International SEO is about telling search engines which version of a page belongs to which audience. Most of the difficulty is not the concept but the implementation, which is unforgiving of small errors.
The core mechanism is hreflang: a set of mutual declarations linking equivalent pages across languages or countries. It works when every version points at every other version, including itself, and breaks quietly when one does not.
Guides in this section
- hreflang errors — the implementation mistakes that stop it working.
- Website structure —
For a review of a multi-region or multi-language site, book an SEO consultation. See also technical SEO.