Building your SEO strategy where your customers search

The reflex that skews everything: measuring from home

A company based in Lyon looks at its rankings from Lyon. It is natural, and it is often wrong. Since Google adapts its results to the location of each search, what the team sees at the office is not what its buyers see if they are in Paris, Brussels or Dubai.

The problem is not limited to measurement. It steers decisions: you write for the queries you can see, you fight the competitors you come across, and you leave aside the markets where you are invisible without knowing it.

Palmora Property is a good example. The platform publishes property listings in Phuket, but people looking for a home on the island often search from abroad. Its strategy is therefore built from the countries and languages of those buyers, not from Phuket.

Starting from the map of your customers

The first step is a commercial question, not a technical one: where do your customers come from, and where will the ones you are aiming for come from? Three sources answer it without inventing anything: your CRM (billing addresses, origin of enquiries), your Search Console (countries of clicks), and your sales team, who know where contracts get signed.

1. 01Locate.

   List the cities and countries your current and target customers come from.

2. 02Translate.

   For each area, the language and the words actually used.

3. 03Measure.

   Check rankings in each area, on those words.

4. 04Decide.

   Invest where the gap between the value of the market and your visibility is widest.

The “translate” step is underestimated. The same need is not searched with the same words in Paris, Geneva or Montreal, and a French speaker living in Dubai may search in English for a local service and in French for a European provider. The list of queries is built market by market, not once and for all.

Each area has its own competitors

On the same query, the sites ahead of you change from one city to another. In Paris, you may be up against large agencies; in a mid-sized town, a well-established local player; abroad, specialists of the country. Your content and link strategy is not the same against each of them.

That is why we check rankings by city and by language, and look at who holds the top spots in each area. The details are in our method for tracking rankings city by city.

The system behind the strategy

Once the areas are chosen, the work becomes repetitive and massive: thousands of checks by country, city, language and topic, renewed at a fixed interval. This volume is handled automatically, AI sorts the significant gaps (a drop in one city, a competitor rising in one language), and an expert decides: a new page, content to strengthen, or nothing to do.

That is the principle of our rank tracking on Google and in AI. When several markets need dedicated pages in numbers, we move to programmatic SEO, with one rule: each page must bring something specific to its market.

When the market is abroad

If your customers are in another country, the strategy also affects the structure of the site: languages, URLs, hreflang, and the question of when one page per market becomes necessary. We cover it in international SEO: when do you need one page per market, and opening a new country in our guide to international SEO.

Frequently asked questions