International SEO Agency | Global SEO Services, Hreflang, Multilingual Sites and Country Targeting

Updated September 2026 · Written and maintained by the Progression Agency strategy team

Progression Agency is an international SEO agency in New York City: we make one website rank in more than one country, or in more than one language, without the versions competing with each other. That means the right URL structure, hreflang that validates, keyword research done in each market rather than translated from English, and tracking by country so you can see which markets are actually working. Clients are in the United States and worldwide.

What international SEO is, and what it is not

International SEO is not translating a site and hoping. It is choosing where each country’s or language’s pages live (domain, subdomain or subfolder), telling search engines which page serves which audience (hreflang), researching demand in each market in its own language, and measuring each market separately. Google’s own guidance on managing multi-regional and multilingual sites sets the technical rules; everything else is judgment about which markets deserve a full version and which only need a landing page. A site that sells in the UK and the US needs international SEO even though both are in English, because prices, spellings, delivery terms and search volumes differ.

The decision that comes first: ccTLD, subdomain or subfolder

Where the country versions live is the highest-leverage decision and the hardest to reverse. The table sets out the three structures Google recognises, with the trade-offs as we see them in practice. Our default for a company with one brand and one domain is subfolders (example.com/uk/, example.com/de/), because authority is shared and hosting is simple; ccTLDs win where local trust matters more than shared authority, which is common in Germany, Japan and France.

Hreflang done properly

Hreflang is the annotation that tells Google which language and country each version serves. The rules are short and widely broken: every version lists every other version and itself, the codes follow ISO 639-1 for language and ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2 for region, an x-default entry covers everyone else, the URLs are the canonical ones, and every link is returned. Google documents the three ways to declare it in its guide to localized versions of a page. Our free hreflang checker and guide runs the return-link and self-reference tests on any page; we use the same checks at the start of every audit. Fixing hreflang alone has moved clients’ country pages from the wrong market’s results into the right one within a crawl cycle, because the pages were already good and only mislabelled.

International keyword research: research each market, do not translate the list

The English keyword list translated into German is not the German keyword list. Searchers in each market use different terms, different word order and different brands as reference points, and the volumes and competitors differ by an order of magnitude. We run keyword research per market in the local language and in the local Google, group by intent, and only then decide which pages each market needs. For English-speaking markets the differences are smaller but real: ‘estate agent’ against ‘realtor’, ‘solicitor’ against ‘attorney’, ‘hire’ against ‘rent’, and search volumes that bear no relation to population size. The output is a per-market map of which page targets which terms, which is also the content brief.

SEO translation and localization

SEO translation is writing the page in the target language around the target market’s keywords, not translating the English page. Machine translation followed by native editing is fine for product descriptions; landing pages, category pages and articles that must rank are written or rewritten by a native writer with the keyword map in hand. Localization goes beyond language: currency, units, date formats, delivery terms, phone formats, legal notices and the examples used. A localized page is one a native buyer would not identify as translated.

Multilingual SEO: languages, not only countries

Some sites need language versions rather than country versions: a Swiss site in German, French and Italian; a US site in English and Spanish; a Belgian site in Dutch and French. Hreflang handles this with language-only codes (de, fr, it) or language-region pairs where a language differs by country (pt-BR against pt-PT, es-MX against es-ES, or es-419 for Latin America). The mistakes we fix most often are language versions that share one URL with a JavaScript switcher (Google sees one page), auto-redirects by IP that stop Googlebot reaching the other versions, and machine translations left indexable that pull the whole site’s quality down.

Local signals for each market

Search Console no longer offers a country-targeting setting for generic domains, so the country a page targets is inferred from signals: the ccTLD if there is one, hreflang, local currency and addresses, local phone numbers, links from local sites, and content that references the market. For companies with a physical presence, a Google Business Profile per country and local citations add to this; our local SEO work covers that layer. For a company entering the US, these signals are the reason a US page or subfolder with US details outperforms a home-market page with a dollar price added.

International SEO audit: what we check

Every engagement begins with a paid audit, because the technical state decides the plan. The audit is written, prioritised and yours to keep; it covers the items below and is the basis of the quotation.

Tracking rankings and traffic by country

International SEO cannot be judged from one aggregate report. We set up a Search Console property per version, GA4 segmented by country and language, and rank tracking in each market’s Google with the local language, then report per market: impressions, clicks, ranking pages and conversions. The monthly review is written and shows which markets are moving, which are flat, and what changes next month. Our SEO services page describes the general reporting; the international version adds the per-market layer.

Two directions: US companies going abroad, foreign companies entering the US

For a US company expanding to the UK, Canada, Australia or Europe, the work is new market research, country versions with hreflang, and local signals per market, usually on subfolders under the existing domain. For a foreign company entering the US, the work is a US version that reads as American (dollars, US contact details, US spellings, US legal pages), hreflang between the home and US versions so each ranks in its own country, and US keyword research, which usually reveals demand the home-market list never showed. Both directions are covered on our worldwide service page.

International SEO for manufacturers and B2B

Manufacturers and industrial B2B companies are the most common international SEO clients because their buyers are in many countries and their catalogues are large. The approach is a product or category page per market for the lines that sell there, specification content that is genuinely localized (units, standards, certifications named by market), distributor and service-location pages with local signals, and hreflang across the whole catalogue managed from the CMS rather than by hand. SaaS and ecommerce follow the same pattern with pricing and checkout localized per market.

How an international SEO engagement runs

What it costs

International SEO is priced as SEO with a per-market layer: the audit is a fixed-price project, the structure and hreflang work is a fixed-price project, and ongoing work is a monthly retainer sized by the number of markets and the content volume. The planning ranges on our pricing page are the ones we quote against; a quotation follows the audit. Ranges are US figures and apply worldwide.

Where we work

Progression Agency is headquartered in New York City and delivers international SEO remotely to clients across the United States and worldwide, under New York contracts with US-dollar invoicing. The countries we work with most, and what changes for each, are on the worldwide page; the engagement terms are on the international clients page.

Frequently asked questions