International SEO: a new market isn’t your site translated
The words people search with change, the competitors change, what Google shows changes — often the intent behind the same query changes too. Five years across six regulated markets, where a wrong hreflang tag meant disappearing from an entire country.
Where it usually breaks
- 01Translating the site isn’t doing international SEO — translation solves the language, not the search: keywords, competitors and even the intent behind a query shift from one market to the next
- 02Wrong hreflang causes quiet damage — it’s the most common technical mistake and the hardest to spot: Google shows one country’s audience the version meant for another, and in the reports it just looks like that market “isn’t taking off”
- 03Language versions end up competing with each other — without a clear structure, two near-identical pages in neighbouring languages, or the same language for different countries, cannibalise each other instead of adding up
- 04One market doesn’t replicate another’s results — what worked in one country may not work in the next: competition, category maturity and search habits differ, so the strategy has to be recalibrated, not copied
What the work covers
- 01Structure — ccTLD, subdomain or subfolder: a decision made early, because changing it later is expensive, and it depends on resources, existing authority and how different the markets actually are
- 02Hreflang implemented and then verified — not just written: checked for reciprocity, consistency, and whether Google is actually honouring it. This is where most of the errors I see concentrate
- 03Keyword research redone per market — from scratch, in the country’s own language, never translated from another market
- 04Differentiated content, not duplicated — every market has its own references, objections and rules; where local context matters, and in regulated sectors it matters a great deal, the content has to genuinely change
- 05Authority built market by market — signals earned in one country don’t automatically transfer; a new market means building authority there, with sources from that country
- 06Migrations that don’t lose what already works — changing structure or CMS on a multi-country site is the highest-risk moment, and needs to be planned ahead, not fixed afterward
Frequently asked questions
Which markets do you have direct experience in?
Italy, Germany, Austria, Spain, the Netherlands and New Zealand, plus Malta, across five years running SEO for an international iGaming operator — six regulated markets, each with its own licence, compliance requirements and rules on what can be said and how. On the UK and the US I work from data, not prior operational experience, and I’d rather say so than pretend otherwise.
ccTLD, subdomain or subfolder — which is better?
It depends, and it’s one of the genuinely hard decisions to reverse later. A subfolder concentrates the main domain’s authority and is usually the most efficient choice starting out; separate country domains send a sharper local signal and isolate risk, but each one needs authority built from zero. The right call comes from the resources actually available and how different the markets are — not a universal rule.
Why does hreflang go wrong so often?
Because it fails silently. If reciprocity is missing, if the language-country codes are imprecise, or if the referenced pages don’t match, the site keeps working and the reports just show one market underperforming. In my work, hreflang across multiple jurisdictions — with content that had to legally differ from one country to the next — was a daily concern, and it needs verifying after implementation, not just writing.
Do I need a native speaker for the content?
For content that has to convert, or that touches regulated subjects, yes — the difference between correct copy and copy that reads native is real, and in sectors where trust is everything, that difference matters. My role is strategy, architecture and technical SEO; the final language rendering still needs a native speaker.
How is this different from iGaming SEO?
Much of the method is the same — that’s where it comes from — but iGaming adds constraints an ordinary business doesn’t have: separate licences per jurisdiction, content that has to change by regulatory requirement, and an outsized level of competition. If you operate in that sector, the right page is <a href="/en/igaming-seo">iGaming SEO</a>.
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