There are lots of myths and misconceptions surrounding the subject of international SEO. I recently gave a Mozinar on this; I'd like to share the basis of that talk in written form here. Let’s first explore why international SEO is so confusing, then dive into some of the most common myths. By the end of this article, you should have a much clearer understanding of how international SEO works and how to apply the proper strategies and tactics to your website.
One common trend is the lack of clarity around the subject. Let's dig into that:
Why is international SEO so confusing?
There are several reasons:
- Not everyone reads Google Webmaster Guidelines and has a clear understanding of how they index and rank international content.
- Guidelines vary among search engines, such as Bing, Yandex, Baidu, and Google.
- Guidelines change over time, so it’s difficult to keep up with changes and adapt your strategy accordingly.
- It’s difficult to implement best practices on your own site. There are many technical and strategic considerations that can conflict with business needs and competing priorities. This makes it hard to test and find out what works best for your site(s).
A little history
Let's explore the reasons behind the lack of clarity on international SEO a bit further. Looking at its development over the years will help you better understand the reasons why it's confusing, laying some groundwork for the myth-busting that is about to come. (Also, I was a history major in college, so I can’t help but think in terms of timelines.)
Please note: This timeline is constructed almost entirely on Google Webmaster blog announcements. There are a few notes in here about Bing and Yandex, but it's mostly focused on Google and isn't meant to be a comprehensive timeline. Mostly this is for illustrative purposes.
2006–2008
Our story begins in 2006. In 2006 and 2007, things are pretty quiet. Google makes a few announcements, the biggest being that webmasters could use geo-targeting settings within Webmaster Tools. They also clarify some of the signals they use for detecting the relevance of a page for a particular market: ccTLDs, and the IP of a server.
2009
In 2009, Bing reveals its secret sauce, which includes ccTLDs, reverse IP lookup, language of body content, server location, and location of backlinks.
2010
In 2010, things start to get really exciting. Google reveals some of the other hints that they use to detect geo-targeting, presents the pros and cons of the main URL structures that you can use to set up your international sites, and gives loads of advice about what you should or shouldn’t do on your site. Note that just about the same time that Google says they ignore the meta language tag, Bing says that they do use that tag.
Then, in fall of 2010, hreflang tags are introduced to the world. Until this, there was no standard page-level tag to tell a search engine what country or language you were specifically targeting.
2011
Originally, hreflang tags were only meant to help Google sort out multi-regional pages (that is, pages in the same language that target different countries). Only, in 2011, Google expands hreflang tag support to work across languages as well. Also during this time, Google removes the requirement to use canonical tags in conjunction with hreflang tags, citing they want to simplify the process.
2012
Then in 2012, hreflang tags are supported in XML sitemaps (not just page tags). Also, the Google International Help Center is created, with a bunch of useful information for webmasters.
2013
In 2013, the concept of the "x-default" hreflang tag is introduced, and we learn that Yandex is also supporting hreflang tags. This same year, Bing adds geo-targeting functionality to Bing Webmaster Tools, a full 5 years after Google did.
2014
Note that it isn’t until 2014 that Google begins including hreflang tag reporting within Google Webmaster Tools. Up until that point, webmasters would have had to read about hreflang tags somewhere else to know that they exist and should be used for geo-targeting and language-targeting purposes. Hreflang tags become much more prominent after this change.
2015
In 2015, we see improvements to locale-adaptive crawling, and some clarity on the importance of server location.
To sum up, this timeline shows several trends:
- Hreflang tags were super confusing at first
- There were several iterations to improve hreflang tag recommendations between 2011 and 2013
- Hreflang tag reporting was only added to Google Search Console in 2014
- Even today, only Google and Yandex support hreflang. Bing and the other major search engines still do not.
There are good reasons for why webmasters and SEO professionals have misconceptions and questions about how best to approach international SEO.
At least 25% of hreflang tags are incorrect
Let’s look at the adoption of hreflang tags specifically. According to NerdyData, 1.7 million sites have at least one hreflang tag.
I did a quick search to find out:
438,417 sites have hreflang=“uk”
7,829 sites have hreflang=“en-uk”
Both of these tags are incorrect. The correct ISO code for the United Kingdom is actually gb, not uk. Plus, you can't target by country alone — you have to target by language-country pairs or by language. Thus, just writing “uk” is incorrect as well.
That means at least 25% of hreflang tags are incorrect, and I only did a brief search to find a couple of the most commonly mistaken ones. You can imagine just how many sites out there are getting these hreflang values wrong.
All of this is to prove a point: the field is ripe for optimization when it comes to global SEO. Now, let’s debunk some myths!
Myth #1: I need to have multiple websites in order to rank around the world.
There's a lot of talk about needing ccTLDs or separate websites for your international content. (A ccTLD is a country-coded top-level domain, such as example.ca, which is country-coded for Canada).
However, it is possible for your website to rank in multiple locations around the world. You don't necessarily need multiple websites or sub-domains to rank internationally; in many cases, you can work within the confines of your current domain.
In fact, if you take a look at your analytics on your website, even if it has no geo-targeting whatsoever, chances are you already have traffic coming in from various languages and countries.
Many global brands have only one site, using subfolders for their multilingual or multi-regional content. Don't feel that international SEO is beyond your reach because you believe it requires multiple websites. You may only need one!
The most important thing to remember when deciding whether you need separate websites is that new websites will start with zero authority. You will have to fight an uphill battle to build authority for establish and rank those new ccTLDs — and for some companies, organic traffic growth may be for many years after launching ccTLDs. Now, this is not to say that ccTLDs are not a good option. But you just need to keep this in mind that they are not the only option.
