How to set the language on an international website to have good SEO

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When it comes to creating your website configuration for different languages ​​(or for different regions, or areas), there are several options, each with advantages and disadvantages that will better or worse suit your company's strategy. The reality is that there is no “ideal” configuration for all websites, but rather depending on what we are looking for with it, one or another will suit us better.

How the language settings of an international website affect SEO
Google's indexing of your website is based on the home page of that domain , france email list which will be the root of the positioning . That is why it is essential to think carefully about the content that the home page will have by default.

Normally, you have configured your international website (or are planning to do so) using subdomains , creating a specific version of the website in each language . The structures that follow this model are:


That is why in this post we want to show you different alternatives when setting up an international website , so that you can assess, with their advantages and disadvantages, what best fits your SEO-corporate-technical capacity balance.

Options for setting up a multilingual international website
Pre-home with language selector
In this type of configuration, the site's home page is dedicated exclusively to the language or country selector . This option is convenient from an SEO point of view because none of the subdomains has more weight than the other. As long as the links to all the subdomains are included in the pre-home page (which is the root of the domain), Google will consider them all to be equally important.

This option may seem a bit tedious at first, as it is not good for our users to constantly encounter this barrier when entering. But in reality, cookies will solve this problem for you . Once the user has selected their language, the next time they enter the website they will be automatically redirected to the corresponding subdomain.

However, when you decide to go for this option, you should know that configuring your root as a pre-home will take away strength. Normally, the root of the domain is the one that includes the most links, and with this configuration you will only include the links to the subdomains, so you are diluting the weight of the page (to give it to each of your language subdomains equally).

This option is therefore particularly suitable for companies that create their international website because their products are customised according to region , or because their buyers are distributed in a fragmented way , without one standing out from the other, between different countries.

International SEO

Home with language version or default language/country
This type of configuration consists of hosting the company's main market page on the home page , and allowing the rest of the subdomains to come from this root. e will have the Spanish website hosted (if this is our main market), and for each of the other languages ​​we have, their subdomains will come from here (but we will not create a subdo

The consequence of this configuration is that we will be giving a lot of weight to the website of our main market, which will have a good positioning because it will contain many links and will be able to compete in this market, which is the one that interests you the most.

The drawback of this option is that users from other markets will find a website that is not “theirs” until they find their language selector, which gives them access, for example, to compare the different prices or services available for different countries. In addition, in terms of SEO, you will not initially have a very competitive positioning for those other languages ​​(although a content strategy in those languages ​​can help you climb positions on the other hand).