International SEO isn’t easy – there are a lot of elements that you need to consider. When done well you’ll open up your business to new markets, when poorly done you won’t even show up on page 10 of Google.

So, lets get to the point and talk about best practices that you need to follow. 

SEO Tips for International Businesses

#1 Determine Your URL Structure 

Your URL structure will determine how you “SEO” the rest of your website. 

Do you want to go with a top-level domain (ccTLD) or use another strategy? For example:

• https://www.adidas.com – USA
• https://www.adidas.co.uk – UK
• https://www.adidas.ca – Canada
• https://www.adidas.ie – Ireland

You can see a complete list of ccTLD’s on Iana’s website. 

Top-level domains let you tailor content to the country you want to serve as their location is clearly indicated – Adidas does a pretty good job of this. Top-level domains also give you the option of local hosting, meaning you can serve your website to users faster than if it was hosted in a single location. 

One of the downsides of this strategy is that you’ll need to buy a lot of domains, and some of your chosen names may not be available. 

You can also target different countries through subfolders – users of this method include Apple and Nike. 

Using sub-folders involves hosting all content on a single domain. For example:

• https://www.apple.com/ca/ – Canada
• https://www.apple.com/uk/  – UK
• https://www.apple.com/za/ – South Africa
• https://www.apple.com – USA

Advantages of using sub-folders include them being easy to set up – unlike top-level domains you don’t need to purchase a domain for every country you would like to do business in. 

One of the biggest cons is that customers may not be familiar with the setup, but as more and more global brands favor this SEO strategy sub-folders are being more familiar to users. 

There are also other methods you can use – but these two are what I would call the most favorable. Their advantages easily outweigh the cons. 

When finalizing URL structure, you need to be aware of how many languages are spoken in a country – you may need to provide content in multiple languages for each country. Here are some examples: 

• https://www.apple.com/ca/fr/ – Canadian French 
• https://www.apple.com/befr/ – Belgium French 
• https://www.apple.com/lae/ – Purto Rico English
• https://www.apple.com/la/ – Purto Rico Spanish 

You can also target users by language only, rather than country + language but a limitation of this is that you will struggle to target a specific country. 

#2 Create Localized Content 

A regular mistake brands make is that their content is not localized. They simply translate content from one website and paste it into another. 

Your business is entering a new market, the customs are different, the culture is different, the language is different. 

You need to tailor your content. Simple translations don’t consider the uniqueness of new cultures. 

Burger King adapted their content for each country for each country they serve, they make sure to localize the price, menu options and language. Here’s an example from their Indian website:

You can see that their menu is tailored for the Indian market, along with the currency. 

KFC provide another great example, their German website is localized to the region. Their Belgian website offers content in both French and Dutch. 

Sticking with content, you need to make sure your metadata and other technical elements are also optimized / translated.

This includes URLs, page titles and meta descriptions.  

For example:

• https://www.adidas.com/us/soccer-shoes – In the USA Adidas call their football shoes soccer shoes. 
• https://www.adidas.co.uk/football-shoes – In the UK Adidas use the term football. 

The localization can be seen in their URL, on-page text, SEO page title, and meta descriptions. 

#3 Implement hreflang tags 

Hreflang tags tell Google what language or market your page indents to target. They are essential. 

Implementing hreflang can become complex – fast. Especially if you have multiple different languages. John Mueller calls it one of the most complex aspects of SEO.

TBH hreflang is one of the most complex aspects of SEO (if not the most complex one). Feels as easy as a meta-tag, but it gets really hard quickly.

— johnmu (official) — #StaplerLife (@JohnMu) February 19, 2018

Here’s a snippet of the hreflang tags on Apple’s USA website.  

<link rel=”alternate” href=”https://www.apple.com/” hreflang=”en-US” /><link rel=”alternate” href=”https://www.apple.com/ae-ar/” hreflang=”ar-AE” /><link rel=”alternate” href=”https://www.apple.com/ae/” hreflang=”en-AE”

You’ll notice that I said Apple’s USA website. 

Hreflang needs to be implemented on every version of your site.

If you have a hreflang tag pointing from the US version to the UAE version, then you need to make sure the UAE version has a hreflang tag that points to the US version. 

As well as this, you’ll need to implement a self-referencing hreflang tag (and this is separate to a canonical tag). 

So if I was selling maple syrup in Canada, USA and the UK I would need to implement the following on all three websites. 

• <link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x-default” href=”www.harpsmaplesyrup.com”/>
• <link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en-GB” href=”www.harpsmaplesyrup.com/en-gb/”/>
• <link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en-CA” href=”www.harpsmaplesyrup.com/en-ca/”/>
• <link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”fr-CA” href=”www.harpsmaplesyrup.com/fr-ca/”/>

Google recommends that you add a default page – and this is represented by the x-default tag. This would be the page that gets shown when there is no other appropriate viarant. 

To make life easier you can use this handy hreflang generator from Sistrix to help you create links. 

When it comes to implementation you have three methods: 

1. HTML tags
2. HTTP headers
3. XML Sitemaps

For large websites it’s advisable to implement hreflag tags via the XML sitemap.

For smaller websites you may choose to use HTML tags, however if you have too many URLs then you’ll notice slower load times for your pages. HTTP headers are suited for non-HTML files such as pdfs or docs.

#4 Create Region or Language-Based Sitemaps

It might not be possible to create just one sitemap, for organizational purposes I recommend creating specific sitemaps for each region or language. 

For example:

• www.harpsmaplesyrup.com/sitemap.xml
• www.harpsmaplesyrup.com/en-gb/sitemap.xml
• www.harpsmaplesyrup.com/en-ca/sitemap.xml
• www.harpsmaplesyrup.com/fr-ca//sitemap.xml

Once you’ve created your sitemaps, remember to submit them to Google. 

#5 Don’t Forget About Regular SEO

Once you’ve established your domain strategy, figured out how you’re going to provide unique content to your users in each country, and implemented hreflang tags – you need to remember to “do your normal SEO”. 

This includes (but not limited to), optimizing for speed, controlling duplicate content, preventing crawl errors, preventing javascript errors, creating helpful content, generating backlinks and more. 

If you’re wondering how you can get started with regular SEO, and what it involves then you might find my guide on how you can get started with an SEO audit for free useful. 

A Global Audience Awaits

Hopefully, by reading this article you saw that it’s not difficult to achieve success in foreign markets through SEO – you need to ensure that you do the basics of SEO right, and then add a few additional targeting elements on top.

In the end the same principles that apply to your home country, apply to new markets. 

You should be creating content that users can engage with and serve content via a technically sound website.