Myth #2: "The best site structure for international rankings is _________."
There's a lot of debate about what the best site structure is for international rankings. Is it subfolders? Subdomains? ccTLDs?
Some people swear by ccTLDs, saying that in some markets users prefer to buy from local sites, resulting in higher click-through rates. Others champion subdomains or sub-directories.
There is no one answer to the best international site structure. You can dominate using any of these options. I've seen websites of all site structures dominate in their verticals. However, there are certain advantages and disadvantages to each, so it's best to research your options and decide which is best for you.
Google has published their pros and cons breakdown of the URL structures you can use for international targeting. There are 4 options listed here:
- Country-specific, aka ccTLDs
- Subdomains
- Subdirectories with gTLDs (generic top-level domains, like .com or .org)
- URL parameters. These are not recommended.
Subdirectories with gTLDs have the added benefit of consolidating domain authority, while subdomains and ccTLDs have the disadvantage of making it harder to build up domain authority. In my opinion, subdomains are the least advantageous of the 3 options because they do not have the distinct advantage of geo-targeting that ccTLDs do, and they don’t have the advantage of a consolidated backlink profile that subdirectories do.
The most important thing to think about is what’s best for your business. Consider whether you want to target at a language level or a country level. Then decide how much effort you want (or can) put behind building up domain authority to your new domains.
Or, for those who are more visual learners:
- ccTLDs are a good option if you’re Godzilla. If branding isn’t a problem for you, if you have your own PR, if building up domain authority and handling multiple domains is no big deal, then ccTLDs are a good way to go.
- Subdirectories are a good option if you’re MacGuyver. You’re able to get the job done using only what you’ve got.
- Subdomains are a good option if you’re Wallace and Gromit. Somehow, everything ends well despite the many bumps in the road.
I researched the accuracy of each type of site structure. First, I looked at Google Analytics data and SEMRush data to find out what percentage of the time the correct landing page URL was ranking in the correct version of Google. I did this for 8 brands and 30 sites in total, so my sample size was small, and there are many other factors that could skew the accuracy of this data. But it's interesting all the same. ccTLDs were the most accurate, followed by subdirectories, and then subdomains. ccTLDs can be very effective because they give very clear, unambiguous geo-targeting signals to search engines.
However, there's no one-size-fits-all approach. You need to take a cold, hard look at your business and consider things like:
- Marketing budget you have available for each locale
- Crawl bandwidth and crawl budget available for your site
- Market research: which locales should you target?
- Costs associated with localization and site maintenance
- Site performance concerns
- Overall business objectives
As SEOs, we're responsible for forecasting how realistically our websites will be able to grow and improve in terms of domain authority. If you believe your website can gain fantastic link authority and your team can manage the work involved in handling multiple websites, then you can consider ccTLDs (but whichever site structure you choose will be effective). But if your team will struggle under the added burden of developing and maintaining multiple (localized!) content efforts to drive traffic to your varied sites, then you need to slow down and perhaps start with subdirectories.
Myth #3: I can duplicate my website on separate ccTLDs or geo-targeted sub-folders & each will rank in their respective Googles.
This myth refers to taking a site, duplicating it exactly, and then putting it on another domain, subdomain, or subfolder for the purposes of geo-targeting.
And when I say "in their respective Googles," I mean the country-specific versions of Google (such as google.co.uk, where searchers in the United Kingdom will typically begin a search).
You can duplicate your site, but it's kind of pointless. Duplication does not give you an added boost; it gives you added cruft. It reduces your crawl budget if you have all that content on one domain. It can be expensive and often ineffective to host your site duplicated across multiple domains. There will be cannibalization.
Often I'll see a duplicate ccTLD get outranked by its .com sister in its local version of Google. For example, say a site like example.co.uk is a mirror of example.com, and the example.com outranks the example.co.uk site in google.co.uk. This is because geo-targeting is outweighed by the domain authority of the .com. We saw in an earlier chart that ccTLDs can be the most accurate for showing the right content in the right version of Google, but that's because those sites had a good spread of link authority among each of their ccTLDs, as well as localized content.
There's a big difference between the accuracy of ccTLDs when they're localized and when they are dupes. I did some research using the SEMRush API, looking at 3 brands using ccTLDs in 26 country versions of Google, where the .com outranked the ccTLD 42 times. You shouldn’t just host your site mirrored across multiple ccTLDs just for the heck of it; it's only effective if you can localize each one.
To sum it up: Avoid simply duplicating your site if you can. The more you can do to localize and differentiate your sites, the better.
Myth #4: Geo-targeting in Search Console will be enough for search engines to understand and rank my content correctly.
Geo-targeting your content is not enough. Like we covered in the last example, if you have two pages that are exactly the same and you geo-target them in Search Console, that doesn’t necessarily mean that those two pages will show up in the correct version of Google. Note that this doesn’t mean you should neglect geo-targeting in Google Search Console (or Bing or Yandex Webmaster Tools) — you should definitely use those options. However, search engines use a number of different clues to help them handle international content, and geo-targeting settings do not trump those other signals.
Search engines have revealed what some of the international ranking factors they use are. Here are some that have been confirmed:
- Translated content of the page
- Translated URLs
- Local links from ccTLDs
- NAP info — this could also include local currencies and links to Google My Business profiles
- Server location*
*Note that I included server location in this list, but with a caveat — we’ll talk more about that in a bit.
You need to take into account all of these factors, and not just some of them.
Myth #5: Why reinvent the wheel? There are multinational companies who have invested millions in R&D — just copy what they do.
