International SEO: Effective Strategies for 2025

Expanding a business globally takes more than simply translating your website. It requires a well-crafted international SEO strategy. This guide covers everything you need to know about optimizing websites for multiple countries and languages, ensuring your content reaches the right audience on a global scale.

What is international SEO?

International SEO is the process of optimizing multilingual or multinational websites to improve their visibility and organic performance across multiple countries or languages. Its goal is to ensure that search engines can identify the countries and languages a website targets, and deliver the most relevant version to each user based on their location and preferences.

How is international SEO different from general SEO?

While general SEO usually focuses on a single country, international SEO is more complex. It covers multiple countries and languages and may involve a single website or separate websites for each target market. It also comes with specific challenges, such as managing different languages and search engines, as well as varying legal restrictions and infrastructure.

Web infrastructure and SEO strategies

When approaching international SEO, you need to decide whether to use a single website with multiple language versions or separate websites for each market. This decision depends on business structures, legal requirements, cultural nuances, and decentralized management. Each type of global website requires a distinct SEO approach to minimize specific challenges.

Duplicate content and SERP cannibalization

Companies with multinational websites face challenges such as duplicate content and incorrect market indexing. It is important to ensure that each local version of the website is indexed correctly to drive relevant traffic and ensure that the right page appears in local search results.

Technical elements of international SEO

Technical SEO management becomes more complex with multiple websites. Elements such as ccTLDs, server location, and hreflang attributes are crucial for properly signaling specific locations and languages to search engines.

ccTLDs and server location

ccTLDs tell search engines which country a website is intended for, but they are often misused in multilingual strategies. Server location is also taken into account, although CDNs are commonly used to manage geolocation effectively and cost-efficiently.

The SEO impact of publishing English content on a Brazilian Portuguese website

Setting the lang attribute in the HTML to <html lang="pt-BR"> tells search engines and browsers that the website's primary language is Brazilian Portuguese. However, publishing content in another language, such as English, without properly adjusting this setting can have significant implications for SEO, user experience, and accessibility. Here are the main impacts:

1. Confusion for search engines

Search engines such as Google use the lang attribute to understand the language of the content and index it correctly. Publishing English content on a website configured as pt-BR can:

• Lead to improper indexing, hurting rankings in English-language searches.
• Reduce the content's relevance to users looking for information in Portuguese, since the text does not match the expected language.

2. Lower rankings in local search

If your website targets a local audience (Brazil) and publishes English content without proper configuration, search engines may:

• Consider the website less relevant for local searches, since the content's language conflicts with the target audience.
• Prioritize competitors whose content matches the configured language (pt-BR).

3. Poorer user experience

Visitors expecting a website in Portuguese may be frustrated to find content in English. This can:

• Increase the bounce rate.
• Reduce the time spent on the page.
• Negatively affect user experience metrics, such as Core Web Vitals, which are critical SEO factors.

4. Compromised accessibility

Screen readers and other accessibility tools use the lang attribute to determine the correct pronunciation of text. Publishing English content on a website configured as pt-BR can:

• Make things difficult for visually impaired users who rely on these tools.
• Affect compliance with web accessibility standards, such as the WCAG guidelines.

5. Solutions and best practices

To avoid negative impacts, follow these recommendations:

• Set the correct language for specific content: Use the lang attribute directly on the tags containing text in another language. Example:htmlCopyEdit<p lang="en">This content is in English.</p>
• Create separate pages for different languages: Consider implementing a multilingual strategy by creating specific subdomains or subdirectories, such as:
  • Portuguese: www.seusite.com.br
  • English: www.seusite.com.br/en/
• Implement hreflang: Use hreflang tags in the HTML to tell search engines that versions of the content are available in different languages.htmlCopyEdit<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://www.seusite.com.br/en/"> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="pt-BR" href="https://www.seusite.com.br/">
• Set the language in the URL: URLs that include the language, such as /en/ for English, help search engines identify the language and improve SEO.

Maximize your global reach with international SEO

Strategy plays a crucial role in optimizing for different cultures, infrastructure, and search engines. Collaboration between global and local teams, smart resource allocation, and ongoing adaptation help ensure a company's online presence.

Read also: Why maintain your website

Successfully addressing these challenges can unlock new market opportunities, requiring a smart combination of strategy, technical expertise, and collaborative teamwork.

This content was produced based on content originally published on Search Engine Land.