International SEO
International SEO for sites selling into more than one country.
Most international SEO problems are structural, not linguistic. The wrong site structure, hreflang that silently switched itself off, or an IP redirect quietly hiding half your locales from Googlebot. These are technical faults with technical fixes, and they are usually cheaper to correct than the translation budget people reach for first.
Straight answer
More locales is not the same as more traffic.
The instinct is to launch every market at once and translate everything. That multiplies your maintenance surface and your duplicate content problem before it multiplies your revenue. Two markets done properly beat ten done thinly, every time.
What usually gets done
- Ten locales launched at once, machine translated
- Hreflang added by a plugin and never validated
- Visitors auto-redirected by IP, including Googlebot
- ccTLDs bought before there is demand to justify them
- The same keyword translated literally into each language
What actually works
- The markets with real demand, evidenced before you build
- Hreflang validated as a complete, reciprocal set
- A suggestion banner, so every locale stays crawlable
- Subfolders on one strong domain unless there is a reason not to
- Keyword research done natively in each language
Said plainly
Working with us as your international SEO consultant means the person who diagnoses the hreflang cluster is the person who writes the fix, so nothing is lost between a recommendation and whoever implements it. If the honest answer is that a market is not worth entering yet, you will hear that before you have paid for the translation.
Scope
What an international SEO agency should actually cover.
The work that decides whether a multi-country site performs, roughly in the order it matters. The first two are where most of the damage is, and where most of it is fixable.
Site structure
ccTLD, subdomain or subfolder, decided on your actual situation rather than a blog post's preference. This is the hardest decision to reverse later, so it gets made with the trade-offs written down, including what it costs you if the market does not work out.
Hreflang implementation
A complete, reciprocal, self-referencing set that stays valid through releases. Validated as a cluster rather than page by page, because a single missing return tag silently disables the whole group and nothing in Search Console shouts about it.
Crawlability per locale
Confirming Googlebot can actually reach every market. IP based redirects, geo gated content and locale switchers built in JavaScript are the three usual reasons an entire language version never gets indexed and nobody notices for a year.
Duplicate and near-duplicate handling
UK and US English, or Spain and Mexico Spanish, are near duplicates by definition. Canonicals and hreflang declared so Google shows the intended version rather than picking one and suppressing the rest.
Native keyword research
The terms people actually search in that market, which are often not the translation of your English keyword. Done in the language rather than through a translated list, because the literal translation is frequently a term nobody types.
Multi-region migrations
Moving between structures, adding a locale, or consolidating markets that did not work. Every one of these is a migration with a redirect map, and it is where international sites most often lose the rankings they had.
How it runs
Diagnose, decide, implement, verify.
Locale audit
Every market crawled as Googlebot sees it: which locales are indexed, whether hreflang resolves as a complete set, where redirects intercept the crawler, and which markets are earning nothing despite being maintained.
Usually two to four daysStructure decision
If the structure is wrong, you get the options with the cost and risk of each, including the option of doing nothing. If it is right, we say so and spend the budget on the faults instead of a rebuild.
You approve before we startImplement and verify
The hreflang, canonicals, redirects and geo-targeting built and then verified per locale, rather than declared done at deploy. International faults hide well, so the checking is the deliverable as much as the change is.
Logged as it is spentEvidence
The pattern behind most international faults.
These are the two we find most often, and both are invisible until someone crawls the site the way a search engine does.
Pattern
A canonical pointing somewhere it should not
We have diagnosed a page ranking for nothing whose canonical pointed at a URL that then redirected elsewhere, telling Google the page was not the real version of anything. Across locales this fault multiplies, because one bad canonical template can suppress every market at once.
Pattern
Signals spread thin across too many pages
On one site a templated block of twenty-five internal links was scattering authority indiscriminately. Cutting it to five chosen links did more than any of the twenty-five had. International sites hit the same problem at locale scale, where a switcher links every page to every other market.
Cost
What it costs.
International SEO is billed at £90 to £110 an hour, or the £95 blended rate where it crosses into development. Most engagements start with a locale audit and are scoped from what it finds. Minimum engagement is 4 hours.
Locale audit
From £650
Every market crawled and checked: indexation per locale, hreflang validated as a set, redirect and crawl traps found, with a prioritised list of what is costing you traffic now.
Hreflang build
Scoped
A correct, reciprocal hreflang implementation built into your templates and verified per locale, with a check that survives future releases rather than one that decays.
Structure migration
Scoped
Moving between ccTLD, subdomain and subfolder, or consolidating markets. Planned, implemented and verified as a migration, because that is exactly what it is.
Time is logged as it is spent and the ledger is open to you, including anything scrapped or reverted. Full breakdown on the rates page.
FAQ
Questions clients actually ask
Should I use a ccTLD, a subdomain or a subfolder?
For most businesses, subfolders on one strong domain (example.com/de/) are the safest default, because every market inherits the authority the whole domain has earned rather than starting from zero. Separate ccTLDs (example.de) send the strongest local signal and are the right answer when you have a genuine local entity, local support and the budget to build authority in each country separately, which is a much bigger commitment than most people realise when they choose it.
Subdomains sit awkwardly between the two and are usually chosen for internal reasons rather than search ones. The honest version: the structure matters far less than whether you have real content and real demand in each market. We will tell you if the answer is to consolidate rather than expand.
What is hreflang and why does it keep breaking?
Hreflang tells Google that two pages are the same content aimed at different languages or regions, so it can show the right one to the right searcher instead of picking for you. It breaks constantly because it has to be reciprocal and complete: if the German page points at the English one, the English one has to point back, and every page in the set has to reference every other, including itself.
Miss a return tag, use a region code that does not exist, point at a URL that redirects, or let a locale drop out of the set during a release, and the whole cluster is quietly ignored. It is one of the few parts of SEO where a small syntax error silently switches off the entire feature.
Do I need to translate everything, or is one language enough?
Translation alone is usually not enough, and machine translation on its own is often worse than nothing, because it produces pages that read as filled rather than written and Google is markedly better at spotting that than it used to be. Localisation means the examples, currency, units, and the actual search terms people use in that market, which are frequently not the direct translation of your English keyword.
If the budget only stretches to doing one market properly, do one market properly. Ten thin locales perform worse than two real ones and cost more to maintain.
Is auto-redirecting visitors by IP address a good idea?
No, and it is one of the most common ways an international site damages itself. Googlebot crawls predominantly from US IP addresses, so an automatic redirect based on location can mean entire locales never get crawled or indexed at all. It also frustrates real users who want a different version to the one their location implies.
Suggest, do not force. A dismissible banner offering the local version, with the user's choice remembered, gets the same benefit without hiding your site from the crawler.
Will duplicate content across locales get me penalised?
Not penalised, but it can absolutely cost you. Two English pages for the UK and the US are near duplicates, and without correct hreflang and canonical handling Google will often pick one and suppress the other, which is usually not the one you wanted for that market. The fix is not to spin the copy into artificial variation; it is to declare the relationship properly and let genuine local differences do the rest.
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Which market is underperforming?
Tell us the countries you sell into and the domain. We will tell you which locales Google can actually see, whether your hreflang is doing anything, and where the traffic is being lost.