The problem here is that large multinational companies don't always prioritize SEO. They make SEO mistakes all the time. It's a myth that you should look to Fortune 500 websites or top e-commerce websites to see how they structure their website— they don't always get it right. Imitation may be the best form of flattery, but it shouldn’t replace careful thought.
Besides, what the multinational companies do in terms of site structure and SEO differs widely. So if you were to copy a large brand’s site structure, which should you copy? Apple, Amazon, TripAdvisor, Ikea…?
Myth #6: Using URL parameters to indicate language is OK.
Google recommends against this, and from my experience, it's definitely best to avoid URL parameters to indicate language or region.
What this looks like in the wild is:
https://www.example.com?language=english
https://www.example.com/example/?lang=en
...where the target language or region of the page changes depending on the parameter. The problem is that parameters aren't dependable. Sometimes they'll be indexed, sometimes not. Search engines prefer unique URLs.
Myth #7: I can just proxy localized content into my existing URLs.
In this situation, a website will use the IP address or the Accept-Lang header of a user to detect their location or browser language preference, then change the content of the page based on that information. So the URL stays the same, but the content changes.
Google and Bing have clearly said they don't like parameters and recommend keeping one language on one URL. Proxied content, content served by a cookie, and side-by-side translations all make it very problematic for search engines to index a page in one language. Search engines will appear to crawl from all over the world, so they'll get conflicting messages about the content of a page.
Basically, you always want to have 1 URL = 1 version of a page.
Google has improved and will continue to improve its locale-aware crawling. As of early 2015, they announced that Googlebot will crawl from a number of IP addresses around the world, not just the US, and will use the Accept-Lang header to see if your website is locale-adaptive and changing the content of the page depending on the user. But in the same breath, they made it very clear this technology is not perfect, this does not replace the recommendation for using hreflang, and they still recommend you NOT use locale-adaptive content.
Myth #8: Adding hreflang tags will help my multinational content rank better.
Hreflang tags are one of the most powerful tools in the international SEO toolbox. They're foundational to a successful international SEO strategy. However, they're not meant to be a ranking factor. Instead, they're intended to ensure the correct localized page is shown in the correct localized version of Google.
In order to get hreflang tags right, you have to follow the documentation exactly. With hreflang, there is no margin for error. Make sure to use the correct language (in ISO 639-1 format) and country codes (in ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 format) when selecting the values for your hreflang tags.
Hreflang requirements:
- Exact ISO codes for language, and for language-country if you target by country
- Return tags
- Self-referential tags
- Point to correct URLs
- Include all URLs in an hreflang group
- Use page tags or XML sitemaps, preferably not both
- Use HTTP headers for PDFs, etc.
Be sure to check your Google Search Console data regularly to make sure no return tag errors or other errors have been found. A return tag error is when Page A has an hreflang tag that points to Page B, but Page B doesn't have an hreflang tag pointing back to Page A. That means the entire hreflang association for that group of pages won't work, and you'll see return tag errors for those pages in Google Search Console.
Either the page tagging method or the XML hreflang sitemap method work well. For some sites, an XML sitemap can be advantageous because it eliminates the need for code bloat with page tags. Whichever implementation allows you to add hreflang tags programmatically is good. There are tools on the market to assist with page tagging, if you use one of the popular CMS platforms.
Here are some tools to help you with hreflang:
- Page tag generator: https://www.internationalseomap.com/hreflang-tags-generator
- Hreflang validators:
- XML sitemap generators:
Myth #9: I can’t use a canonical tag on a page with hreflang tags.
When it comes to hreflang tags AND canonical tags, many eyes glaze over. This is where things get really confusing. I like to keep it super simple.
The simplest thing is to keep all your canonical tags self-referential. This is a standard SEO best practice anyways. Regardless of whether you have hreflang tags on a page, you should be implementing self-referential canonical tags.
Myth #10: I can use flag icons on my site to indicate the site’s language.
Flags are not languages — there's even a whole website dedicated to talking about this common myth: https://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com. It has many examples of sites that mistakenly use flag icons to indicate languages.
For example, the UK's Union Jack doesn't represent all speakers of English in the world. Thanks to the course of history, there are at least 101 countries in the world where English is a common tongue. A flag of a country to represent speakers of a language is very off-putting for any users who speak the language but aren't from that country.
Here's an example where flag icons are used to indicate language. A better (and more creative) approach is to replace the flag icons with localized greetings:
If you have a multi-lingual site(s), you should not use flags to represent language. Instead, use the name of the language, written in the local language. English should be “English,” Spanish should be “Español,” German should be “Deutsch,” etc. You’d be surprised how many websites forget to use localized language or country spellings.
Myth #11: I can get away with automated translations.
The technology for automated translations or machine translations has been improving in recent years, but it's still better to avoid automated translations, especially machine translation that involves no human editing.
Automatic translations can be inaccurate and off-putting. They can hurt a website trying to rank in a competitive landscape. A great way to get an edge on your competitors is to use professional, high-quality native translators to localize your content into your target languages. High-quality localization is one of the key factors in improving your rankings when it comes to international SEO.
If you have a very large amount of content that you cannot afford to translate, choose some of the most important content for human translation, such as your main category and product pages.
Myth #12: Whichever site layout and user experience works best in our core markets should be rolled out across all our markets.
This is something I’ve seen happen on many, many sites, and it was part of the reason why eBay failed in China.
Porter Erisman tells the story in his book Alibaba’s World, which I highly recommend. He spoke of how, when eBay and Alibaba were duking it out in China, eBay made the decision to apply its Western UX principles to its Chinese site.
