International SEO: Multilingual and Multi-Country Sites

We provide international SEO for websites that sell or inform in more than one language or country: we choose the URL structure, decide which language and country each page targets, redo keyword research for each market and set up measurement country by country. Someone searching from Spain should land on the Spanish page, with Spanish prices and the words people use in Spain, not on the Italian page translated.

SEO consulting starts at €300 a month + VAT. We work only online, in Italian, English and Spanish.

Who it is for, and who it is not for

The service is designed for:

• foreign companies that want to be found in Italy, with Italian-language pages built on what Italians actually search for;
• companies that export and want leads from other countries as well as their home market;
• online stores that ship to other countries, with currencies, prices, shipping or catalogs that differ from one market to the next;
• hotels and rentals, tour operators and travel services, where a large share of customers search in another language;
• multilingual sites that underperform: foreign versions with no traffic, or pages in the wrong language in search results.

It is not the right service if the main version of your site doesn't work yet: every flaw is multiplied by the number of languages. Nor is it right if the translations will stay machine-generated and no one will be able to review them or answer customers in that language.

The problem in practice

A website almost always becomes international by addition: a translation plugin, an /en/ folder, a foreign domain bought years ago. The typical problems start there:

• the site picks the language on its own, based on IP address or browser language, and people who are traveling or living abroad can no longer see the version they want;
• the same page shows navigation in English and body text in Italian, or two languages side by side;
• the language changes through a cookie while the URL stays the same, so for Google only one version exists;
• the foreign pages are literal translations of the original ones, using words that nobody in the target country searches for.

Google's documentation explicitly advises against these choices. Fixing them once the site is live costs more than getting them right from the start, which is why we begin with the structure.

What we do and what we deliver

URL structure

The first decision is where the versions of the site live. Google's guide to managing multi-regional and multilingual sites compares four options:

Structure	Example	Pros	Cons
Country-code domain (ccTLD)	example.de	clear geotargeting, server location doesn't matter	expensive, more infrastructure, one domain covers only one country, some ccTLDs have strict requirements
Subdomain	de.example.com	easy to set up, servers can be in different places	users may not tell from the URL whether "de" means the language or the country
Subdirectory	example.com/de/	easy to set up, low maintenance because there is only one host	targeting is less clear from the URL, a single server location, separating the versions is harder
URL parameter	example.com?loc=de	none worth mentioning	not recommended by Google: it makes segmentation harder and is unclear from the URL

For most sites we recommend subdirectories: one site to maintain and grow. A country-code domain makes sense when you have your own company, price list and team in that country. The same guide notes that Google ignores locale meta tags such as geo.position and that server location is only a hint.

One language or country per URL, with no automatic redirects

Each URL has a single language, for both content and navigation, and a single country if needed. Google asks for separate URLs for each version instead of cookies or browser settings, asks you to avoid side-by-side translations and says to avoid automatically redirecting users based on the language you assume they speak: instead of redirecting, you add visible links to the other versions. The guide to locale-adaptive pages explains why: Googlebot's default IP addresses appear to be in the United States and the crawler does not send an Accept-Language header, so a site that changes content based on these signals risks Google not crawling and indexing all of its versions.

Google determines the language from the visible text, not from the lang attribute or the URL: a page with an English menu and Italian body text confuses both users and search engines.

Hreflang and x-default, in brief

You tell Google about the versions with hreflang. The guide to localized versions of a page sets out the essential rules: each version lists itself and all the others, with full URLs; the language code (ISO 639-1) is required, while the country code (ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2) is optional and cannot be used on its own; x-default indicates the page for users who don't match any version, often a language or country selector. When two versions in the same language are nearly identical, hreflang and canonical tags work together.

For Bing, the most explicit guidance is still the article "How To Tell Bing Your Website's Country and Language", published on the Bing webmaster blog in March 2011. It names the content-language meta tag (for example <meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en-us">) as the first signal of language and country, followed by the html element's attribute, and says that among domains only ccTLDs affect a document's localization. This guidance is dated and we have not found it updated in more recent documents: on multi-country sites we add content-language alongside hreflang, because it costs nothing.

