What Is International SEO?

International SEO is the process of optimizing your website so that search engines can easily identify which countries you want to target and which languages you use for business.

Do you need to go international?

If you know that a good share of your website visitors come from a different country than where you’re located, speak different languages, or both, then it may be time to make some changes to your website to create a better experience for all of your international visitors.

On the surface, international SEO may seem like a totally foreign concept, but in reality, you may be more familiar with it than you know. Think of international SEO as geotargeting, but instead of optimizing your website to attract traffic from your city or state, you’re optimizing it for different countries and languages.

Some of our International SEO Best Practices

• Subdomain — Internationalized content is placed on a separate “third-level domain” that may or may not pass or receive link equity from the root domain.
• Subdirectory — Internationalized content is placed in a specific subdirectory, or subfolder, of a root domain.
• Make sure that everything from your site navigation, to your content, to your help desk, is in the primary language of the region you’re targeting.
• Different domain  — Internationalized content is placed on an entirely different root domain than the non-internationalized site.
• Don’t use machine translations (they’re still just not good enough).
• Don’t automatically redirect a user to a different language based on location. It’s fine to suggest an alternate language site, but you don’t know (without asking) if that English-language searcher in France is an expat, a student of foreign language, or someone who’s lost on the internet.
• Stay away from using cookies or scripts to show different-language versions of page. Search engines can’t crawl that type of dynamic content, and human users may not be able to see it, either.

International targeting in a nutshell

If you’re targeting a specific country, think about using a ccTLD. But, if you are focusing on language targeting only, a ccTLD probably isn’t your best choice as they’re meant for targeting a specific geographic area and not specifically the language spoken there. In these cases, you’ll likely want to use a different internationalization technique such as using hreflang, subfolders, or subdomains in combination with or instead of using a ccTLD. If you choose not to use a ccTLD for your internationally targeted site, check out this discussion of the pros and cons of subdirectories versus subdomains.

If your company sees a service or product that can be sold overseas and the difficulty to rank for those keywords are relatively easy to moderate, international SEO can help produce develop a plan to go overseas into new markets.