How to Do International SEO and Reach a Global Audience

So, you’ve translated your website and you’re hoping people overseas will just start finding you, right? Yeah… if only it was that simple.

If you’re serious about reaching an audience outside your own country, you’ve got to structure your site in a way that makes sense to both people and search engines, wherever they are.

Let’s talk about the setup. You’ve got three main options when it comes to international site structure:

• Country-specific domains, like yourbusiness.fr or yourbusiness.de. These are obviously “local,” which is great for trust, but you’re building SEO authority from scratch for each one. It’s a big job.
• Subfolders, like yourbusiness.com/fr/. Keeps everything under one roof, which is great for maintaining domain authority. But they don’t always feel quite as local to international users.
• Subdomains, like fr.yourbusiness.com. This one's a bit of a halfway house - it gives a local nod but can be trickier to manage properly.

The “best” choice depends on what you’re working with, including your budget, tech team, and how many countries you’re targeting.

Hreflang Implementation

This one’s a must. Hreflang tags tell Google, “this page is for people in Spain,” or “This one’s for French speakers in Canada.”

They stop Google from thinking you’ve just copy and pasted content across multiple pages. But here’s the catch - they’ve got to be set up properly. And that means every page has to reference the others. Every tag needs to point back to itself. And everything needs to match your canonical URLs.

Miss one of those and Google gets confused. And that confusion means you don’t show up where you should.

Content Localization Strategy

Most businesses think international SEO goes as far as translating your content. Wrong. 

It’s not just about the language, it’s about local behavior. What people search for. How they phrase things. What they care about. What works in the UK won’t necessarily work in Germany — and so on.

You’ve got to do the research. What search engines are popular there? Because it's not always Google. What are your local competitors doing? Even your tone, pricing, and messaging might need a rethink.

Technical Implementation

Auto-redirecting based on someone’s location? Sounds easy enough, but it actually causes issues. Googlebot might never see your other pages, and users might get sent to the wrong version. Just give people a choice.

Make sure each version of your site uses the right language tags in the HTM - and that it’s easy to switch between regions, for both users and crawlers.