International SEO
Audit the page for multi-language and regional targeting issues.
When to activate: Only relevant if the site serves multiple languages, regions, or has localised content. If a page is monolingual with no internationalisation signals, report ✅ PASS "No internationalisation issues (single-language site)".
1. Hreflang tags
Look for <link rel="alternate" hreflang="..."> in <head>:
| Check |
Status |
| No hreflang tags on a multi-language site |
❌ FAIL "Add hreflang tags to indicate language/region variants" |
| Hreflang tags present |
✅ PASS — list all language-region codes found |
Hreflang validation rules
| Rule |
Violation = |
| Self-referencing hreflang missing (page must include itself) |
❌ FAIL |
x-default fallback missing |
⚠️ WARN "Add hreflang=\"x-default\" for the default/fallback page" |
Invalid language code (must be ISO 639-1, e.g. en, fr, de) |
❌ FAIL |
Invalid region code (must be ISO 3166-1 alpha-2, e.g. en-US, fr-CA) |
⚠️ WARN |
| Hreflang URLs return 4xx or 5xx |
❌ FAIL "Hreflang points to broken URL" |
| Duplicate hreflang entries for same language-region |
⚠️ WARN |
2. HTML lang attribute
| Check |
Status |
<html lang="..."> missing |
❌ FAIL |
lang value doesn't match hreflang self-reference |
⚠️ WARN "Mismatch between html lang and hreflang" |
| Properly set |
✅ PASS |
3. Content-Language header (meta)
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="..."> → check if present- If present, verify it matches the
lang attribute → ⚠️ WARN if mismatch
4. URL structure for internationalisation
Detect URL pattern used:
| Pattern |
Example |
Assessment |
| Subdirectory |
/en/, /fr/, /de/ |
✅ Recommended |
| Subdomain |
en.example.com |
✅ Acceptable |
| ccTLD |
example.fr, example.de |
✅ Strong geo-targeting |
| URL parameter |
?lang=en |
⚠️ WARN "Not recommended — search engines may ignore parameters" |
5. Translated content checks
| Check |
Status |
Page has lang="en" but content appears in another language |
⚠️ WARN "Language mismatch detected" |
<title> and <meta description> not translated (same across language variants) |
⚠️ WARN |
| Images with alt text not translated |
⚠️ WARN |
6. Regional targeting
- Check for
<meta name="geo.region">, <meta name="geo.placename">, <meta name="geo.position"> → ✅ PASS if present
- Google Search Console geographic targeting hint: check for
<link rel="canonical"> pointing to regional variant
Edge cases
- A monolingual site with no internationalisation signals → skip all checks, report "Not applicable"
- A site with
hreflang on some pages but not others → flag inconsistency
- Right-to-left languages (Arabic, Hebrew) → check for
dir="rtl" attribute on <html> or <body>
