International and multilingual SEO
International and multilingual SEO for businesses that sell across borders
Your clients search in their own language and their own country: English, Spanish, German, French, Arabic, Swedish or any other. A site that translates its pages without telling search engines how the versions relate ends up competing with itself.
What goes wrong
The usual problems on multilingual sites
Each one makes a language version harder to find, and none of them is visible to a visitor who reads only their own language.
- Translated pages with no hreflang, so search engines treat them as unrelated pages or as duplicates.
- Hreflang that points to redirects, to pages marked noindex, or only in one direction.
- One address that switches language by browser setting. Search engines usually crawl without a language preference, so they only ever see one version.
- Machine translation published as it came out, with the wrong words for what clients actually search for.
- The same title and meta description in every language.
- Business details that differ between the website, Google Business Profile and directories.
How we set it up
Language versions search engines understand
One address per language
Language folders on one domain, such as /es/ and /sv/, in most cases. Every version has its own address, its own canonical and its own title.
Hreflang in both directions
Each version lists every other version and itself, plus x-default for visitors whose language you do not cover. In the HTML or in the sitemap, and checked after launch.
Demand before translation
Not every page is needed in every language. We check what people search for in each language and build the pages that have demand, first.
Native wording
A Swedish family searching for a villa does not type a translation of the English phrase. Titles and headings follow how each language actually searches, and a native speaker, yours or one you approve, should check the copy before it goes live.
Local signals that agree
Google Business Profile, directories and your own pages carry the same name, address, phone and opening hours, in every language.
Structured data per language
Each version declares its language, and the business behind every version is the same entity, connected with @id.
An example
A company selling in four countries
Think of a clinic with patients from Spain, the United Kingdom, Sweden and the United States, or a software company selling in the same four markets. Each group searches for the same thing with different words, and expects prices, terms and contact details explained in its own language and currency.
The structure we would build: a page per service in each language and market that has demand, hreflang between the versions, Google Business Profile for every real location, and the people behind the work named on the page. The free audit checks the technical basics of any one of those pages.
Running a vacation rental or concierge company? See SEO for vacation rental companies.
Questions
About international SEO
Language folders, subdomains or separate domains?
Language folders on one domain in most cases: one site collects all the trust, and one team maintains it. Separate country domains make sense when the business itself differs by country, for example different prices, stock or legal terms.
Do we need every page in every language?
No. A page in a language nobody searches in is maintenance without return. We start with the pages that have demand in each language, and add more when the data says so.
Is machine translation good enough?
As a draft, often yes. Before it is published, a native speaker should check it, above all the words clients use in searches, which machine translation often gets wrong.
Which languages and markets should we start with?
The ones your clients already come from, then the ones where search demand shows an opening. We look at your own enquiries and at demand per language and country before recommending any.
Back to SEO services, or see AI search optimization.
Start with what the page itself shows
Run the free website readiness audit on your most important page. It checks 24 technical basics and tells you, check by check, what it saw and what it does not prove. Then decide whether you want our help.