Thanks to the online world many companies are deciding to sell their products and services overseas. However, to ensure that your company is visible on the global market, it is essential to implement an international SEO strategy tailored to the new country or countries that interest you.
More and more businesses are finding new opportunities for growth in countries abroad and diversifying their market to increase their turnover. Although most UK companies, especially SMEs, have decided to remain anchored to the local market, the number of companies choosing to export is rising in all sectors.
To "test" a new market(s) before investing considerable economic resources, many companies rely on digital tools to evaluate the genuine potential of their business abroad; thus, studying the prospects, competition, needs and tastes of overseas customers. These analyses help the company devise a successful SEO strategy for its online presence abroad. This is the first fundamental step in entering the global market: becoming present, visible, and easily found on search engines ahead of your competitors.
Let us look at how to implement international SEO to reach potential new customers abroad.
1- Identify the most attractive countries for your business
Before talking about SEO strategy, your company needs to analyse which market(s) it will expand into in detail. At this point, it is useful to decide which global markets to target and which ones have already expressed interest in your products and services. Through analysis tools like Google Analytics, it is possible to monitor where visitors to your website come from. In this way, you can identify areas overseas where you may not currently advertise your company but where there are a lot of searches for your products and services.
2- Online presence thanks to search engines and your website
Once you have chosen which country to target overseas, you must adapt your website to this country. On a technical level, you need to decide which type of domain to use, whether to have a specific address only for that country or use the existing UK domain and give it a foreign meaning. For domain choice and everything related to technical SEO, it really is essential to rely on professionals.
You must also remember to monitor the various search engines used in the countries that interest you: in China, for example, Baidu is used much more than Google; in South Korea Naver holds a large share, and in the USA Bing is widely used. Furthermore, the browser algorithms differ and can change quickly, so it is important to keep up with the updates of these search engines.
3- Analysis of the competition
For successful selling overseas, it is essential to stand out from other companies and highlight the advantages of your company compared to competitors. It is advantageous to study the competitors, what they are offering, and their overseas market penetration. This is the only way to get an idea of competing markets for that country and help you understand the best ways of highlighting and making your company stand out.
4- Defining and researching potential target customers overseas
In an international SEO project for the global market, the study of the clients and customers is of paramount importance. In this phase, the company needs to study the public's demographic, cultural and linguistic characteristics and look for a segment which to address its offer. Just bear in mind that research habits and intentions overseas may be totally different from those in the market at home.
At the same time, it is necessary to find out which keywords potential overseas customers are using to search for you or for products and services like yours: analysis of keywords and their seasonality is essential in understanding the searches in the chosen segment.
Thanks to these two analyses, geo-localised keywords will be found, which will help companies appear at the top of the first page of any search engine.
5- How multilingual SEO helps you communicate effectively in different countries
When we talk about international SEO for countries abroad, this also includes multilingual SEO, which means optimising communication through the language used on your company website and social networks.
Once you understand the target market, you will also know which language and terminologies are best suited for communicating with this market. It may well be that the same language is used in two countries, but with linguistic differences. Below is an example; assuming we are an automotive company that wants to enter both France and Québec:
UK → car, drive
France → voiture, conduire
Québec → char, chauffer
In this case, verbatim translation of the site is not enough; you may have to localise the site content to suit the country where you want to start selling.
Mintense is a Multilingual SEM agency that, in 17 years, thanks to its experience and presence in several countries, has helped many companies to sell abroad. Contact us to find out how we can support you in your business development abroad.
Which market should you enter first, and in what order?
The most expensive mistake at the planning stage is launching four countries at once because the translation quote happened to cover four. Every market you add multiplies the work: keyword research in another language, pages to write, links to earn, a property to watch in Google Search Console and somebody to answer the enquiries. Sequence them instead.
Rank your shortlist on three things you can check. Demand that already exists, which Google Search Console shows you as countries collecting impressions you never targeted. Then two questions with nothing to do with SEO: can you ship and invoice there, and can you reply in that language within a day? A country you cannot serve is not a market.
How to size demand in a country before you build anything
Search volume does not travel. The term that carries your category in the UK may be a literal translation nobody types. Do the research in the local language first, with a native speaker sense checking the shortlist, and only then map those terms back to your English pages. The other way round produces a keyword list that is grammatically correct and commercially useless.