In Alibaba’s World, Erisman writes about how eBay “eliminated localized features and functions that Chinese Internet users enjoyed and forced them to use the same platform that had been popular in the US and Germany. Most likely, eBay executives figured that because the platform had thrived in more industrialized markets, its technology and functionality must be superior to a platform from a developing country.
"Chinese users preferred Alibaba’s Taobao platform over eBay, because it had an interface that Chinese users were used to – cute icons, flashing animations, and had a chat feature that connected customers with sellers. In the West, bidding starts low and ends high, but Chinese users preferred to haggle with sellers, who would start their bids high and end low."
From this story, you can tell how localization — in terms of site design, UX, and holistic business strategy — can be of tantamount importance.
Here is an example of Lush’s Japanese site, which has bright colors, a lot going on, and it’s almost completely localized into Japanese. Also notice the chat box in the bottom right:
Now compare that to the Lush USA site. There's a lot more white space here, fewer tiles, and the chat box is only a small button on the right sidebar.
They’ve taken the effort to adjust layout according to how they want to express their brand to each market, rather than just replacing tiles in the same CMS layout with localized tiles. Yet, in both markets they have many elements that are similar, too. They're a good example of keeping a unified global brand while leaving plenty of room for local expression.
The key to success internationally is localizing your online presence while at the same time having a unified global brand. From an SEO perspective, you should make sure there's a logical organization to your global URLs so that localized content can be geo-targeted by subdirectory, subdomain, or domain. You should focus on getting hreflang tags right, etc. But you should also work with a content strategy team to make sure that there will be room for trans-creation of content, as well as with a UX design team to make sure that localized content can be showcased appropriately.
Design, UX, site architecture — all of these things play increasingly important roles in SEO. By localizing your design, you're reducing duplicate content and you're potentially improving your site engagement metrics (and by corollary, your clickstream data).
Things that an SEO definitely wants to localize are:
- URLs
- Meta titles & descriptions
- Navigation labels
- Headings
- Image file names, internal anchor text, & alt text
- Body content
Make sure to focus on keyword variations between countries, even within the same language. For example, there are differences in names and spellings for many things in the UK versus the US. A travel agency might describe their tours to a British audience as "tailor-made, bespoke holidays," while they would tell their American audience they sell "customized vacation packages." If you used the same keywords to target all countries that share a common tongue, you'd be losing out on the ability to choose the best keywords for each country. Take this into account when considering your keyword optimization.
Myth #13: We can just use IP sniffing and auto-redirect users to the right place. We don’t need hreflang tags or any type of geo-targeting.
A lot of sites use some form of automatic redirection, detecting the user’s IP address and redirecting them to another website or to a different page on their site that's localized for their region. Another common practice is to use the Accept-Language header to detect the user’s browser language preference, redirecting users to localized content that way.
However, Google recommends against automatic redirection. It can be inaccurate, can prevent users and search engines from indexing your whole site, and can be frustrating for users when they're redirected to a page they don't want. In fact, hreflang annotations, when correctly added to all your localized content and correctly cross-referenced, should eliminate or greatly reduce the need for any auto-redirection. You should avoid automatic redirection as much as possible.
Here are all the reasons (that I can think of) why you shouldn’t do automatic redirection:
- User agents like Googlebot may have a hard time reading all versions of your page if you keep redirecting them.
- IP detection can be inaccurate.
- Multiple countries can have multiple official languages.
- Multiple languages can be official in multiple countries.
- Server load time can be negatively affected by having to add in all these redirects.
- Shared computers between spouses, children, etc., could have different language preferences.
- Expats and travelers may try to access a website that assumes they're locals, making it frustrating for the users to switch languages.
- Internet cafes, hotel computer centers, and school computer labs may have diverse users.
- The user prefers to browse in one language, but make transactions in another. For example, many citizens are fluent in English, and will search in English if they think they can get better results that way. But when it comes to the checkout process, especially when reading legalese, they will prefer to switch to their native language.
- A person sends a link to a friend, but that friend lives in a different place, and can't see the same thing as her friend sees.
Instead, a much better user experience is to provide a small, unobtrusive banner that appears when you detect a user may find another portion of your site more relevant. TripAdvisor and Amazon do a great job of this. Here's an image from Google Webmaster Blog that exemplifies how to do this well:
One exception to the never-use-auto-redirection rule is that, when a user selects a country and/or language preference on your site, you should store that preference in a cookie and redirect the user to their preferred locale whenever they visit your site in the future. Make sure that they can set a new preference any time, which will re-set the cookie preference.
On that note, also always make sure to have a country and/or language selector on your website that's located on every page and is easy for users to see and for search engine bots to crawl.
Myth #14: I need local servers to host my global content.
Many website owners believe they need local servers in order to rank well abroad. This is because Google and Bing clearly stated that local servers were an important international ranking factor in the past.
However, Google confirmed last year that local server signals are not as important as they once were. With the rise in popularity of CDNs, local servers are generally not necessary. You definitely need a local server for hosting sites in China, and it may be useful in some other markets like Japan. It’s always good to experiment. But as a general rule, what you need is a good CDN that will serve up content to your target markets quickly.
Myth #15: I can’t have multi-country targeted content that’s all in the same language, because then I'd incur a duplicate content penalty.
This myth is born from an underlying fear of duplicate content. Something like 30% of the web contains some dupe content (according to a recent RavenTools study). Duplicate content is a fact of life on the web. You have to do something spammy with that duplicate content, such as create doorway pages or scrape content, in order to incur a penalty.
