How to choose the best site structure to boost your international SEO efforts

When expanding your business internationally, having a solid international SEO strategy is crucial. International SEO ensures that your website is optimised for global audiences, helping search engines understand which countries or languages your website is targeting. But to build a successful strategy, one foundational decision you’ll need to make is how to structure your website for different markets.

A core element of this decision is the domain concept. The domain concept refers to how your website is structured to serve content for different regions or languages. This directly affects how search engines and users perceive your site’s relevance to a specific country or language, ultimately influencing your rankings and traffic in those regions.

There are three primary ways to structure an international website:

ccTLDs (country code Top-Level Domains):

Examples include yourwebsite.de (Germany) and yourwebsite.fr (France).

Directories:

For example, yourwebsite.com/fr/.

Subdomains:

Such as fr.yourwebsite.com.

Choosing the right option depends on your business goals, current and future plans for international expansion, and your resources. Each approach comes with its own advantages and drawbacks, so it’s essential to carefully evaluate which structure aligns best with your objectives.

Understanding the different URL options

ccTLD

A ccTLD is a two-letter domain extension specific to a particular country or geographic territory. For example, .uk for the UK, .us for the US, .de for Germany, .fr for France and .ca for Canada.

ccTLDs show a website’s association with a specific country or region, so search engines, like Google, can understand the site’s target location and help with local SEO.

Using a ccTLD can improve visibility in search engine results within that country, as search engines often favour ccTLDs for location-based queries. According to Google’s official documentation on managing multi-regional and multilingual sites ccTLDs “provide a strong signal to both users and search engines that your site is explicitly intended for a certain country.”

Advantages and disadvantages of using ccTLD structure

Advantages

• Helps search engines recognise the geographical targeting of the website.
• Increases trust among local users who may prefer sites with their country’s domain extension.
• Often ranks better for location-based searches within the specific country. A 2024 study from Search Engine Journal showed that 56% of Google’s top three positions are held by ccTLDs. Gary Illyes also stated that “Generally speaking the local domain names, in your case .kr, tend to do better because Google Search promotes content local to the user.”

Disadvantages

• Requires separate SEO efforts for each ccTLD, which can be resource-intensive.
• Does not share domain authority across different ccTLDs.
• Typically, it is more expensive to manage compared to subdomains or subfolders.

The official documentation shows the pros and cons of using ccTLD:

Subdirectory

 A subdirectory (also known as a subfolder) is a section of a website organised within a specific folder on the main domain. It appears after the main domain name in the URL path, using a “/” to separate it from the root domain. Subdirectories are used to organise content within a website.

In international SEO, subdirectories can be used to serve localised content for different regions or languages. For example, yourwebsite.com/fr/ for France, yourwebsite.com/de/ for Germany or yourwebsite.com/ca/ for Canada.

Advantages and disadvantages of using subdirectory structure

Advantages

• SEO Authority: Subdirectories share SEO authority with the root domain, making it easier to consolidate backlinks and boost rankings across all pages.
• Simplified Management: Managing international content in one site structure rather than multiple sites or subdomains can be easier for analytics and tracking.
• Unified Brand Experience: Keeps all content within a single domain, providing a unified user experience.

Disadvantages

• Complicated Website Management: Managing different languages or regions within subdirectories can become complex, especially for large sites with extensive localised content. Keeping track of various translations, language tags (like hreflang), and region-specific pages requires a lot of organisation.
• Less Flexibility in Content Localisation: Subdirectories may limit your ability to fully localise content for different regions compared to subdomains or ccTLDs, where each site can have separate things such as currency, shipping options, and other localised information.

The official Google documentation shows the pros and cons of using a subdirectory as

Subdomain

A subdomain is a section of your main domain that is treated as a separate entity, often used to target specific regions, languages, or audiences. It appears before the root domain in the URL structure and is created by adding a prefix to your main domain. For example, fr.yourwebsite.com could represent your French site, ca.yourwebsite.com could target Canada, and es.yourwebsite.com could cater to Spanish-speaking users.

Subdomains allow you to create distinct websites for different markets while keeping them connected under the same overarching domain. This structure is useful for businesses that want to segment their audience geographically or linguistically, offering a tailored experience while maintaining some level of brand consistency.

Advantages and disadvantages of using a subdomain structure

Advantages

• Clear Geotargeting Signals: Search engines can easily associate subdomains with specific regions or languages, especially when combined with hreflang tags.
• Flexibility for Localisation: Subdomains allow for independent customisation of content, design, and even hosting (e.g., local servers for better performance in target regions).
• Separate SEO Strategies: Google treats subdomains as distinct entities, which allows you to apply targeted SEO strategies, keywords, and content for each region or language.

Disadvantages

• Link Authority Does Not Get Shared: As Google treats subdomains as separate domains the authority of your root domain does not automatically benefit your subdomains. Building domain authority with backlinks for each subdomain requires additional work.
• Dedicated Resources and SEO Time is Needed: As its own site a subdomain would require its own SEO resources and time dedication to fix issues and to work on your ongoing SEO strategy.

The official Google documentation shows the pros and cons of using a subfolder for international SEO as:

Conclusion

In summary, choosing the right international website structure – ccTLDs, subdirectories or subdomains – is an important part of your SEO strategy. Each has its pros and cons from geotargeting strength to management complexity to resource requirements.

When you make your decision, consider your business goals, target audience and plans. If you are resource rich and localised trust and ranking in specific regions is key, then ccTLDs might be the way to go. For streamlined SEO management and shared domain authority subdirectories are a big plus. Subdomains offer flexibility and independence for local content but require separate SEO efforts.

So, there is no magic answer. Assess your current resources, long-term goals and audience needs. That’s the way to international SEO success, if you are in the process of migrating get in touch so we can talk through your unique position.