Mastering Hreflang: Optimizing Your Global Website for International Success

Many of the most successful businesses operate in multiple countries. While this appears to be a slam dunk in terms of growing your user base there is a significant technical hurdle to tackle: hreflang. On the surface hreflang looks to be relatively simple; add markup to tell search engines all of the country and/or language specific versions you have of each page. However, hreflang needs to be constructed carefully and maintained to ensure ongoing performance.

Why Use Hreflang?

So let’s start with the obvious question, why bother?

Different countries have developed differing cultures and these cultures impact the way people do everything which can in turn affect online behaviour. 

For example, in countries with a high level of trust in e-commerce, like the UK, offering a variety of online payment options is seen as a positive. However, in cultures where e-commerce is newer there are likely to be lower trust levels. In these markets offering cash-on-delivery or other alternative payment methods might be necessary to increase conversions.

It’s therefore hugely important that the content that you have crafted for a specific market is actually shown to that market. Showing content that is tailored to a different audience could easily see poorer click through rates, user engagement and conversion rates. There is therefore a lot at stake.

If your website has a global reach it is unlikely that all of your content is going to be tailored to every market. In these instances a lack of hreflang may cause search engines to see your content as duplicate versions, triggering duplicate content filters. This may mean that some of your local pages never really see the light of day in the SERPs.

Conversely if you get it right the opposite is also true – each market feels as though the brand is resonating with what matters to them, which likely results in better engagement and conversion rates.

Common Hreflang Mistakes

Your hreflang setup will vary significantly spending the complexity of your website and the countries and languages you’re looking to target. However over the years I have seen some common themes in sites struggling with international targeting.

Canonical and Hreflang Mismatch

Before you even consider implementing hreflang ask yourself if you’ve nailed the canonical logic across the whole website. Are you sure that your canonicals for your faceted navigation work as expected? If you have any question marks about your canonicals then sort that first. 

The reason being that search engines will expect your hreflang to reference the canonical version of each URL. 

Conflicting Hreflang Markup

Your hreflang markup can be added in 3 different ways. You can see details of these methods here. If your hreflang has been added in more than one way there is the risk of the two markups conflicting. This causes confusion for search engines as they wont know which version to respect.

Managing Large Scale Hreflang

If you have a large site it becomes more difficult to confirm if your hreflang markup is working as expected, simply because it gets too large to manually review. This obviously makes troubleshooting something of an issue. While using tools such as ScreamingFrog can help you to identify problems it can still be a mammoth task. 

How to Avoid Hreflang Mistakes

Maintain Consistent Site Structures

Where possible try to ensure that the general structure of your website for different countries/languages is broadly the same. This makes it much easier to sense check your hreflang. I’ve worked with a client that targets several audiences. One country used a single URL for all audiences, while another created separate URLs for each audience. This then led to significant problems when trying to map hreflang URLs. 

Start Simple 

It’s important to remember that you don’t need to implement hreflang across your whole site. If the majority of your traffic lands on a handful of pages then it makes sense to ensure hreflang is working for those pages before extending out to the wider website. 

Automate, automate, automate

Where possible automate as much of your hreflang setup as possible. Errors tend to creep in due to user error, so minimising the opportunity for that to happen can only be a good thing. The majority of popular CMS’s have inbuilt hreflang automation or plugins to enable the same functionality.

Make use of Index Sitemap

For sites that cover a large number of countries and languages it is recommended to implement hreflang via the XML sitemap. Split this into multiple XML sitemaps each one focused on a specific country and language combination. This makes it much easier to diagnose issues with your hreflang. You can also submit these sitemaps in Google Search Console which will also flag issues to you. 

Provide a Navigable Path to Other Countries / Languages

In order to provide context to search engines it is recommended to ensure that there is a navigable path from one country page to another. If the user or search engine follows a link to another country then they should be taken to that version of the current page not to the homepage. This not only represents a frustrating user experience but also helps search engines to see that these are equivalent pages.

Bonus Recommendation

Tailor Content to the Relevant Market

One of the most valuable things you can do to help search engines and users know they are on the right version of the site is to tailor your content for each market. Use commonly used terminology, reference the country you’re targeting, speak to the market conditions of the region. All of these tweaks to your content will help to drive the point home that this content is for a specific market. 

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