Geo-targeted, localized content is not spammy or manipulative. There are valid business reasons for wanting to have very similar content geared for different users around the world. Matt Cutts confirmed that you will not incur a penalty for having similar content across multiple ccTLDs.
The reality is, you CAN have multi-country targeted content in the same language. It’s just that you need to combine hreflang tags + localization in order to get it right. Here are some ways to avoid duplicate content problems:
- Use hreflang tags
- Localized keyword optimization
- Adding in local info such as telephone numbers, currencies, addresses in schema markup, and Google My Business profiles
- Localized HTML sitemaps
- Localized navigation and home page features that cater to specific audiences.
- Localized images that resonate with the audience. American football, for example, is not very popular outside the US. Also, be mindful of holidays around the world and of current events.
- Transcreated content (where you take an idea and tailor it for a specific locale), rather than translation (which is more word-for-word than concept-for-concept)
- Obtain links from local ccTLDs pointing to your localized content
As you can see, there are many common myths surrounding international SEO, but hopefully you've gained some clarity and feel better equipped to build a great global site strategy. I believe international SEO will continue to be of growing interest, as globalization is a continuing trend. Cross-border e-commerce is booming — Facebook and Google are looking at emerging markets in Africa, India, and Southeast Asia, where more and more people are going online and getting comfortable buying online.
International SEO is ripe for optimization — so you, as SEO experts, are in a very good position if you understand how to set your website up for international SEO success.
Hi and thanks for the article. I have a case that I think you'll find interesting. Say you have a business operating in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. It's acceptable to use Russian in all three countries as the main language on the website and sometimes it's even required for better results. How would you work with that? I assume it's best to have 3 separate domains in this case .ru .ua .by ? Otherwise you'll have 3 identical sets of content targeted at differetn regions. Thoughts?
Hi Igor, thanks for your comment! If your site is going to be exactly the same for each audience, you could have one site in Russian. But if your product/service is different in each country, if your prices are different for each country, and if you have local phone numbers and offices, then it would be beneficial to have separate versions of your site for each country. You can put those versions on sub-directories of one domain, or you can go with ccTLDs. Don't forget to use Yandex Webmaster Tools as well!
Kaitlin
first of all, thanks for the comprehensive article. Lots of interesting stuff to use as a guide.
Following on the question above from Igor, we have similar case with Spanish speaking countries. We may want to have 90% of the content similar in all countries, and only 5-10% of pages with different content. What would you recommend in such a case? Does it make sense to have separate versions or could the 5-10% differences be addressed in other ways?
Hi Luis, usually I recommend unique URLs in that case. Whether you choose ccTLDs, sub-domains, or sub-folders depends on a lot of different factors, but in general you want to have separate URLs so that those 5-10% differences will be accounted for. Let's say your Spanish websites sell avocados. In many Spanish-speaking countries, you would choose the keyword "aguacate," but in certain countries like Peru, you would want to choose "palta." With different URLs for each country, you get to target countries more granularly.
If you were use the same URLs and make those 5-10% changes using push states or JS or something, then those differences essentially disappear for a bot. Google is getting better at locale-aware crawling, but they still aren't perfect, and other search engines have an even harder time with it.
Hope this helps you out.
First of all thank you Kaitlin for this in-depth overview and also thank you Igor for bringing up the question which is very common in Europe.
Kaitlin, let's suppose that Igor's case refers to a website that will be launched, hence we start from scratch, and let's suppose that Igor opts for a single website in Russian. Would you place this website from a SEO point of view on a gTLD (knowing that you can geo-target it only to a single country, not all three of them) or would you place it on a ccTLD, probably .ru as this is the biggest market and RU is also the ISO format for Russian? From my observation having a ccTLD is still a powerful ranking factor, hence it would certainly give a boost in the biggest market. But does this outweigh NOT targeting the smaller markets? What's your experience and advice?
Secondly, let's suppose that the website has been launched a while back on a ccTLD; it therefore has a number of links and other positive ranking signals connected to its history. Most companies start small and optimise first everything for their domestic market. For example a German company starts on a .de-domain. Then later, the company expands and decides to localize their offering in other countries using the same language, for example Austria (.at) and Switzerland (.ch). Yet, the resources for these new geographical markets will be limited. I think that's a common case for many SME in Europe: you expand by appointing a sales rep, but not by hiring a full marketing team. What would you recommend? a) keep the .de domain with /at and /ch subdirectories? b) despite the limited resources in Austria and Switzerland launch .at and .ch websites? c) migrate the existing website to a gTLD with appropriate subdirectories? Again: what's your experience and advise?
Thanks a lot in advance for your insights!
Hi Frank, Great questions.
In answer to your first, if you're starting a site brand-new, and you know you want to target multiple countries that all speak the same language, you can either go with one site or separate ccTLDs. The advantage with one site is that you will only need to build authority to one domain, but the disadvantage is that you do no have clear geo-targeting which ccTLDs provide. With separate ccTLDs, the advantage is clear geo-targeting, but the downside is it will take more effort to build domain authority to multiple domains. Your suggestion to use one ccTLD for multiple countries can work, but it won't be as effective as if you used separate ccTLDs. For example, if you search for "автодетали" ("car parts") on google.ua (Ukraine), most sites ranking use the .ua ccTLD, but some use .ru ccTLDs. So both will rank, but it is more likely (all other factors being equal) for the same ccTLD to rank in its country-version of Google. If you can, go with ccTLDs for each, but be aware that this will take a lot more time and effort to see results.
