Hreflang and localized URLs are the technical signals that tell Google which version of a page to show which user: the German page to German searchers, the Chinese page to Chinese searchers, without the versions competing against each other. We set up the URL structure for each language or market and add the hreflang tags that connect them, so search engines serve the right page and your translated pages do not cannibalize your main one. Done right, this is invisible to customers and decisive for international SEO.
What we set up
- A clean URL structure per market: subfolders, subdomains, or country domains, chosen for how you actually operate rather than by default.
- Reciprocal hreflang tags across every language version, including the x-default for users who do not match any specific market.
- Canonical tags that agree with hreflang, so you are not sending search engines contradictory instructions.
- Correct handling in sitemaps and on the platform (Shopify Markets or WPML) so the signals stay right as pages are added.
This is the part teams most often get wrong: a site adds languages, the translated pages go live, and then they all fight for the same rankings because the hreflang is missing or self-referential. We check it page by page and confirm it in Search Console rather than assuming the plugin handled it.
Start here if you already have or are about to add language versions. Getting the URLs and hreflang right early is far cheaper than untangling duplicate-content problems after the pages are indexed.
Shopify Markets and WPML handle most of this natively, and we check the hreflang and localized URLs they output.