For any brand looking to grow, expanding into international markets is a logical next step. However, simply having a website that can be accessed globally isn’t enough. To truly succeed, you need to ensure that search engines and users are being directed to the most relevant version of your site based on their location.
At Atkinson Smith Digital, we advocate for a two-pronged approach: technical precision through hreflang tags and a frictionless international user experience (UX). Read on to discover these essentials for growing traffic and offering a quality experience that converts users into leads and sales.
1. Routing Search Users with Hreflang Tags
Hreflang tags are HTML attributes that signal to Google which version of a page should be shown to users in specific regions or language groups. When implemented correctly, they ensure your UK customers see GBP pricing while your US customers see USD, preventing confusion and improving conversion rates.
The Technical Essentials
To make hreflang work for your site, there are several “non-negotiables” you must follow:
- Self-Referencing is Mandatory: Every page must include a tag that points to itself, alongside all its international alternates.
- Reciprocity is Key: If your UK page points to a US version, the US version must point back to the UK page. Without this “handshake,” Google may ignore the tags entirely.
- The x-default Tag: This specifies the “catch-all” version of your site for users whose location doesn’t match any specific tag. Typically, this should be your primary or most global market.
- One-to-One Mapping: Each URL should only be paired with one other equivalent URL per region.
Where to Place the Code
While there are multiple ways to deploy these tags, we generally recommend placing them in the <head> of your HTML. For platforms like Shopify, this logic can be added directly to the theme.liquid file. For WordPress sites, we typically leverage the WPML plugin that links transcreated content together in the WordPress backend and deploys the required Hreflang tags automatically.
That said, for larger websites with a large number of regional and linguistic variants, it can be best to deploy hreflang tags to your XML sitemaps, helping to reduce page size and can aid page load speeds.
We also have experience working with developers to set up custom solutions, for example a previous project where pages across multiple CMSs needed to be grouped together. Our solution was a centralised database that deployed the required tags to each CMS via an API. Learn more in our case study.
2. International UX Best Practices
Technical SEO gets users to your site, but UX keeps them there. If a user lands on the “wrong” version of a page—perhaps because they are traveling or using a VPN—you must provide a clear path to the correct one.
Smart Location Pickers
Every international site should feature a location or language picker, usually located in the header navigation.
- Logical Mapping: If a user switches locations while viewing a specific product, the site should attempt to navigate them to the equivalent page in the new region.
- Fallback Logic: If that specific product isn’t available in the new region, the user should be directed to that region’s homepage rather than seeing a 404 error.
- Visual Cues: Using national flags is a common heuristic that helps users identify their target region at a glance. However, beware that national flags do not refer to languages (for example, French speakers in Belgium and Switzerland), so naming the language or language-region pairs is often preferable for greater clarity
The Dangers of Forced Redirection
It might be tempting to use “geo-redirects” to force users to a specific site based on their IP address. However, we strongly advise against this.
Googlebot primarily crawls from the US. If you automatically redirect all “non-UK” IPs to a US site, the crawler may never find or index your UK or European-specific content. It’s something that Google specifically warns against, and may have the effect of reducing traffic, or make issues harder to diagnose, since inspecting your page via Google Search Console is typically done from a US server.
The “Modal” Solution
Instead of a forced redirect, consider using a notification modal. This is a user-friendly pop-up that acknowledges the user’s location, for example: “It looks like you’re in the UK. Would you like to shop on our UK store?”.
- 200 Status Codes: Ensure every regional page serves a “200 Found” status code to all users, regardless of their location.
- User Choice: Allow users to dismiss the modal and stay on their current page if they wish. This is important for users away from their home region, for example while on holiday.
- Frictionless Transition: Provide a clear “Switch Store” button that moves the user to the correct region immediately.
3. Building a Scalable Structure
International SEO isn’t just about the here and now; it’s about planning for future growth. Whether you use subdomains (e.g., us.example.com) or subdirectories (e.g., example.com/fr/), your structure should be consistent. When designing an international SEO solution, it’s also important to think about your brand’s future growth to ensure your solution can scale across new regions or languages that may be added in future.
By combining robust hreflang clusters with a modal-based navigation strategy, you create a site that is both search-engine friendly and built for a global audience.
Ready to take your brand global? Get in touch with the team at Atkinson Smith Digital
to discuss your international search strategy.