulling the HTML lang tag, which follows a different ISO standard than hreflang, leading to a broken implementation.
Other times, there is a field in your CMS that your development team pulls from to build your hreflang setup.