Your customers abroad are landing on the wrong version of your site
International SEO is the work of running one site across several countries or languages so each market reaches the version meant for it. Wrong currency, wrong stock, wrong shipping: the page loads, the visitor leaves, and nothing in your analytics tells you why.
Request a quote- Country and language targeting
- Hreflang done properly
Four areas, and the order they happen in
Research decides the structure, the structure decides the signals, and only then is content worth writing. Building the site first and researching afterwards is how markets end up competing with each other.
Market and keyword research per country
Demand does not translate. The same product is searched for with different words in different countries, and a market that looks identical on paper often has different competitors, different intent and different volume.
- What each market actually searches for
- Who ranks there, which is rarely who ranks at home
- Which markets justify the work and which do not
- Local terminology and spelling differences
Site structure by country or language
Subfolders, subdomains or separate domains. The choice is close to irreversible, which is why it comes after the research rather than before it, and why it is worth spending time on.
- Which structure suits your markets and resources
- URL patterns that stay readable as you add markets
- Migration planning where a structure has to change
- Language and country separated where they differ
Hreflang and technical setup
The signals telling search engines which version belongs to which audience. Hreflang is unforgiving: one missing return tag and the whole cluster is ignored, silently, with nothing in Search Console saying so plainly.
- Hreflang implemented and validated both ways
- Canonicals that agree with the hreflang cluster
- Redirects that do not trap visitors in one version
- An x-default for everyone you do not target
Localised content and translation oversight
Translation makes a page readable. Localisation makes it rank. A page can be perfectly translated and still use none of the words that market searches with, which is the most common waste in international projects.
- Briefs built from local search demand, not the source page
- Translator output reviewed against those terms
- Titles, headings and metadata localised, not converted
- Currency, units and examples that suit the market
The structure decision, in plain terms
Three options, and the right one depends on how many markets you serve and what you can maintain. We make the recommendation and explain the trade-off rather than defaulting to whatever is easiest to build.
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site.com/uk/
Subfolders
Everything inherits the authority of one domain. Simplest to maintain, and the usual right answer for most businesses.
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uk.site.com
Subdomains
Cleaner separation where markets are run by different teams, at the cost of authority being split between them.
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site.co.uk
Country domains
The strongest local signal and the heaviest commitment. Each domain earns its authority from nothing.
Questions about international SEO
The answers below are the ones we give on calls, so you know where you stand before speaking to anyone.
Can you work on languages your team does not speak?
Yes. The research and the technical work do not depend on speaking the language, and for anything that does, we work with native speakers of that market.
What we never do is judge a translation nobody qualified has read. Where a language is outside our own, a native reviewer checks the output against the terms the research found, and their verdict is the one that counts.
Do you handle the translation itself?
Usually we oversee yours. Most businesses expanding abroad already have translators, and the problem is rarely translation quality: it is that nobody briefed them on what the market searches for.
Where you have no one, we arrange it. Either way the brief comes from the keyword research rather than from the English page, which is the part that changes whether the result ranks.
Our site structure is wrong. Can you fix it?
We can tell you what it should be and plan the move. A structural change means a migration, and migrations are scoped and quoted separately because the effort depends entirely on your platform and how many URLs are involved.
We will also tell you when a structure is worth living with. A migration that costs more than the markets are worth is not progress.
How many markets should we start with?
Fewer than most businesses expect. Each market needs its own research, its own content and its own maintenance, and half-finished markets tend to hold each other back rather than add up.
The research stage answers this directly: which markets have demand you can realistically compete for, and which look attractive but are already owned by someone local.
We only sell in English. Is this still relevant?
Yes, and this is where most of the damage happens. Sites serving the UK, US, Canada and Australia in one language produce near-identical pages that compete with each other for the same queries.
Country targeting without language differences is its own problem, and hreflang exists precisely for it.
How is this different from your normal SEO service?
The SEO service builds coverage for one site in one market. This is about several versions of a site coexisting without undermining each other.
Most international engagements need both: the structural work here, and the ordinary SEO work inside each market once the versions are separated properly.
Is this a project or ongoing?
Either. A project suits a site that needs its structure and hreflang set up correctly once. Ongoing suits a business adding markets, where each new one repeats the whole sequence.
Which fits is settled after the research, once we both know how many markets are actually worth pursuing.
Tell us which markets you are trying to reach
Send the site, the countries or languages you serve, and what is happening now. You get a written scope and a quote back, not a discovery call before anyone will tell you anything.
- Related:
- SEO service
- Technical SEO
- Content writing