Expertise
International and multilingual SEO
Being found correctly in every market you sell to, not only the one you wrote the site in.
What it means
International SEO is the work of making one company legible in several markets at once: which language and region signals you send, how those signals agree with each other, and whether a search engine in Madrid, Tokyo or São Paulo can tell which version of your site it should show. Most of it is structural rather than editorial. It fails quietly, and it fails in the markets you look at least.
Why it matters
Multi-market sites break in ways nobody notices from head office. Hreflang clusters lose their return links after a redesign. A country subfolder ships without its alternates. The market with the smallest team gets the stalest content, so it ranks worst, so it gets less investment. By the time it shows up in a revenue number, the cause is two migrations back and nobody can reconstruct it.
What we do
- Audit the language and region signals you send now: hreflang reciprocity, x-default, canonical agreement, and where the sitemap and the pages disagree.
- Decide the market structure: subfolders, subdomains or country domains, and what that choice costs you to maintain.
- Establish which markets deserve original content and which deserve translation, based on what each market actually searches rather than on headcount.
- Build the checks that stop it drifting, so correctness is enforced by the build rather than by whoever remembers.
Verifiable on this page
This site runs six locales. Every hreflang cluster is generated from one route registry that also generates the sitemap, so the two cannot disagree. Alternates are emitted only for languages that genuinely have the page, articles that exist only in English carry no invented alternates, and the build refuses to compile if a translation is missing a single key. View the source of any page here and check it.
How we use the framework
The three realities apply per market. A company can have a small Digital Reality Gap at home and a wide one in Japan, because Internet Reality is assembled from local sources, in the local language, by systems that never saw the English site.
See the full frameworkCommon questions
Subfolders, subdomains or country domains?
Subfolders for almost everyone. They inherit the authority of one domain and cost the least to maintain. Country domains earn their keep when you have separate legal entities, separate teams and separate P&Ls, and not before.
Do we need to translate everything?
No, and trying to is how multi-market sites become unmaintainable. Translate what the market searches for. Leave the rest in the original language and say so on the page, which is more honest than a machine translation nobody reviewed.
How do we know it is working?
Impressions by country in Search Console, and whether the right page ranks in the right market. Traffic totals hide a market being served the wrong language, which is the failure worth catching.
Start with what the market can see.
A conversation is enough to know whether there is a gap worth closing.