Rank in every country you ship to, with the right page.

Each report is one client site’s web search performance over the same 28 days, 20 September to 17 October 2026. They show that the sites we run SEO for earn steady traffic at average positions between 7 and 10. They don’t break traffic down by country, so they are not proof of a multi-market project.

Our own build follows the same rules we audit against. This site’s pages each carry one canonical URL, the old site’s addresses were mapped one by one before launch, and every page was checked for a single indexable version. A multi-country store needs the same discipline, repeated for each market.

International SEO starts with the URL plan. Google’s guide to managing multi-regional sites compares country domains (example.de), subdomains (de.example.com), subfolders (example.com/de/) and URL parameters, and recommends against parameters. Country domains give the clearest signal but cost more and split authority; subfolders share the main domain’s strength and are the easiest to run. For most stores with two to five markets, we recommend subfolders, and Shopify’s own international domains guide suggests the same for a first setup.

Then hreflang. Google’s page on localized versions sets three rules we check on every page type: each version lists itself and every other version, every link must be returned (if two pages don’t point to each other, Google ignores the tags), and codes use ISO 639-1 for language with an optional ISO 3166-1 region. So “en-GB” works, “es-419” doesn’t, and a region code on its own is invalid. We add an x-default for the country selector or the main store.

On Shopify, Markets writes hreflang and alternate sitemaps for you when you add international domains or subfolders. That covers most of it, but we still check three things by hand: that every market really has translated content, that apps adding their own tags don’t create a second set, and that a removed market’s URLs redirect rather than return a 404. On WooCommerce, hreflang comes from the translation plugin, so we confirm that product, category and blog pages all carry it, and that the plugin’s sitemap lists every language.

Redirects need care. Google says to avoid automatic redirects based on a guess at the visitor’s language, and its page on locale-adaptive pages explains why: Googlebot mostly crawls from US addresses and sends no Accept-Language header, so a store that forces visitors by IP can hide its other versions from Google. We prefer a banner or selector that suggests the right store, and we test what a crawler from the US is served on every market.

Translation comes next. Google treats localized pages as duplicates only when the main content stays untranslated, so translating the menu and footer alone isn’t enough. We review product titles, descriptions, collection copy and meta tags in each language, with local spellings and units, and we check that prices, currency, shipping and returns match the market. A UK page that shows US sizes or dollar shipping costs loses the sale even when it ranks.

Last, each market gets its own measurement. We submit a sitemap per domain or subdomain in Search Console, compare clicks and position by country, and check the Page indexing report for each version. Because markets grow at different speeds, the plan after launch is set market by market, not for the store as a whole.