Technical SEO

International SEO

Last updated October 2, 2026

What is International SEO?

International SEO is the work of making a website rank for the right audience in more than one country or language. It covers how the site is structured (country domains such as .sg or .com.au, subfolders such as /en-sg/, or subdomains), how language and regional versions are marked up with hreflang, and how content is adapted to each market rather than copied.

There are two separate questions behind every international setup: which language a page is in, and which country it is for. A single English page can serve several countries, while one country, such as Singapore or Malaysia, can need pages in several languages. Google stopped offering a country-targeting setting in Search Console in 2022, so signals now come from the domain, hreflang, local content and links.

Why it matters for SEO

Without a deliberate international setup, search engines may show the wrong version of a page to a searcher, treat regional variants as duplicates, or rank a generic global page where a local one would convert better. Getting the structure right early is much cheaper than migrating URLs later.

Example

A Singapore software company sells across Southeast Asia and Australia. It keeps one English site on a .com domain with /sg/ and /au/ subfolders for pages that need local prices and regulations, adds a /zh-sg/ section in Simplified Chinese for Singapore's Mandarin-speaking buyers, and links all versions with hreflang so Google can show each searcher the closest match.