Do you want to deploy your site across multiple markets? International SEO aims to help make your business or online presence visible in foreign countries on search engines like Google. It's important to understand that local and international SEO differ in many ways. Today, we will discuss 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 for optimizing websites for multiple countries. Technically, there are several factors to consider when tackling international SEO for our website. Keyword strategy by market, adaptation of UX design by country, hreflang tags, URL structure, link building...
Today, we will review some methods related to URL structure. As a reminder, Google is clear that having well-structured URLs is the foundation of a good website.
So what are the options for organizing my URLs?
2. How to organize the URLs of my website?
If you want to create an effective international SEO strategy, you need to use a unique URL for each page based on the user's language. Translators like Google Translate, which translate your website pages on the fly, are therefore not an effective way to achieve results in international SEO.
There are two main methods for organizing the URL hierarchy of a multilingual website.
2.1 International site using subdomains
International sites organized with subdomains add a country-specific domain name in front of the root of your domain. For example:
- en.mysite.com
- us.mysite.com
- de.mysite.com
- fr.mysite.com
- etc..
This practice is used and it yields satisfactory results in search. However, it has several limitations that make it not the preferred structure we recommend.
- the URL is not very visually appealing: the country tag is not visible in the URL bar when you are on the page as a visitor, see the image
- you need to have a general domain name like ".com." For example, for digidop.fr, it would make little sense to see en.digidop.fr (you would almost be lost there)
In this case, there is a method called "subdirectory," which involves categorizing your URLs into folders. This is the method our agency recommends when building multilingual sites optimized for SEO.
2.2 International site using subdirectories (recommended)
A site using subdirectories has a URL structure like this:
- mysite.com/es/example
- mysite.com/fr/example
- mysite.com/de/example
- mysite.com/us/example
This structure is recommended for organizing your site visually for users, as well as for search engines during an international SEO strategy.
Check out this tutorial for transitioning your site to subdirectories with Weglot!
Example of a website with international subdirectories
Here’s an example of a Webflow site organized into sub-directories.
