Slide 15 of 39
How does an SEO company handle international SEO campaigns?
International SEO starts with a market your own data already shows demand for. From there, an SEO company chooses a URL structure, implements hreflang so each country gets the right page, rebuilds keyword research and content for each market, earns links in each country, and checks which version ranks where. If no country shows demand yet, the first spend is research into demand, before any translation.
Pick Markets From Your Own Data
Which market comes first depends on your business, not on where the SEO industry earns its money. Compare candidate countries on four things:
- Search demand for your core terms in that country’s own keyword data.
- Organic traffic and revenue already arriving from that country, using the country filter in Search Console and your analytics.
- How strong the local competitors are in that country’s results.
- Whether you can sell, ship and support customers there.
The market that scores best on existing demand and readiness goes first. A country with no current demand and no operations is a weak first bet, however large it is. Where the launch sits against your domestic priorities is a sequencing decision, made the way an SEO company builds a roadmap for a client.
Choose a URL Structure
Google’s guide to managing multi-regional sites sets out the options:
| Structure | Example | Strengths in Google's table | Weaknesses in Google's table |
|---|---|---|---|
| Country-code domain | example.de | Clear geotargeting; server location irrelevant; easy separation of sites | Expensive, with limited availability in some cases; more infrastructure; strict ccTLD requirements in some countries; targets a single country |
| Subdomain | de.example.com | Easy to set up; different server locations allowed; easy separation of sites | Users might not recognize geotargeting from the URL alone (is "de" a language or a country?) |
| Subdirectory | example.com/de/ | Easy to set up; low maintenance on one host | Users might not recognize geotargeting from the URL alone; single server location; separation of sites harder |
| URL parameter | example.com?loc=de | No pros listed; Google marks it not recommended | URL-based segmentation difficult; users might not recognize geotargeting from the URL alone |
Our default recommendation for a company entering its first few markets without local entities is subdirectories: one domain is cheaper to maintain, and new country sections sit on a domain that already has links. Country-code domains make sense where the business has local operations, a local legal entity or a country-specific brand. Record the choice in the campaign strategy before any build work, because changing structure later means a migration. The technical audit then checks that the structure, hreflang and canonicals are implemented the same way in every section; that audit is described in how an SEO company conducts a technical SEO audit.
International and local SEO work at different levels. For example, imagine a retailer with stores in Toronto, Manchester and Sydney: international SEO serves the right country version of its site, and local SEO inside each market wins the searches near each store, the subject of the role an SEO company plays in local SEO.
Implement Hreflang Correctly
Hreflang annotations tell Google about the language and regional versions of a page, so that Google Search can point each visitor to the most appropriate one. Google’s documentation on localized versions sets the rules, and its own list of the most common hreflang mistakes repeats several of them:
- Return tags. “Each language version must list itself as well as all other language versions.” And: “If two pages don’t both point to each other, the tags will be ignored.” Where a complete set is hard to maintain, Google says it still processes the pairs that do point to each other, and that new market pages should at least link both ways with the original, dominant language version.
- Codes. The language uses ISO 639-1 (en, fr, de), optionally followed by a region in ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 (US, GB, CA). Google warns: “You can’t specify the country code by itself.” The language code comes first, because Google does not derive the language from a country code. Add the region when one language serves several countries with regional variations, such as en-US and en-GB. Reserved codes do nothing: Google lists EU, UN and UK as having no effect in hreflang, so a British page uses en-GB.
- A fallback. An x-default version serves visitors whose language settings match none of your versions. Google designed it for language selector pages and suggests it for country selectors and home pages that redirect automatically.
Canonical tags have to agree with the hreflang set, and the right canonical depends on whether the versions are translations. Translated pages are separate versions: the hreflang page says localized versions count as duplicates only when the main content remains untranslated, so a translated page can carry a canonical that points to itself. Same-language versions are different: where URLs in one language show similar or duplicate content, such as example.de/ and example.com/de/ both showing German content, Google’s multi-regional guide says to pick a preferred version and use rel="canonical" together with hreflang so that searchers reach the correct regional URL. Review each same-language cluster before setting canonicals, rather than applying one rule to every version.