As to the 2nd question, if you have an established ccTLD, don't move it! :-) In your example, you would want to keep the .de domain, and preferably set up separate ccTLDs for your Austrian and Switzerland markets when you are ready to expand for SEO purposes. The second best option would be to set up a separate gTLD with subdirectories. The problem with using a ccTLD to target separate countries via sub-folders is you don't get that option within Google Search Console; you only have the specific country associated with the ccTLD.
Good luck!
Thanks Kaitlin for your answer!
Oviously, I didn't make myself clear for the first question. The questions is: if one site, gTLD or ccTLD? The question is not if one or multiple ccTLD sites are better.
Thank you for revisiting your answer in this respect!
Hi Frank, in your example above, if you can have only one site for a Russian speaking audience, I would recommend going with a .ru ccTLD. In general though, if you can only have one site for multiple countries and/or languages, then a gTLD is best because it is more scalable, especially if you have a smaller company and not too many resources for marketing/PR.
Hi Kaitlin
Wow, piece as a guide to the best aspects of Google International. Especially for the issue of language and translation, we can not ignore this issue. In fact, as the Myth No. 11 says, we can not get away with automated translations, because to begin with, the user experience is very bad (will influence the CTR) and not conviente us
Thank you very much for the post and the tips
Correct
Myth #14 about CDNs: I'd still strongly suggest to check if the CDN has servers in the target market area (country and city). As far as I remember Amazon started its Australian servers in 2014 and before that data was coming from the US "cloud", which is pretty far.
Also if you're targeting large(!) countries, cloud hosting is great, but if their nearest server is thousands of kilometers away from the target market, customers might end up having slow page loads. So, it's worth asking about server locations before signing up for a cloud hosting service.
Good point, thanks for bringing that up, Gyorgy!
Great piece of work, Kaitlin. I'd like to ask about Your opinion - What solution (directory or TLDcc) would You recommend in my situation - I have a business that provide a SaaS solution for emigrants from Central Europe (like Polish or Romanian people) living and working in Great Britain. They would propably use both - their native (in most cases) & english language to perform web searches. So my website provides a content in their native language, but should be geotargeted on the GB territory. Any piece of advice what strategy should I use concerining international SEO? Thanks again!
Hi zenon, That's an interesting situation. For users in Great Britain, you can use the .co.uk ccTLD. I would choose one main language for the main site, and then the other two or more languages would go on sub-folders on that site. For example:
EN on .co.uk
PL on .co.uk/pl
RO on .co.uk/ro
Alternatively you could use a gTLD and geo-target it to the UK.
Make sure to use hreflang tags as well on each localized page of your site.
Good luck!
Dear Kaitlin,
There're are so many myths I didn't know about! The one that shocked me the most is n.10, never really thought about writting greetings instead of the flag. I guess it's a common mistake that many of us do and you're totally right, it's not fair for the countries that speak a certain language but are not from the country of the flag.
Numer 11 is pretty common too, but in my case in Mallorca we live from tourism, so we're constantly speaking three or four languages (catalan, spanish and english - Deutsch is a must sometimes too), so we know pretty well that automated translations are NOT a good choice, you can look really ridiculous if you do and your company is going to have a bad image.
In conclusion, really informative post and really easy to read :D. Thanks for that!
Another way to avoid flags is to use the ISO abreviations of languages, such as EN for English, DE for German etc.
Totally right Frank, thank you!
Superbly covered Kaitlin, hreflang thing you mentioned is more of a problem in correct implementation than a myth. Following ISO codes is really helpful, thanks for sharing the link. I'd say that there are quite some myths in regional and local SEO but you just have to follow the quality guidelines to get things done in a better way.
Kaitlin - Terrific article on a complex topic. Thanks for outlining all of these factors!
I´d add that language is critical to the success of international content. From keywords to phrasing to grammar, it all impacts your SEO success. Do not simply translate one language into another and put it up on your ccTLD site. Perform native language keyword research so you target the best words and phrases! Great article!
Terrific article on a very complex topic. Thanks for outlining all of these factors! Things have changed rapidly in past few years for International SEO, the factors like top level domains earlier mattered a lot, however we have seen shift in that strategy lately. You covered most of the aspects of International SEO beautifully, I am bookmarking your post for future reference.
Hi Kaitlin,
This is an incredibly well written article. I am also half way through your Mozinar which again, is providing me with some really valuable information - thank you so much!
I do have a couple of questions that I would really appreciate your thoughts on...
Thank you so much in advance!
I look forward to hearing back from you.
Hi Vend,
I'm glad the blog post was helpful to you! Here are a few brief replies to your questions:
1. You apply hreflang tags to specific pages. The way to think about it is: if you have a page about ABCtopic, and that page is available in different country and/or language versions, then you want to have hreflang tags on all of those pages about ABC topic, and the tags would point to all of the localized versions. So there would essentially be a group of hreflang tags, all about ABC Topic. Those would only be on the pages about ABC topic, not sitewide.
2.Yes, all of the things you mentioned would be great localization signals, including targeting in GSC. But targeting in GSC only works on a country level. You can choose either city or country (or a mix), it depends on your business.
3. Unique content localized for the region will be very helpful. It will also be helpful to get links from ccTLDs in those areas where you're content is not ranking very well, and have those links point to the relevant country/city content on your site.
4. I think that will be very sufficient to localize your content enough.
It sounds like you have a lot of really great tactics in place. Go for it, and good luck!
Thank you Kaitlin :D
Not sure if you are still taking questions.. but we have recently updated our contact us page. The Google Maps listing URLs we have are all .co.nz. I was wondering if we should use the local Google for the specific office. For example, for our office in the UK, should the Google Maps link be .co.uk? Does this even matter?
