International SEO

It depends on your teams, your markets and your risk tolerance. We recommend one in writing, with the trade-offs made explicit. Subfolders consolidate authority and are simplest to govern. Separate country domains signal locality most strongly and cost the most to build and maintain. Subdomains sit awkwardly in between and suit specific technical or legal cases. Most businesses want the first option and get talked into the third by a well-meaning developer. The right answer is the one your team can actually govern for the next five years, not the one that looks most international in a presentation.

We localise. Native-language writers who know search intent in that market, working to your approved terminology. Translation preserves your words. Localisation preserves your meaning in the words the market would have chosen for itself. For regulated claims the difference matters more than anywhere else, because a permitted phrase in one jurisdiction can be prohibited in the next and the regulator is always local. Good localisation also passes internal legal review faster, which matters more than most agencies admit. The buyer should never be able to tell the page was written anywhere else.

Structure and hreflang fixes can land within weeks. Visibility in a new market builds over months, and how many months depends on how established the local competitors already are and how much authority your existing domain carries into the new territory. Expect the first market to teach you more than the next four combined. Anyone promising page one in every country on a fixed date is guessing, and they are guessing with your budget. We report the trend per market so progress can be judged honestly, market by market rather than in one hopeful total.

It scales with the number of markets, the number of languages and the state of what you already have. One new market on a sound structure is a contained project with a clear end. Several country sites carrying years of duplication is a serious piece of work that touches your developers as much as us. We scope it after the audit, price it per market and tell you which territories your budget cannot support yet. There is no prize for entering a market badly and then having to leave it, and a staged launch is not a compromise.

Usually not. A shared domain with properly governed country or language sections carries authority further and costs far less to maintain over time. Separate country sites earn their keep when legal, brand or platform constraints force the split, and sometimes they genuinely do. We recommend the structure in writing and spell out what each choice costs you over the next three years, including the maintenance bill that nobody budgets for. Changing that decision later is a project in itself, which is exactly why we settle it before anything is built.

Carefully, because it is where international SEO most often goes wrong. Pages for the UK, the US and Australia should differ in currency, spelling, offers and the words buyers actually use. Where one page genuinely serves two markets, hreflang and canonicals say so instead of pretending otherwise. Near-identical pages across territories are how large groups quietly compete with themselves and lose to a smaller local rival who simply sounds more at home. The fix is deliberate variation, backed by hreflang rather than by hope, and it is cheaper to build in at the start.