International SEO: choose your markets before translating

One Monday morning, a request for a quote arrives in Italian. Your site only exists in French, and the idea comes quickly: translate your pages in an afternoon to launch your international SEO. Translation will not be the problem. What follows will be: who answers in Italian, how the customer pays, who delivers, and which terms of sale apply.

Translating costs almost nothing now. On Palmora Property, a property portal in six languages that we operate, switching to an AI model divided the cost of translation by 60. That figure is one site’s, not a promise for yours, and the amount of review is set page by page: we explain which pages to have reviewed, and which to validate on a sample.

What remains expensive cannot be translated: serving customers in their language, feeding the market with local content, getting cited there, measuring. These are the costs that should decide which markets to open. This article extends our guide to marketing automation for SMEs, and leaves the technical side of language versions to hreflang and multilingual SEO: the mistakes that cost money.

A language or a country?

International SEO covers two different projects, which Google distinguishes in its page on managing multi-regional and multilingual sites:

Targeting a country has a price. This approach can improve your ranking in the target country, but Google warns that it comes “at the expense of results in other locales or languages”. Also let the visitor choose their language or region with a link on every page, instead of choosing for them: “Don’t use IP analysis to adapt your content.” If you sell online in the European Union, the European Union’s portal for businesses adds that you must “obtain your customers’ consent explicitly before redirecting them to another location-specific version of your online shop”.

Where does demand already exist?

Step one: read what your site already receives. As the Search Console help on the performance report explains, the table in this report shows data grouped “by query, page, or country”, depending on the tab chosen above it. Open the Countries tab over the longest period available: you can see which countries already send you impressions and clicks.

Then cross-check, as the help page on filtering and comparing data shows: if you group data by query, you can add the filters country='France' AND device='Mobile'. Replace France with Belgium or Switzerland, and you read those visitors’ searches, in their own words. Compare two countries, and the table displays “a Difference column to compare values in each row”.

You are looking for queries typed in another language, or visits from a country you are not targeting: demand that exists without you having done anything for it. These queries form a first list of searches to win, the one that our SEO and GEO content engine keeps up to date every month, scanning your Search Console every day.

Can you serve this market?

Step two: check that you can fulfil an order from that country. In its page on multi-regional sites, Google lists, among the signals that tell it who a site is aimed at, “local addresses and phone numbers on the pages, the use of local language and currency, links from other local sites, or signals from your Business Profile (where available)”. Apart from the language, none of these signals comes out of a translation tool. Four questions, then, before translating:

• Support. Who answers in this language, and during which hours?
• Payment. Can your customers in that country pay with their usual methods, in their currency?
• Delivery. Can you deliver, or work on site, within timescales and at a cost you can sustain?
• The legal framework. Are your terms of sale, your legal notices and your invoicing valid in that country?

A “no” does not condemn the market: it puts a figure on the work to be done before attracting traffic to it.

Who already holds the top positions?

Step three: look at who ranks, country by country, and not from your own office. The performance report help reminds us that “Search results are specific to the time, place, device, and recent history of the person searching”. Ask someone on the ground to search your three main queries, or use a tool that simulates a search from that country.

Note who holds the first page: companies comparable to yours, based in that country? Directories and comparison sites? Official sites? The more the first page is held by well-established local players, the more country-specific content, and sites from that country that talk about you, it will take to get in.

What does a language cost over time?

Step four: cost not the translation but the upkeep. An open language requires, every month:

• content written for the questions of that market, not just translated from yours;
• mentions and links from sites in that country;
• service: quotes, replies and complaints in the language;
• measurement, country by country.

Multilingual SEO is paid for language by language. Three languages opened at once is three times that work for a team that has not tripled. Hence our advice: one market after another. And if the plan is to produce hundreds of pages per country from the same template, first read when programmatic SEO works, and when it harms.

How do you test without fooling yourself?

Step five: test small. One language, one country, and only the pages that answer the searches spotted in step one, in a subdirectory of your site.

Before opening, write down three things: the indicator you will track (impressions, clicks or quote requests from the country), the threshold that will make you continue and the date on which you will read it. The threshold is yours to set: it depends on what a customer from that market brings you. What matters is to write it down before seeing the figures, and to allow time, because SEO is counted in months.

A real example serves as a warning.

Growth, service or closure?

Step six: decide, on the planned date, between three outcomes.

A growth language. The threshold is reached: you invest in local content, links from the country and a person who answers in the language.

A service language. The market does not justify investing, but customers are already there: you keep the language for them, without trying to attract others. That is the rule written for Palmora Property: French is the growth language, Russian and Chinese are service languages, and Search Console and Google Analytics decide. Big investments, such as a complete retranslation, an official WeChat account or a Baidu project, wait until real traffic is validated.

A clean closure. Nothing takes off: you close the language, with redirects to the nearest version, and you write down what would make you reopen. We closed Spanish and Chinese on our own site, at a measured cost of about one click a month, and we tell the story of that tidy-up in our hreflang mistakes and what we fixed. The translation files are kept, and reopening has a written precondition: that our content production pipeline is running.

Domain, subdomain or subdirectory?

The test is done in a subdirectory. The question comes back when a market becomes a growth language: should it get its own domain? Google compares four URL structures:

• A domain per country (example.de): “Clear geotargeting”, but “Expensive (can have limited availability)” and “Can only target a single country”.
• A subdomain (de.example.com): “Easy to set up”, but the address alone does not say whether “de” means the language or the country.
• A subdirectory (example.com/de/): “Easy to set up” and “Low maintenance (same host)”, but the address alone does not say which country is targeted either, and Google lists “Separation of sites harder” among the drawbacks.
• A parameter (site.com?loc=de): “Not recommended”.

This site and Palmora Property both use subdirectories: our French version lives under /fr/, and each Palmora Property language has its own prefix. A domain per country is better justified when a market you have won needs its own prices, company or team, and if the country allows it: “Some countries have restrictions on who can use ccTLDs”.

Where to start

Getting started comes down to four steps:

1. 01Note.

   Open your Search Console, Countries tab, and note the three countries that already send you impressions outside your main market.

2. 02Check.

   For each one, answer the four service questions without counting on a new hire.

3. 03Choose.

   Keep one, and write down your indicator, your threshold and your reading date.

4. 04Test.

   Open a subdirectory with the few pages that answer that country’s searches.

To make this choice with an outside perspective, tell us about the country you are targeting and what you can serve there. Once the country is confirmed, the ads, the pages and the CRM are set up together in our digital marketing in one block offer.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

1. Managing multi-regional and multilingual sites (new tab)developers.google.com
2. The European Union’s portal for businesses (new tab)europa.eu
3. The Search Console help on the performance report (new tab)support.google.com
4. The help page on filtering and comparing data (new tab)support.google.com