Then look at what the results page is made of, because volume alone says nothing about whether you can win. A first page filled with marketplaces, comparison sites and public bodies will resist an unknown foreign supplier for a long time. A first page of ordinary competitor websites, some thinner than yours, is an open market.
ccTLDs, subfolders or subdomains, the decision you cannot cheaply reverse
This belongs in the planning stage precisely because undoing it later is painful. A ccTLD such as a .de or .fr domain gives the strongest local signal and can be handed to a team in the country, but each one starts with no authority of its own and has to be hosted and maintained separately. A subfolder keeps every market on one domain, so new pages inherit the authority you have already earned, and it is the cheapest structure to run. Subdomains sit between the two and rarely win on merit alone.
Choose on your circumstances rather than on a rule: how many markets you are planning, whether you have people in country, and how much technical time you can commit. Settle your URL naming convention at the same time, because renaming URLs later means redirects, lost signals and a re-crawl you have to wait for.
Plan hreflang and x-default before the first page is written
Hreflang is not a plugin you switch on at the end. It is a map of every page in every market, and it works only when the map is complete: each version pointing at all the others and at itself, with codes written correctly, which for the United Kingdom means en-GB. If you plan a French page and never write it, the tag promising it becomes an error instead of a signal.
Reserve an x-default from the outset for the version a visitor sees when nothing else matches, usually a language selector or your main international page. Decide now where the tags will live, in the head of each page, in the XML sitemap or in HTTP headers, and make sure your canonical tags agree with them. A translated page whose canonical points at the English original is asking Google to ignore it.
Who is going to write the content, and how much of it?
Most international plans fail on resourcing rather than technique. Before committing to a country, decide who produces its pages: a native speaker in your team, a specialist writer briefed on your product, or a translation that a local reviewer rewrites rather than proofreads. Machine output published untouched reliably underperforms, because it repeats your domestic argument in another language instead of answering the question the local buyer is asking.
Then agree the volume you can sustain each month and multiply it by the number of markets. A market you cannot feed should not be launched. Two notes on scope: a site already live abroad and simply performing badly needs a diagnosis, not a plan. And if this is your first country outside the UK, one market done properly beats two started together. Mintense plans this way across 16 languages.
FAQ, planning an international SEO strategy
What is an international SEO strategy?
It is the set of decisions you take before building anything: which countries you will target and in what order, which language each market is served in, whether those markets live on separate ccTLDs or in subfolders of one domain, how hreflang will connect them, and who writes the content. Get those right and the technical work that follows is straightforward. Get them wrong and you pay for it later in redirects and lost time.
How do you choose which country to enter first?
Start with evidence you already own. Google Search Console shows countries where your pages collect impressions with no targeting at all, and those are the cheapest markets to enter deliberately. Then apply the practical tests: can you ship, invoice and answer enquiries in that language quickly, and does the local results page hold ordinary competitors rather than marketplaces and public bodies? Rank your shortlist on those answers, then launch one market at a time.
Should you use a ccTLD, a subdomain or a subfolder?
A ccTLD gives the clearest local signal and suits a company with a real presence and a team in the country, but each domain builds its authority from zero and costs time to run. A subfolder keeps every market on one domain, so new pages inherit the authority you have already earned, and it is the cheapest structure to maintain. Subdomains sit between the two. Decide before launch, because changing later means redirects and a long re-crawl.
What does the x-default hreflang value do?
It tells search engines which page to show a user whose language and country match none of your other versions. In practice it points at a language selector, an international landing page or your main English page. It does not replace the individual hreflang tags and it does not make an incomplete set valid. Plan it alongside the rest of the map, so a visitor from a country you have not built for still lands somewhere sensible.
Who should write the content for each market?
Somebody who thinks in the language, not a tool that converts your English into it. The realistic options are a native speaker on your team, a specialist writer briefed properly on your product, or a translation that a local reviewer rewrites rather than proofreads. Decide before you commit to the country, together with how many pages a month you can sustain, because a market nobody is writing for will quietly stall a few weeks after launch.
