I often meet companies with an international client base, or international growth ambitions, who only show up in Google and AI search in their domestic markets.

One CFO of a French SaaS company I met recently described his firm as being ‘landlocked’ in France, as far as SEO was concerned, despite having excellent search rankings in France and the beginnings of a client base in the UK.

The truth is that ranking highly in other markets usually requires some dedicated investment – though it can be a relatively affordable way to approach a new market, certainly cheaper than hiring a local salesperson.

And even if you don’t want to compete overseas, you may still have to contend with international competitors encroaching in your territory – so you should still be aware of these principles to defend against this competitive threat.

The purpose of this article is to explain the following (click to jump to each section):

• how (and why) search tools rank content based on geography, and the levers you can pull to overcome algorithmic biases that favour local firms
• different scenarios where a business may want to consider international SEO, based partly on the level of competition in your target market
• how to tailor your content strategy for a foreign market, and the extent to which translation and transcreation can help
• how to structure your digital footprint for SEO and GEO, and the danger of fragmenting your websites and social media channels into multiple separate properties.

The internet is mostly borderless (except where countries put up artificial borders, like Russia and China), so there are no practical obstacles, necessarily to ranking in another country.

However, only certain companies sell across international borders, and search tools are designed to give users the most useful results possible. So, unless you give platforms such as Google and ChatGPT clear signals that you are present and active in a market, it’s far less likely that your business will show up in search results there.

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Note: throughout this article, we will be referring variously to SEO (search engine optimization), GEO (generative search engine optimization) and content marketing. Really, they’re all part and parcel of the same discipline of helping your business rank for relevant customer enquiries, so we’re mostly using the terms interchangeably unless otherwise specified.

How (and why) search tools rank content based on geography

The most important thing to understand is that Google and AI search tools are designed to give the user the most relevant results based on what the search tool can infer about the user.

Only relatively few companies, in certain categories, can sell successfully across international borders, so search tools use geographic signals to determine which content is most relevant to users in a particular market. As a result, a company that ranks very highly in its domestic market may rank much less prominently or be practically invisible – for the same searches carried out in another country.

Most of the time, this helps the user get more relevant search results.

Nor is having a shared language a reason why a company would rank well in a foreign market. Modern search tools can interpret content across many languages, while browsers and other tools can also translate content automatically.

More importantly, though, a shared language is only one of dozens of factors which may affect a company’s ability to sell effectively in multiple markets. Other more significant factors include:

• regulatory & financial differences – particularly with differing tax systems, which affect many categories of B2B SaaS, amongst other business categories
• geographical and logistical differences which may make certain value propositions more or less relevant in different markets
• digital maturity and local partner ecosystems. Many technology companies rely on partner integrations in order to serve customers, so if the partner network is different in another market, it may make that market harder to penetrate
• purchasing power parity: purchasing power parity can vary between countries, which can make or break a pricing model
• cultural differences: such as the platforms or systems that people and companies in different countries use to communicate and do business. WhatsApp, for example, is widely used for business in many countries and for payments in others.

These may all be greater determinants of a company’s ability to trade overseas. For this reason, simply publishing your content in another language won’t do much to help it rank in other countries.

Of course, this is a generalisation. Some companies can absolutely sell into foreign markets, and companies with strong content marketing strategies can also surface in search results in other countries, and the search tools’ rules may appear to unfairly punish those businesses.

An email marketing platform would be a good example. The rules, as to what constitutes spammy email marketing, are largely set by email clients (like Gmail and Outlook), which are global businesses, and companies in most countries have more or less the same requirements from their email software.

For an email platform, therefore, the conditions for success may be less dependent on the country they’re operating in. So, there’s every reason why such a vendor might want to rank equally high in many different markets.

The trouble is that search engines’ algorithms are based on statistical generalisations: if something is true 90% of the time, it’s likely that the search tools will treat it true 100% of the time, unless you give them clear reasons not to.

This means that small international companies must work hard at international SEO in order to counteract search algorithms which tend to prioritise local vendors.

Imposters: the ranking factors that permit large companies to rank overseas

Furthermore, it’s also important to recognise the other extreme of this problem: that some large enterprises may rank in foreign markets even if they don’t proactively sell there.

This is because geography is only one of the criteria used to rank results. Other criteria such as:

• domain reputation and backlink profile – which can derive partly from being a very large and well-known company
• frequency of content publishing (which is a lot easier if you have a dedicated content team, as most enterprises do)

…also significantly affect where a company ranks.

For this reason, large companies which may have little presence in a region, but which have very strong SEO can often end up ranking highly in search terms. Indeed: American enterprise vendors, such as SAP and Salesforce, persistently show up in search results in Brazil. Our work with Brazilian companies shows that this includes for queries where their solutions may not be particularly relevant for most local businesses.

There are two important takeaways, here, for companies’ content marketing and SEO strategies.

