International SEO in 2025: Expand Your Business’ Reach With 5 Simple Steps

International SEO is when you optimize your website to reach audiences in other countries or languages. If you want to increase brand awareness by promoting your business to other markets, or sell internationally and boost conversions on your online store, knowing how to apply international SEO practices to your website is key.

First off, I recommend researching your markets beforehand. To appeal to your desired audience, you’ll need to have a clear understanding of different cultural norms, know which languages are spoken in certain areas, and be aware of regional search engine preferences.

What Are the Benefits of International SEO?

Optimizing your website for international SEO has several benefits:

• Reach new markets – International SEO can help your business reach overseas markets, which expands your potential customer base.
• Boost brand recognition – If your business has an online presence in multiple markets, you can significantly increase brand awareness, cultivate a positive brand image overseas, and build trust with customers over time.
• Better search visibility – If you’re showing up in national and global search results, you can increase your visibility on search engines, leading to higher website traffic, engagement, and conversions.
• Stronger customer satisfaction – When targeting multiple markets through international SEO, you can tailor each campaign to different audiences and enhance their overall customer experience.

To work out whether your business should go international, I suggest considering these two key factors first:

• Your website’s traffic – Are international visitors already visiting your website? Use tools like Google Analytics to find out which product or service pages they’re visiting, the time they spend on your website, and if this traffic is contributing to increased conversion rates. If international visitors have already benefited your business, you can use international SEO to better optimize your content for these audiences.
• Product demand – A product that’s popular in your home country won’t necessarily be popular overseas. Make sure what you’re offering is in demand first. You can use free websites like Google Trends to see if there’s significant interest from any countries you’re interested in targeting.

If you’re certain that breaking into international markets is right for your business, you can start applying international SEO practices to your website.

1. Research Different Regions

Conducting market research is key to understanding global audiences. With strong knowledge of key consumer behaviors, pain points, and needs, you can better tailor your SEO strategy to these audiences.

During market research, you can learn more about your target audience through social media channels, global market reports, and blogs or YouTube channels from overseas creators.

Once you’ve gathered enough information about your target audience, I recommend using this data to create buyer personas representing your different customers. You can reference these personas while you develop your site’s international SEO strategy and make crucial business decisions.

2. Carry Out International Keyword Research

Keyword research is vital for effective international SEO, since it’ll help you understand what global audiences are typing into search engines like Google when looking for something online.

SEO tools like SEMRush, Ahrefs, and Google Ads offer easy ways to begin your search. You can take advantage of geographical filters to find popular keywords in different regions, or look into useful metrics like:

• Search volume: the number of users searching for a keyword
• Competition: how difficult it will be for one of your pages to rank for a specific keyword
• Search intent: whether a keyword search is used to find information, locate a brand’s website, or look for a product or service to buy

When looking for relevant, high-traffic keywords, don’t forget to take cultural and language nuances into account. For instance, a slang word might have a slightly different meaning in another country. Make sure that you have awareness of these differences so you can target the appropriate keywords.

3. Structure Your Website for International SEO

With the keywords you’ve identified, you can now optimize your website’s structure and make sure that it’s fit for international audiences and will amplify your website’s visibility on search engines.

This includes adding relevant keywords to:

• Meta data – This includes the titles and descriptions that show up in Google search results. Make sure that they include keywords your target audiences will be looking for during their search journey.
• Your content – You should include keywords throughout your content, including headings and the main body of text. However, make sure that any keywords are organically woven into your website’s content so they don’t come across as confusing or spammy.

Based on the keywords you’ve found, you might also want to create new content that reflects what audiences are looking for, or reorganize your website’s navigation so that overseas customers can find what they need fast.

Incorporating this information in a structured format helps search engines better understand your business and improve visibility in local search results. Remember, your website needs to go beyond translation—it’s about resonating with your audience in a culturally relevant way.

4. Create Multilingual and Multiregional Content

Your website’s content must be tailored to the regions and language speakers you’re targeting. This includes making sure that your content includes the correct:

• Primary language of the region you’re targeting
• Currency
• Timezone
• Date formats
• Measurements

If you need help tailoring your content to overseas audiences, I recommend hiring a native speaker to help. They’re more accurate than computer translations and can help with the linguistic accuracy and cultural appropriateness of your content, so audiences feel seen and heard.

