International SEO: how to target more than one country or language.
International SEO helps the right version of your site appear for the right audience. The core of it is a separate URL for each language or regional version, hreflang annotations that link those versions, and content that is genuinely localised, not just translated.
By Neural Media Labs5 min read
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Do you need it?
If you sell in one country in one language, you do not. International SEO matters when you publish similar content for different languages or regions, for example English pages for Australia, Canada and the United States, or English and French pages for Canada. More markets mean more pages to maintain, so add them where there is real demand.
Site structure
Each language or regional version needs its own URL. Google's guidance on localized versions says alternate URLs can be on the same domain or different ones. Common patterns are shown below.
| Structure | Example | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Subfolders | example.com/au/ | Often simplest to maintain on one domain |
| Subdomains | au.example.com | Treated as separate sites to manage |
| Country domains | example.com.au | Strong local signal; more domains to run |
Hreflang
Hreflang annotations tell Google which pages are versions of each other. Google says you can add them as HTML link tags, HTTP headers or in an XML sitemap, and that each version must list itself and all the other versions. Google also notes it does not use hreflang or the HTML lang attribute to detect a page's language: it works that out itself, and hreflang tells it which localized version to show.
- Decide the language and region of each version.
- Give each version its own fully qualified URL.
- List every version, including the page itself, on every page.
- Check that the annotations are reciprocal: if page A points to B, B must point to A.
Localise, do not just translate
- Use local spelling, currency, units and date formats.
- Show contact details and examples that fit the market.
- Research keywords per market. The phrase people use differs between countries even in the same language.
- Have a person review anything customers will read. Google's guidance asks for helpful, reliable, people-first content.
Google notes that localized versions are only considered duplicates if the main content remains untranslated, so translated pages are not penalised for being similar.
Next steps
Start with a market and demand check, then structure and hreflang. Our international SEO service covers all of it, and our SEO audit checklist shows how we review a site first.
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