International SEO Consultancy

Frequently asked questions

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• We're debating ccTLDs versus subdirectories. Which is better for international SEO?

  It depends on your business model, your budget, and your long-term market strategy. Country-code domains (.de, .fr, .co.uk) send the strongest geo-targeting signals and allow fully independent SEO strategies per market, but they’re expensive to maintain, split your domain authority across multiple properties, and multiply your technical overhead. Subdirectories (/de/, /fr/) consolidate authority under one domain, are simpler to manage at scale, and are typically the right choice for most enterprise brands expanding internationally. Subdomains sit somewhere in between but often create more problems than they solve. We’ll assess your specific situation – how many markets you’re targeting, your resource capacity, your existing domain authority, and your growth timeline – and recommend the architecture that gives you the best commercial return. For brands like IG Markets, we worked on geo-specific targeting across a global platform where the domain strategy had to balance divisional autonomy with consolidated authority. The right answer is always specific to the business.

• We already have localised sites but they're not ranking. What's usually wrong?

  In most cases it comes down to one or more of three issues. First, hreflang and canonical signals are conflicting – Google can’t determine which language variant to show in which market, so it either picks the wrong one or suppresses both. Second, the localised content is translated but not truly localised – the keyword targets, search intent, and content depth don’t match how people actually search in that market, so pages exist but aren’t competitive. Third, the international pages are structurally isolated from the rest of the domain – weak internal linking, missing from XML sitemaps, or not properly integrated into the site’s navigation and crawl paths. We audit all three layers: the technical geo-targeting signals, the content-market alignment, and the site architecture connecting it all. The fix is usually a combination, not a single issue, and getting the diagnosis right first is what prevents your team from spending months on the wrong thing.

• We have regional teams in each market. How do you manage the stakeholder complexity?

  This is where most international SEO projects stall – not on the technical side but on the people side. Regional marketing teams have their own priorities, local agencies have their own opinions, and global leadership wants consistency across markets. We’ve managed exactly this dynamic for brands like BlackRock, where global stakeholder management across multiple product lines and regional teams was central to the engagement. Our approach is to establish a single strategic framework with clear priorities per market, then work with each regional team on localised execution within that framework. We produce market-specific recommendations so each team knows exactly what to implement in their region, and we provide consolidated reporting so leadership has visibility across every market without relying on regional teams to self-report. The goal is alignment without bottlenecks – every market moves forward on the same strategic foundation without waiting for every other market to catch up.

• How does AI search affect our international SEO strategy?

  It adds a new layer of complexity that most international strategies haven’t accounted for yet. AI-generated search results are rolling out at different speeds in different markets and in different languages. Google’s AI Overviews behave differently in English than in German or Japanese. In markets where Baidu or Naver dominate, the AI integration is following an entirely separate path. This means your international content strategy now needs to consider not just whether your pages rank in traditional results across each market, but whether your brand is cited in AI-generated answers in each language, and whether the structured data and entity signals on your localised pages are strong enough for LLMs to reference. We monitor AI search visibility across your target markets as part of the international SEO assessment, so you understand your exposure and can build a strategy that positions your brand for both traditional and AI-driven discovery in every region you operate in.

• We're consolidating multiple country domains onto a single .com. How risky is that?

  It’s high risk if done poorly and high reward if done right. Domain consolidation is effectively a multi-market migration happening simultaneously – every regional domain has its own authority, backlink profile, ranking positions, and indexed content that needs to transfer cleanly to the new structure. The common failure mode is that redirects are implemented, hreflang is set up, sitemaps are updated, and leadership considers it done – but organic visibility across markets drops and doesn’t recover because the consolidation lost signals that weren’t accounted for. We approach domain consolidation as a phased migration project with market-by-market risk assessment, redirect mapping that preserves regional equity, hreflang architecture designed for the new structure from day one, and post-migration monitoring at the individual market level rather than just the global aggregate. If the consolidation is being driven by a PE restructure or brand simplification, we can also advise on the timing and sequencing to minimise organic revenue disruption during the transition. This ties directly into our migrations consultancy – the two services often work together for international consolidation projects.

Additional services for brands with specialist requirements.