5. Build Relevant Backlinks

To enhance your international SEO efforts, it’s worth getting backlinks from high-quality websites that are relevant to your target markets. These backlinks will show search engines that your content is relevant to a specific region, while helping drive additional traffic to your website.

You’ll find backlink opportunities from popular websites, blogs, or news outlets in your target regions. It’s also worth considering approaching local influencers or industry professionals who might be willing to link to your site.

Keep in mind that the content you want to push must be culturally relevant to the audience you have in mind. An Italian consumer might not care about a white paper on USA work-life balance, but they may be more inclined to read one on the lifestyle differences between the USA and Italy.

Before you expand overseas, there are some technical considerations to take into account first. I’ve explained the three most important ones below.

URL Structures for International Websites

If you have a website in, for example, the USA and France, your website URL will differ slightly depending on the region someone is accessing your website from. There are three website URL structures you can use to indicate these regional or language-based differences:

1. ccTLD (country code top-level domains)

A ccTLD is a domain that represents a specific geographic location and uses two letter codes to represent each country. They’re often structured like this:

• www.bestbuilds.it (Italy)
• www.bestbuilds.uk (United Kingdom)

2. Subdirectories

Subdirectory URLs enable you to keep the regional versions of your website under one domain. For each region or language, you’ll need to create a different website folder which is then represented by a slash symbol and a two letter code in your URL. For instance:

• “www.bestbuilds.com/it” (Italy)
• “www.bestbuilds.com/uk” (United Kingdom)

3. Subdomains

Unlike the previous two URL types, subdomains feature a country code that’s added to the beginning of your website URL. Businesses will often use them to separate content from the main website that serves a different purpose. Here are two examples:

• “it.bestbuilds.com” (Italy)
• “uk.bestbuilds.com” (United Kingdom)

The three URL structures I’ve listed also come with different pros and cons, so use the following table to familiarize yourself with them:

🚨 Regardless of which country or language they’re targeting, your URLs should be optimized for search. Use our guide to SEO-friendly URLs to make sure you’re on the right track.

Hreflang Tags

Hreflang tags tell search engines what the specific language of a webpage is. With this knowledge, Google can work out which version of your content to show users based on their language and location. So, if your customers are looking for product listings in their preferred language, search results will provide them with the relevant pages.

They look like this:

• <link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en-us” href=”http://example.com/us” />.

The “en-us” highlights that American English is spoken on a page, while the URL at the end is the page that the language is used on.

On each language version of your website, you’ll need to add a hreflag tag at the head of each page. You’ll want to specify the language code (“en” for English) or, optionally, the country code (“us” for the United States).

Additionally, if you have different versions of one page, you’ll need to add the appropriate language tags so Google can differentiate between them all. For example, if you have the same product page on an English and French site, you need to have the corresponding hreflang tag on both pages.

Canonical Tags

If you have the same content on different versions of your website, you may end up with duplicate content—a huge SEO mistake that could impact your international search engine rankings.

This is where canonical tags come in handy, since they tell search engines which page URL contains the master copy. That way, Google knows which version of your content to show on international search results, preventing any duplicate content issues.

🤔 Curious about other technical SEO terms? Brush up on your knowledge with our SEO glossary.

By tracking your website’s performance, you can see if your international SEO strategy is working, or if there’s room for improvement. The easiest way to track your progress is through Google Analytics 4, since it’s free to use and tracks all the metrics you need to make a fair assessment of your website.

By clicking on the “Reports” tab in the left-hand sidebar of Analytics, you can measure:

• Top countries – You’ll be able to see whether your traffic is primarily from the international audiences you’re targeting. If a key country is falling behind, make sure that you’re targeting the right keywords for that region, while double checking that your website is best optimized for their needs.
• Traffic acquisition – This metric shows you where your website visitors are coming from, be it through social media or organic search results. If a key traffic source isn’t doing well, it’s a sign to make some adjustments to your strategy to try and give it a boost.
• Events – An event is an action that a user completes on your website. Checking events on your pages can be helpful when measuring conversion rates. You can see if users are viewing items, adding items to their cart, or using a sign up form.

Once your website is optimized for overseas audiences, you’ll need to conduct regular site audits to make sure that you’re on track to achieving your business goals. Whether you want to establish a stronger presence overseas or increase your store’s revenue, a strong international SEO strategy will empower you to reach new markets.

However, if you’ve read this article and still aren’t convinced that international expansion is right for you at the moment, I recommend reading our local SEO guide to better reach customers that are closer to home.