Hi Vend, I probably won't take many more questions after this. :-) That's a great question about Google Maps links. I haven't run into a situation where that mattered. I believe it would make the most sense to link to the local Google Maps version for each specific office. The difference for SEO purposes will be negligible, but it would help in case the user clicks on the map to view more. You would have to ask a Local SEO expert to find out if there is a significant difference between maps on google.co.uk vs. google.com, etc....
You mention that it's not a good strategy to mirror copy your site across multiple ccTLDs, but what if the sites are all in English and there's not much local differentiating factors? I'm considering a .com, .co.uk and .ca version of my English ecommerce site and the only real difference would be the currency on each one. Do you think this is a bad strategy?
Hi Martin,
Sorry for my delayed reply. You certainly could go with the strategy you suggested, but it will take quite a bit of time and effort to start seeing positive results. Make sure to use hreflang to tie your different country versions together, and look for opportunities to further localize your sites. For example, add in local phone numbers, and add schema markup to your local office addresses, if you have them, and display them in your footer or a contact page. Each country version will likely have different verbiage for shipping/return/legal policies as well. Also, consider your keyword targeting for each of those countries carefully. Do your customers in all 3 of those really use the same words to describe your product/service? If not, then vary the keywords you target for each audience. Lastly, make sure to set up social media accounts and press pages for each of your ccTLDs. Be sure to share links to your domains that match the audience you're targeting. This will encourage folks to link to the appropriate ccTLD, rather than only the .com.
The alternative would be to use the .com with sub-folders for the UK and CA. If you choose that route, many of the recommendations above still apply. You would also want to geo-target those sub-folders in Webmaster Tools. Either option would likely be fine for you.
Very nice article Kaitlin! And what a timing.. At the moment i'm struggling with an issue what is related to Myth #2.
My brother's webshop has been around for quit some years and is selling products to a niche-market. It's using a ccTLD (.nl), is multilingual and uses url parameters.. I allready thought that wasn't the best solution..
But still about 40% of its visitors are not from the Netherlands..
Now I want to change this... But what is the best solution? Use the .com domain and target the rest of the world with it and start over with authority?
Or use a subdirectory /en/ and at least improve the ability to index the English version of the site? But then still the targeting in Search Console stays local.
Can you give some advise?
Hi Bart,
When you want to target a multilingual country, you can use a ccTLD and then use sub-folders off that domain to parcel out your different language content. So for .nl, you could have .nl/en for your English content, while the main .nl domain would retain Dutch content (assuming you are using Dutch already). That's the best solution in your situation, I believe!
Cheers,
Kaitlin
Hi Kaitlin,
Thank you for your answer, but that was not what I was looking for. I'll give my question another try..
I want to address the issue of using the parameters for a multilingual site.
I see i've two options to resolve this.
Option 1, the easiest and probably the safest is to use an /en/ directory. Probably the the search results across the globe stay the same. Just by implementing this I wont have the chance to reach more people.
Option 2, the trickiest one, is to use the .com domain for my foreign customers. This is a domain with 0 authority, but has the ability for global targeting in Search Console.
If I implement option 2, what will happen with the search results in other countries? Will they still show the .nl pages, or will they be replaced with the .com pages and therefore won't show up on page 1 for example?
What is the influence of geo targeting in Search Console? And the .nl domain vs. a .com domain? does a .com has the potential to get 5x times more traffic globally? If it is a way better choice in the long run, i might shoose option 2.
I hope my question is more clear this time.
Hi Bart,
Sorry I didn't get the nuance of your question the first time around. Hopefully this answer will be more helpful. I recommend keeping the .nl to target your customers in the Netherlands who speak Dutch. Then redirect the English URL parameters to a /en sub-directory on the .nl site. That will allow users in the Netherlands who are searching in English to find your site as well. Lastly, in order to expand your services to users outside NL, you can create a separate .com website. If you want to target users in multiple countries, you definitely need a gTLD. You won't get as good of results if you stick with a single ccTLD.
Make sure to use hreflang tags to tie these versions together. The hreflang values for each version should be:
.nl Dutch content: "nl-nl" (target Dutch users in the Netherlands)
.nl/en English content: "en-nl" (English users in the Netherlands)
.com English content: "en" (English users worldwide)
According to Gary Illyes of Google, geo-targeting in Search Console is essentially the same as the geo-targeting signal of a ccTLD, however they add in some sanity checks. For example, some webmasters will accidentally set geo targeting for their Swiss site to "SW" in Search Console, thinking that means Switzerland, when actually it means Swaziland.
I hope this helps you out!
Hi Kaitlin,
Thank you. This is some useful information that will help me with my decisions.
One more question, if I may?
What will happen when I implement this solution? Will, for example, google.es immediately stop showing the .nl results on page one, but the .com results instead, but then lower? Or will the .nl results still show?
As you can see.. I reallly wan't to use the .com domain, but i'm scared of it as well. ;-)
Bart
Hi Bart,
I totally understand your concern (and sorry for my delayed reply). The thing is, using a new .com domain (in addition to your existing .nl domain) should only help you grow internationally; it shouldn't have any harmful effects on your current rankings. The real concern would be if you redirected your .nl domain to another new domain, or stopped using the .nl domain entirely).
If a searcher on google.es (or wherever) searches with a query that Google determines is English, your new .com EN site will likely be the one they see ranking. Users in the Netherlands will still see your .nl site ranking.
Best to you and your brother with the webshop.
Great article, especially number 10 writing the flags instead of a word, or country. I just thought of doing this recently and with this article it just opened my eyes. Cannot believe I have not seen this and its just interesting how easily the other myths can be de-mystified. Great resource especially when working with international clients.
