International SEO Checklist

Choose URL structure

• ccTLD
• Subdomain
• Subdirectory
• Different gTLD

Choose implementation type

• Discuss with the developer
• by HTML tags
• by sitemap
• by HTTP headers (for non-HTML documents like PDFs)

Content

• Native > Multilingual > Auto-translate + manual check
• Choose country/market (if necessary) based on
  • Company goals & objectives
  • Market size
  • Demand (not purely keyword volume)
• Keyword research
• Content translation & localization
• Internal link within the same website

Technical

• Prioritisation
• CDN
• Language and region codes
  • Language
  • Language + region
  • Not just region
  • ISO 639-1 format for language codes
  • ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 format for region codes
• Hreflang
  • Itself
  • x-default
  • Other languages
  • Reciprocate!
• Don’t IP redirect – Offer a selection to the user
• Copying technical developments from one market to another after prioritisation (if necessary)