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Expand your reach! Learn how an international SEO strategy can boost your ecommerce brand’s awareness and sales in new global markets.
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Search engine optimization (SEO) is a powerful tool for ecommerce business owners, especially when you’re selling products globally. To launch an effective international SEO strategy, you’ll need to consider the local language and cultural differences, regional competition, and technical challenges of hosting multiple versions of your website for different countries.
The payoff, however, can be huge—a successful international SEO strategy that serves a large audience and the content they want can increase conversions and drive awareness on a global scale. Here’s what you need to know to get started.
International SEO is the process of optimizing your website’s content and structure to improve its performance in search engine rankings in countries other than your business’s base.
Use international search engine optimization (SEO) tactics to tell search engines that your content is meant for audiences who speak a specific language or are located in a particular country. You can also optimize site content (or on-page SEO) to specific international audiences—for instance, by creating pages targeting the most popular relevant keywords in a given country. In 2025, search engines are increasingly prioritizing content that demonstrates deep local relevance and user satisfaction.
The primary difference between local and international SEO strategies is that local SEO focuses on a single country or geographic region, whereas international SEO targets multiple countries or regions.
For this reason, international SEO best practices include all local SEO best practices in addition to factors relevant to targeting multiple global audiences. Here are the steps you need to take to be successful in your international SEO efforts.
The first step in launching an international SEO strategy is deciding which countries to target. Many business owners develop an initial list of countries based on current international sales, anticipated market needs, and logistical considerations for expanding sales in specific regions.
You can use Google Analytics and Google Search Console to gain insights into your current international ecommerce audiences. To view data about your international performance, sign in to Google Analytics and navigate to Reports, then User Attributes, and then Demographic Details. The dashboard will display a color-coded map indicating the countries where the greatest number of user sessions on your website originated.
Once you’ve identified the countries generating site traffic, use Google Search Console to vet the quality of traffic from each one. Log in to the platform, navigate to your Performance report, and use the country filter to select a country that generated significant traffic. The report will display the top 1,000 search queries that resulted in a click to your site. If popular queries indicate site visitors are converting (or have the potential to convert) to customers, you might decide to target that country.
Market research involves gathering information about target audiences, competitors, and relevant trends within a particular market. To successfully expand internationally, business owners need to conduct market research in every country (or region) where they intend to do business.
Your international market research findings will help you identify competitors and build marketing, sales, and SEO strategies around each local audience’s needs, preferences, and decision drivers. For example, you might identify which search engine is most popular with a particular local audience, what percentage of searches come from mobile devices, and what demographic factors are common to users of products like yours. When considering branding for a new market, tools like the Shopify Business Name Generator can help you brainstorm relevant and available business names.
SEO marketing success depends on how well a site performs on its audience’s preferred search engine, and different search engines are popular in different countries. For example, while Google is the most commonly used search engine in the US, South Korea uses Naver, China has Baidu, and Russia’s most popular search engine is Yandex.
International SEO strategy involves tailoring content and technical setup to regional preferences. For example, businesses planning to target users in China might pay careful attention to image alt tags, since Baidu’s image AI is different from Google’s and relies more on alt tags and image metadata to identify images.
Creating localized content involves using localized keywords, local language and idioms, and local currencies, time zones, phone numbers, and addresses, if applicable.
It’s not just about translation; it’s about cultural adaptation to ensure your message resonates authentically with the local audience.
If you plan to target customers who speak different languages, you’ll need to translate your content into one or more foreign languages.
Because translations aren’t literal, most businesses prefer to hire human translators over using automated translation functions. This helps avoid misinterpretations and ensures your content maintains its intended meaning and impact, which is crucial for building trust and improving SEO performance in new markets.
You can also tailor your content to your market research findings. For example, if you sell premade meal kits, you might emphasize their time-saving benefits in countries where people work particularly long hours per week.
To further enhance localized product presentation, consider leveraging tools like Shopify AR to allow customers to visualize products in their own space.