Agreed, the flags/languages thing often trips people up!
Ya totally, even though i haved lived all over the world it really never came to my mind that much but i guess its just things you sometimes oversee. Good to have something that reminded me of it, i´m sure i will not forget it now :)
This is very well timed. We have some potential clients who have multinational, multilanguage sites, and it is something I haven't worked with before, so I was happy to see this waiting for me today on the blog.
Thanks!
Regarding Myth #11, I've actually seen websites get a pure spam penalty from using automated translation services. For this reason, ALWAYS get a multi-lingual copywriter to at least check all translated content before its uploaded to the site.
auto translation is not accurate it can hurt your visitors leaving a bad user experience. Or worst if you automatically redirect your visitor without their notice or control. This can cause frustration since what if the visitor don't want to have that auto redirect in the first place. It would be better to stick to the common language which is English for the better of worldwide visitors or audience.
Great article debunking the myths, I am doing SEO for few international sites and I double check my traffic using Gostats and GA the one with automated translate using wp plugins doesnt rank that well, you need a subdomain like .es or .br with translated site or better still get that country domain.
Excellent post, about myth 14, if I have been a couple of cases with customers who want to have local servers to better position itself in your area and in my opinion that is something illogical.
Impresive post. I allways have the doubt of using subdirectoris or subdomains, in most cases I use subdirectoris.
Many of the multi language websites I manage rank in a different way on each language. I suppose it's because the keywords are different and with different competitors.
"if you take a look at your analytics on your website, even if it has no geo-targeting whatsoever, chances are you already have traffic coming in from various languages and countries."
You can get international traffic without geo-targeting?? -_-
Please edit your work.
Hi Kaitlin,
Here's my current situation: my client has two separate websites ... let's call them www.canadianwebsitename.com and www.americanwebsitename.net. The www.americanwebsitename.net was a duplicate of the Canadian site, however, we did make sure to adjust the spelling accordingly. Recently, www.americanwebsitename.net was penalized for thin content and is no longer ranking on Google. However, the Canadian website still stands.
I've got a bit of a multi-part question here:
1) Is there a way of telling Google that both sites are part of the same organization and that we are not trying to pull a fast one? My interpretation is that Google thinks we are trying to cheat the system by acting as if we are two separate entities. I noticed that www.lush.ca and www.lushusa.com have different TLDs but have lots of duplicate content - why are they not being penalized?
2A) If we are to switch our domain names to let's say, www.globalwebsite.com and www.globalwebsite.ca and take the appropriate measures listed above, such as hreflang, having localized testimonials and content, etc. will we still be penalized if the majority of our product pages contain the same content? 2B) If we were to switch the TLDs - is it possible for us to regain our previous "Google juice" - despite having switched the domain names?
3) Would it make most sense to create an entirely different style of site of site with completely different content for Canadian Vs. American? I don't like this method as it appears to be the path of most resistance (in my opinion).
Thank you for all this fantastic information.
Hi Kaitlin! Master class about international SEO. Very interesting to know the last trends and mistakes we can make when we work to international projects. Thanks so much!
Hi Kaitlin, nice article.
Linkbuilding to specific folders with hreflang attributes. e.g example.com/uk
in your experience does this link equity pass to the other referenced hreflang folders? e.g example.com/au
Ive noticed some results where a seemingly week country specific folder outranks a what would be considered stronger domains with few links and the only difference is one hreflang country folder gets more links.
cheers
"Myth #1: I need to have multiple websites in order to rank around the world."
I think this myth only applies to .cn domains if you want to rank on Baidu, and that's a whole other can of worms, as you need a government license and ideally a mainland-Chinese server to do so.
Very well detailed. I think the part on top level domains is worth checking twice if you are serious about your local content, though
Kaitlin,
It's a wonderful piece of information. I do agree on every item. Thanks a lot!
But, dont find much reason on using only a few sites to stimate the overall performance in the whole world. (8 brands and 3 brands).
Would you mind explaining why did you use that small amount of brands?
Hi Gaston, I agree that my sample size is small. But I've noticed the same trends over the years working on other sites as well, beyond the few that I shared in that report.
I'd love to hear from others who have studied this as well. One of the frustrating things I've noticed is that there is very little info shared when it comes to case studies around different site structures are best, what hreflang tag implementation is best, etc. I think one of the major barriers is that it is hard to have "clean data", such as a control group and all factors being the same except for one variable. It's difficult to use the scientific process when SEO is not done in a lab.
Cheers,
Kaitlin
Yeap, totally agree with you.
It's really hard to find clean data.
Thanks a lot for sharing your data and experiences.
Cheers.
Gastón
hai there Kaitlin McMichael
im new here
does a domain name with extensions like .co.uk or .us or .au
will help for there international targeting..?
Yes domain names with extensions like .co.uk are called ccTLDs (country-coded top level domains). These can be great if you want sell your products in multiple countries. I would recommend NOT using .us though, because it is not often used. .com is more standard for the USA (but it is actually a generic domain, not a proper ccTLD). A .com website can be used for targeting the USA and/or your global audience.
what a complete article, really informative thank you. I'm suprised you didnt' mention more on schema which can really helpful.
its very good article
thanks
It's always useful to know the history of what we are trying to see where we go. Great article! Thanks!
the article gives me much knowledge about international seo....thanks for it
I am very grateful to see this blog. thank you so much for sharing top 15 myths international SEO. Your blog is really informative and simple.
Great post and i fully agree with it all!
Interesting take! Thanks for your insights
Awesome article! thank you for contributing!
Congratulations, great article!