International and multilingual SEO
Three language versions of a site either reinforce each other or quietly cannibalise each other. There is no third outcome, and the difference is a few lines of markup plus a lot of research.
Translating isn't keyword research
A translation turns your sentence into its equivalent in another language. But the words someone types into Google aren't the translation of what your domestic customer types. They're the words that person uses. The gap between those two things is where almost all multilingual traffic is lost. Every market gets its own keyword research, and the page structure follows what that market expects to find, which is frequently not the same information in the same order.
hreflang, canonicals and the mistakes that cost positions
Return tags that don't reciprocate. Missing x-default. Self-canonicals pointing at the wrong language. A ccTLD quietly geo-locking you to one country. Language codes with a region attached that narrows your audience by ninety per cent. Each of these is invisible until you look at which version Google is actually serving, and each is routine to fix once someone has looked.
Common questions
Subdirectories, subdomains or separate domains?
Subdirectories almost always, because all three languages then feed one domain's authority instead of splitting it three ways. Separate country domains only make sense at the scale where each market has its own team and budget.
Can I launch one language first and add others later?
Yes, and it's usually the sensible order. What matters is that the URL structure anticipates the others from the start, so adding a language is a content job rather than a migration.
Keep reading
- Search engine optimisationRanking first on Google isn't luck and it isn't a bigger budget. It's architecture, content and patience, applied in the language each customer is actually searching in.
- Content and keyword strategyPublishing more is not a strategy. Most sites already have too many pages and too few that answer a question somebody is actually asking.
- Technical SEO auditMost sites don't rank because of something they're missing. They don't rank because of something they're doing, and nobody has looked closely enough to find it.
- Web design and developmentA website isn't a brochure. It's the salesperson that works while you sleep, and most of the ones we audit are built as though nobody would ever open them on a phone.