Create immersive shopping experiences with Shopify AR
Give shoppers a new way to experience your products when you add augmented reality (AR) to your online store. Using 3D models for your products provides customers with a better understanding of the function and size of an item, and increases your customers’ confidence in the quality of your products.
It’s unlikely that literal keyword translations will correspond with search queries in an international market. This may even be the case for overseas markets that share your home language, such as Canada or Australia for US-based businesses. Although English is a primary language in all three countries, differences in local culture and idiom will affect the terms your customers use to search for your products. For example, while people in the US and Canada use the term “cotton candy,” people in the UK refer to the same treat as “candy floss.”
You can use keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner, Moz, and Semrush to conduct location-based keyword research. These tools allow you to view keyword search volumes and difficulty by country. They can help you select new keywords for each region and rework your SEO content using popular local search terms.
To target multiple markets, you’ll need a dedicated URL for each one. There are multiple ways to create region-specific URLs. Here’s an overview of popular options, reviewed for 2025 best practices.
Some businesses use each country’s unique code as the final section of the relevant site’s domain name, which is also known as its top-level domain. For example, you might use www.feltedsheep.us for your US site, www.feltedsheep.fr for your French site, and www.feltedsheep.de for your German site. This strategy creates an intuitive user experience, but it also requires you to purchase and maintain multiple domains.
To create dedicated URLs using subdirectories (also called subfolders), simply change your URL path for each market—your French site, for example, might live at www.feltedsheep.com/fr. Using this URL structure will allow you to keep all of your content within a single domain. You have one universal website, which allows you to build domain authority while still targeting regional markets.
Subdomains are an extension of an existing domain that appears at the beginning of a website’s domain name, such as the “fr” in www.fr.feltedsheep.com. Subdomains are customizable, and businesses can use them to target specific languages or specific regions within a country. The main drawback to this approach is that search engines view each subdomain as a separate website, which prevents the subdomains from benefiting from the root domain’s SEO authority.
Local backlinks have a greater impact on search results than links from other markets do, so many businesses invest in local link-building strategies, such as reaching out to local journalists, guest posting, or soliciting product reviews from regional customers.
Content marketing, the process of creating and distributing valuable content to your target audience, can also help you earn local backlinks in international markets. To maximize your results, customize your domestic content marketing strategy to meet the specific needs of your local audience in each market.
An hreflang tag is a piece of HTML code that tells search engines that a page’s content is intended for a specific local audience. Using hreflang tags enables language targeting and country targeting so that search engines display the appropriate page to users from different countries or regions. It’s crucial to implement hreflang tags correctly to avoid common pitfalls that can dilute your SEO efforts.
Search engines penalize duplicate content. To avoid penalties on two or more pages of content written in the same language (for example, pages in English for the UK, the US, and Australia), apply an hreflang tag to differentiate each page for the search engine. For example, you might apply the hreflang tag “en-gb” to a US product page edited to appeal to readers in the UK.
Here’s a sample of hreflang tags in action:
<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en-gb” href=”/website/builder” >
Sell internationally in minutes with Managed Markets
Managed Markets helps you sell in 150+ countries and scale your business internationally—all from a single Shopify store. Make global shipping hassle-free, with tools to manage store localization, collect duties upfront, simplify customs documentation, and get fast transit times.
You can use Google Analytics and Google Search Console to measure your current performance in international markets and evaluate the quality of traffic from individual countries. Countries generating a significant amount of relevant traffic may represent promising expansion opportunities for your ecommerce business.
Instead of translating keywords, conduct keyword research and select new keywords for each market. You can also enlist the help of an international SEO agency to adapt keywords for local audiences.
To optimize your site content for a specific search engine, create localized content targeted to regions where the search engine is popular and tailored to perform well under its algorithm. Utilize research tools specifically recommended for search engines like Baidu, Yandex, and Naver.
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