International SEO: An In-Depth Checklist

This article is part of an SEO series from WooRank. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

Under normal circumstances, SEO can be a tricky business, especially if you don’t have a lot of experience or expertise on the subject. Expanding your business internationally can turn your SEO campaign into what looks like a daunting project. Fortunately, while it can be hard to optimize your site in a language you don’t speak, there are steps you can take to help make your international SEO go smoothly. We’ll cover those five steps in-depth to help get you on your way to ranking overseas.

Find Your Current International Audience

Before ever launching your international site, or before even deciding to expand globally, research where your current international demand is coming from. Gauge current and potential interest by looking at your site traffic by country in Google Analytics. Open the Location report under Geo and sort by sessions to find the countries that your traffic originates from. These should be your top candidates to get their own targeted sites or pages.

Open up the Google Search Console Search Analytics report and filter by country. Check the boxes for impressions, click-through rate (CTR) and position. Countries that already send you lots of clicks, receive a large number of impressions and have higher average positions are good starting points for international targeting. It will be easier for you to rank well in countries where you’ve already gained some traction.

Determine Language vs. Country Targeting

Does it make more sense for you to create sites in alternate languages, or to target them geographically? This might seem like an insignificant difference, but it will actually have a big impact on how you go about creating your international site. There are advantages and disadvantages to each:

• Language: Optimizing your pages by language has fewer restrictions on the audience you’ll reach. Your site in French will be relevant and accessible to French speakers all over the world. It will also make translating/creating content simpler since you won’t need to optimize it for specific cultures or markets. The downside is that your content will have to be generic and free of idiomatic phrases that may not be used globally.
• Country: You’ll be able to really target your content, so you can have discounts, sales and other offers. You also won’t have to worry about linguistic variations like the differences between British, Canadian, Australian and American English. The downside is that you’ll be limiting your audience to a single country and you’ll have to do market research to optimize your content for local buying behaviors.

Decide which URL Structure is Best for You

We’ve discussed site structure for international SEO before. Whether you decide to go with regional or language targeting, you’ll have three options for URL structure for international websites:

• Country code to-level domains (ccTLD): example.fr
• Subdomains: fr.example.com
• Subfolders (also called subdirectories): example.com/fr/

Each option has its strengths and weaknesses, and there’s really no "right" answer.

ccTLD

ccTLDs are pretty self-explanatory: they use country codes as the top-level domain, instead of the generic .com, .org or .net. Perhaps the biggest advantage to using a ccTLD is that it does your geotargeting for you. When Google sees example.co.uk or example.it, it knows to serve those pages to users in the United Kingdom and Italy, respectively. In fact, ccTLDs provide such a strong hint that they will override a conflicting hreflang value. ccTLDs are best for you if:

• You have a physical presence in that country.
• Have a well-established and globally-recognized brand.
• Have products and/or service whose availability differs by location.
• You have the resources to build, maintain and promote several different sites.

Before you decide, remember that if you use ccTLDs, you’ll need to research, devise and implement a separate SEO strategy for each one, and you don’t get to share any link juice. Each ccTLD has its own requirements, so you’ll need to research those as well.

Subdomain

Using language or country-specific subdomains could be the way to go for a company that hasn’t built up a lot of brand awareness globally, or you won’t be consistently creating regionally unique content. If you do create geotargeted subdomains, make sure you use Google Search Console’s International Targeting. This will make sure that Google will use that subdomain in searches in the appropriate country.

As with ccTLDs, you won’t really be able to share link juice and authority across subdomains.

Subfolder

Subfolders are the fastest and easiest option to implement, as they just require you to create a few extra folders for each country and/or language. They’re a great option for smaller companies that have built up lots of authority and backlinks, don’t have any variation in products or services offered in different geographies, or don’t have the resources or don’t meet the requirements for ccTLDs.

The main drawback to subfolders is that they can be somewhat ambiguous for both human users and search engines. They may not be able to tell if your subfolder /fr/ is meant for users in France or for all French speakers. You also run the risk of the wrong content ranking if you have different subfolders in the same language (i.e. your American pages could outrank your Canadian pages for English SERPs). You can overcome this by using International Targeting in Search Console, but that won’t help your human users.

Localize Your Content

Localizing your content is one of the biggest challenges you’ll face when you start expanding to other parts of the world. Simply translating your site word for word isn’t going to be enough to rank - you need knowledge of your actual market to truly be effective. You’ll face these challenges continuously at almost every step of creating your multilingual or multi-regional website.

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by Sam Gooch via SitePoint