Search Console’s Performance report still groups clicks and impressions by country, but its country-targeting tools are gone. Google’s help page on the International Targeting report says: “The International Targeting report has been deprecated.” It adds that Google continues to support hreflang, while targeting search results to specific countries through Search Console “is no longer supported.” Google’s documentation changelog records that on August 24, 2022 it removed references to the deprecated report. For debugging hreflang, Google’s hreflang page lists third-party tools and notes: “These tools are not maintained or checked by Google.” Validation therefore runs through a crawler that checks return tags, codes and canonical conflicts across every page in each set.
Send Location Signals That Agree
Google’s multi-regional guide lists the signals it uses to judge a page’s target audience: country-code domains, hreflang, server location (which “is not a definitive signal” because of content delivery networks and hosting abroad), and other signals such as local addresses and phone numbers, local language and currency, links from other local sites, and a Business Profile where available. The same guide says Google does not vary where it crawls from to find versions of a site, so each version has to be declared explicitly. The agency’s job is to make the signals agree: a German section with English content and US-dollar prices gives Google no clear answer.
The same guide covers how visitors move between versions. It asks sites to avoid redirecting people automatically based on what the site thinks their language is, since that can keep users and search engines from seeing every version, and not to adapt content by IP address, which it calls difficult and generally not reliable. Its alternative is a link on each page to the other language or country versions, so visitors who land on the wrong one can switch.
Rebuild Keyword Research and Content for Each Market
Demand and phrasing differ by country, so keyword research is redone in each market’s own keyword data, ideally with a native speaker, using the method in how an SEO company performs keyword research for clients. One Spanish translation cannot serve Mexico and Spain equally well: the two markets need different currencies, their own regional vocabulary and their own shipping and payment details. A page that swaps the language but keeps one market’s prices and terms reads as foreign to the other. The translation also has to cover the main content: Google determines a page’s language from its visible content and says it does not use code-level language information such as lang attributes, and its guide warns that translating only the navigation and footer around content in another language can create a poor experience when the same content appears several times in search results.
Decide early who writes for each market: the agency’s native-speaking writers, your local team, or a translation agency with an SEO brief. The choice changes the cost and the review process.
Earn Links in Each Country
Google’s multi-regional guide counts links from other local sites among its location signals, so outreach runs per country, to that market’s publications, associations and directories, under the same rules on paid links as at home. The tactics are the ones in what link building strategies an SEO company uses, aimed at another country’s sites.
Check Which Search Engines Each Market Uses
Google’s share differs sharply by country, and in China it is not the leading engine. StatCounter’s figures for September 2026, across all platforms:
| Market | Other leading engines | Planning implication | |
|---|---|---|---|
| India | 96.63% | Bing 1.92% | Plan for Google |
| Japan | 59.27% | Bing 31.41%, Yahoo! 7.61% | Google first; check Bing for desktop audiences |
| South Korea | 47.97% | Naver 43.06% | Naver needs its own plan |
| China | 1.46% | Baidu 46.65%, Bing 21.76% | Baidu is the planning target |
In Japan the split depends on the device: on mobile, StatCounter puts Google at 85.08% and Bing at 0.91%, so Bing’s share comes from desktop. A consumer audience on phones and a B2B audience at desks need different checks. The figures come from StatCounter’s Japan data and its equivalent pages for South Korea, India and China.
Before You Add the Next Market
For one sample set of pages, the agency should be able to show three things that agree: the hreflang cluster with return tags and self-references, the canonical on each version with the reason for it (self-referencing for translations, a preferred version for same-language duplicates), and Search Console performance filtered by country showing which version earns impressions in each market. If the three disagree, fix that before the next market launches.