International SEO: 2 URL strategies

Do you want to deploy your website in several markets? International SEO aims to help make your business or online presence visible in foreign countries on search engines like Google. It is important to know that local and international SEO are different in many ways. Today we are going to talk about the URL structure of your site, and the two main methods that can be implemented: subdirectories and subdomains.

1. What is international SEO?

International seo is a strategy to do seo for websites in several countries. Technically, there are several things to think about when tackling international seo for your website. Keyword strategy per market, UX design adaptation per country, hreflang tag, url structure, netlinking ...

Today, we are going to review some methods related to URL structure. As a reminder, Google is clear that having well-structured URLs is the basis of a good website.

So what are the options for organizing my URLs?

2. How do I organise my website's URLs?

If you want to create an effective international SEO strategy you need to use a unique URL for each page depending on the language of the user. Translators, such as Google Translate, that translate your website pages on a per-click basis are therefore not an effective way to achieve international SEO results.

There are two main ways to organise the URL hierarchy of your multilingual website.

2.1 International sub-domain site

International sites organised into sub-domains add a country-specific domain name in front of your domain root. For example :

• en.monsite.com
• us.monsite.com
• de.monsite.com
• en.monsite.com
• Etc.

It is a practice that is used and brings satisfactory results on the search. But it has several limitations which mean that it is not the structure we recommend.

• the url is not very visual: the country tag is not visible in the URL bar when you are on the page as a visitor, see the image

• you must have a general domain name in ".com" for example. Because for digidop.fr for example, it would make little sense to see in.digidop.fr (we would be almost lost)

In this case, there is a method known as "sub-directory", which consists of classifying in files its URLS. This is the method recommended by our agency when we build sites with multilingual content optimised for SEO.

2.2 International site in subdirectory (recommended)

A subdirectory site is a url structure like this

• monsite.com/es/example
• monsite.com/en/example
• monsite.com/de/example
• monsite.com/us/example

This structure is recommended to organise your site visually for Internet users, but also for search engines during an international seo strategy.

Tutorial to convert your website into a subdirectory with Weglot!

Example of a website with international subdirectories

Here is an example of a Webflow site organised in subdirectories.