International SEO: get found and sell in other countries

When going international pays off

“SEO international” and “hreflang” are each searched 390 times a month in France. The question that comes first is commercial: does your product or service sell abroad, and can you deliver it, take payment for it and provide service in the customer’s language?

Three signals that say yes: visits and orders already arrive from other countries even though the site is in French; your product is digital (guide, template, software) and ships anywhere at no cost; your sector has less competition in another language than at home.

We run our own sites in several languages and several currencies, including a baby products shop in five languages and guide sites in French and English. The lesson never changes: each version must be written for its buyer, not translated word for word.

Choose the URL structure

Three structures work; what matters is to choose one and stick to it.

• Subdirectories (example.com/de/, example.com/es/): the simplest, everything stays on one domain that builds up its authority. This is our default choice.
• Subdomains (de.example.com): useful if each country has a different team or platform, but each subdomain starts out weaker.
• Country domains (example.de, example.es): a strong local signal and buyer trust, but one domain to promote per country.
• Avoid: a language chosen by a parameter (?lang=de) or by a cookie, with no address of its own. Google then sees only one version.
• Avoid: redirecting automatically based on the IP address or the browser language. Google’s crawler, like a traveller, may never see some versions. Offer a banner instead: “This site is available in your language”.

hreflang tags, without errors

hreflang tags tell Google that a page exists in several languages or for several countries, so that it shows the right version to the right user. They go in the head of each page, in the sitemap or in the HTTP headers. Example for a page in three versions:

• <link rel=“alternate” hreflang=“fr” href=“https://www.example.com/fr/poussette-compacte” />
• <link rel=“alternate” hreflang=“de” href=“https://www.example.com/de/kompakter-kinderwagen” />
• <link rel=“alternate” hreflang=“en-GB” href=“https://www.example.com/en-gb/compact-pushchair” />
• <link rel=“alternate” hreflang=“x-default” href=“https://www.example.com/en-gb/compact-pushchair” />

1. 1
   Reference yourself: Google requires it, each language version must list itself as well as all the other versions. The same complete block therefore appears on every version.
2. 2
   Reciprocity: if page A references page B, page B must reference page A. Google says so: if two pages do not point to each other, the tags are ignored.
3. 3
   Valid codes: the language in ISO 639-1 (fr, de, en), the optional country in ISO 3166-1 (FR, DE, GB). The United Kingdom is written GB: Google ignores codes reserved for something else, such as UK or EU.
4. 4
   x-default: the version offered when no language matches, often English or a language selection page.
5. 5
   Canonical URLs: each version is its own canonical. A German version whose canonical points to the French one disappears from Google.

The mistakes that get all the work ignored

• hreflang tags pointing to redirected, broken or noindex pages: the pair is broken.
• An hreflang block present on the French version but forgotten on the others: the links are no longer reciprocal.
• The same French text served under /de/ while waiting for the translation: Google sees duplicates, the German buyer leaves.
• A language declared without the correct lang attribute on the page (<html lang=“de”>): declare it, it is the simplest information to give.
• Sitemaps that list only the French version: every version must be discoverable, through links and through the sitemap.

Check the tags with a crawling tool that compares them page by page, every time you add a language.

Content: localise, do not just translate

A German buyer does not search with the words of a translated French speaker. Each market has its own queries, habits and examples. Keyword research is redone in each language, with the volumes of that country.

• Keywords: note the real searches of the country (a Belgian, a Swiss and a Quebecer do not all write like someone from France).
• Units and formats: sizes, weights, dates, decimal separators, phone number formats.
• Local proof: delivery times to the country, carrier, return conditions, the legal information buyers expect (an Impressum in Germany, for example).
• Review by a native speaker of the pages that sell (home page, product pages, checkout); machine translation can serve as a first draft, never as the final version.
• Nothing copied without value: publishing machine translations in bulk without review amounts to producing pages at scale, which Google’s spam policies target.

Prices, currencies and payment: where the sale is won

Showing the price in the buyer’s currency changes the decision. An American who sees a price in euros does the maths, hesitates, and pays currency exchange fees to their bank on top. On the seller’s side, Stripe’s French pricing adds a 2% conversion fee when a currency has to be converted, on top of the card rate: build it into the price.

On our guide sites sold in France and the United States, the American version shows its prices in dollars, set for the American market, rather than an automatic conversion down to the cent. A round price in the local currency reads better than a price converted to the cent.

1. 1
   Set one price per currency, rounded to the country’s habits, rather than converting on the fly.
2. 2
   Offer the country’s payment methods: cards everywhere, mobile wallets, and local methods depending on the market.
3. 3
   Show the country’s delivery costs and taxes early: costs discovered at the last moment are one of the leading causes of cart abandonment.
4. 4
   Check the tax obligations of selling abroad (European Union VAT, local taxes) before opening a country.

Measure each country separately

1. 1
   Google Search Console: filter the Performance report by country and by page (/de/, /es/) to follow each version.
2. 2
   Indexing: check that each version is indexed, not just the French one.
3. 3
   Analytics: track conversions by country and by language, not just traffic.
4. 4
   Bing matters more in some countries and for some audiences: add each version to Bing Webmaster Tools.