Translation and localization: keyword research for each country

Translating a page is not enough, because the words people search for change from country to country even within the same language. An example, chosen to show the effect and not taken from a client project: someone renting a car in Spain usually searches for "alquiler de coches", in Mexico for "renta de autos"; a holiday home is a "holiday rental" in the UK and a "vacation rental" in the US. A correct translation can still use the word nobody types.

That is why we redo keyword research for each market, with that country's search volumes and the results Google shows there, and write the copy starting from those searches. Localization also covers currency, shipping, contact details and terms of sale: Google's guide lists local addresses, phone numbers, language and currency among the signals of the target country.

Sample plan: URLs and keywords by country

We deliver a structure plan with a keyword map for each country. Here is the format, for a hypothetical company selling in Italy, Italian-speaking Switzerland and Spain (the searches are written to show the format; in a real plan every row has the volume read in Keyword Planner for that country):

URL	hreflang	Main search	Localization notes
/prodotti/arredo-esterno/	it-IT	arredamento da esterno	prices in euros, shipping within Italy
/ch-it/prodotti/arredo-esterno/	it-CH	arredamento da giardino	prices in Swiss francs, delivery times and costs for Switzerland
/es/productos/muebles-exterior/	es-ES	muebles de exterior	translated URL, contact details and terms of sale in Spanish
/scegli-paese/	x-default	none	country and language selector, no automatic redirect

Each row becomes a task with a date: page to create, copy to write, annotations, a check after publication.

Measurement by country

The Search Console Performance report has a "Countries" dimension: we use it together with a page or folder filter to check whether the Spanish version gets impressions from Spain and the Swiss version from Switzerland. If a country lands on the wrong version, the problem is in the annotations or in the content.

How we work, and how long it takes

1. First week: kickoff call, access to Search Console and Analytics, priority markets, constraints of the CMS and the translation plugin.
2. First month: analysis and choice of URL structure, page plan and keyword research for the first markets.
3. From the second month: hreflang, x-default and language selector, localized copy, removal of automatic redirects, then one market at a time.
4. Every month: a report by country with impressions, clicks, pages and the work for the following month.

Technical fixes usually show up within a few weeks; a new market takes a few months. We don't promise rankings: the timeline depends on the condition of the site, the competition in each country and the quality of the copy. If a multilingual site needs to be rebuilt from scratch, we design it with the structure already decided, as part of our web development work.

The service is run by Eugenio Tommasi, founder of SEO SRL, who works in Italian, English and Spanish. He lived and worked in Milan for five years; while living in Como he worked in Chiasso, in Canton Ticino, with clients in Switzerland. He has worked in Prague and in Spain, in Rome with national companies, online publishers and Dutch clients, and in Florence with tour operators and international clients. His full background is on the About page.

How much international SEO costs

All prices are starting prices, + VAT; the final quote is put together after looking at the site and the number of languages and countries.

Service	Price	Best for
SEO consulting, Basic	from €300 a month	a small site in one or two languages
SEO consulting, Advanced	from €700 a month	mid-sized sites and online stores in several countries
SEO consulting, Enterprise	from €2,000 a month	large sites, including those with more than 100,000 pages
SEO audit	€500, €1,000 or €2,000	companies that want an analysis of their international structure before deciding
Corporate website	from €3,000	a multilingual site that needs rebuilding
Ecommerce	from €5,000	an online store launching in several markets

The three audit tiers depend on the size of the site; what each monthly plan includes is explained on the SEO consulting page. Professional translations, if needed, are quoted separately. To discuss your markets, contact us.

Sources

Pages consulted on October 15, 2026.

• Google Search Central, "Managing multi-regional and multilingual sites"
• Google Search Central, "Tell Google about localized versions of your page"
• Google Search Central, "How Google crawls locale-adaptive pages"
• Bing Webmaster Blog, "How To Tell Bing Your Website's Country and Language" (March 2011)
• Search Console Help, "Performance report (Search results)"