1. international search performance can absolutely be manipulated, if a company decides it wants to compete in search in foreign markets
2. B2B organisations must at least be aware of their competitive position in international search if they want to capture their rightful share of website traffic and inbound leads – even if they don’t want to proactively sell across borders.

The good news is that international content marketing and SEO, and fending off foreign competition, are eminently achievable for companies that take the right steps.

It can also be a relatively affordable step towards expanding into a new market, if that’s part of your growth strategy.

The first step is to consider your competitive landscape in your destination market, as this will largely determine how hard you have to work to rank highly in searches by local customers.

Considering your competitive position in international search

The important thing to recognise here is that search terms are relative. If only one company has optimized a webpage for a given search term, they are likely to be the only company that ranks for it.

So, for the rare handful of companies with no competition, they are likely to rank highly, in all markets, in searches for their products or services (though they may compete in the search rankings with other resources, such as news websites, which may publish content optimised for the same keywords).

The majority of companies, however, must contend with multiple competitors.

Let’s consider each of these scenarios in detail, which should cover most businesses actively thinking about international SEO:

1. companies with few or no direct competitors – but who may still compete with other companies for the same search terms
2. companies that are testing, expanding into or competing in a new market
3. companies that are defending their position from international competition.

In any of these cases, you will want to analyse your competitor activity as part of setting up a content strategy, as this will influence the level of investment needed to win desirable search positions.

1. Companies with no or few direct competitors

Some companies have an easier time in international search than others. This is either because their services can only be supplied locally (such as building maintenance services) or because they have very few direct competitors – which means that their content provides the most relevant search results in any market, regardless of where they operate.

An example is our client Currency Alliance (case study here) which only has two or arguably three direct competitors. Currency Alliance offers the same basic solution in every market, and their technology is largely market-agnostic.

That said, Currency Alliance still has to work hard at its content marketing because many non-competitors, or indirect competitors, also want to rank for the same search terms.

So, the content strategy for this business was to build an audience around niche topics that directly apply to the ideal customer profile (ICP) and then begin ranking for much more hotly competed search terms such as ‘fintech loyalty’.

We can see from this company’s marketing analytics that it ranks highly on every continent, because people on every continent are searching for the very specific problems that they solve, and Currency Alliance is the only one that’s invested in providing the answers.

It also helps a lot that Currency Alliance is able to show genuine international presence thanks to having case studies from clients on multiple continents, rather than just its domestic market.

2. Testing, expanding into, or competing in a new market

Content marketing and SEO can be relatively affordable ways of approaching a new market.

Some niche B2B SaaS categories could feasibly build an inbound pipeline in a given market by investing only about £20,000 per year in content marketing. By contrast, a mid-level salesperson’s salary with costs will probably be three or four times that figure. For a senior regional sales lead, it could be over £150,000, plus costs and bonuses – a risky investment for all but the largest businesses.

So, you could make the case that a company should use content marketing to test the waters in a new market ahead of adding new commercial roles in the team. Certainly, when you do hire local salespeople, their chances of success will be greater if you are already investing in an inbound lead pipeline in that market.

If you decide to take that step: the search tools are looking for things such as frequent publishing of local case studies and a regular flow of content marketing tailored for the destination market. This is treated as a sign that the company is genuinely able and expecting to serve customers there.

Effectively, this means you will need a content marketing strategy for the local market that observes all the same best practices as the strategy in your domestic market. It needs to be a dedicated strategy for a new region, not a mere reskinning or an afterthought. Certainly, putting different flags on your website so that people can translate in one click will not be enough.

3. Defending your position from international competition

Some companies may find that encroaching foreign competitors force them to consider their positions in international search.

As mentioned above, in many sectors, multinational corporations will rank the world over for their services, by virtue of sheer scale, even if they’re actually not the best fit for clients in many of the markets in which their content ranks highly.

For smaller businesses, this means they will have to proactively invest in SEO in their domestic market in order to hold high positions in the search results.

In short: that means following content marketing best practices, and publishing regularly high-quality content, building a good backlink profile, and observing all other GEO / SEO best practices.

Already trading within a market should give any company a natural advantage, since you can leverage existing customers and local expertise for articles and case studies. However, there are no shortcuts. If you don’t make a meaningful investment in content and SEO, you will be at far greater risk of being outranked by both local and international competitors.

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Whichever of the above applies to your business, the best practices for international SEO and GEO are essentially the same as those for content marketing in your domestic market. There are extensive resources on this topic, but if you want to read up on this, Google’s own resources are a good place to start.

The crucial point, though, is to maintain a steady pace of high-quality content publishing in your target market, over an extended period of time. That’s the ‘hard’ part, because there isn’t really any way of faking it: you have to commit the resources to writing and publishing those assets for as long as your business intends to be present in that market.

How to tailor your content strategy for a foreign market

As mentioned earlier in this article, localising a content strategy is not simply about translating your existing content into a local language.

Many companies may put a series of flags in their site navigation so that users can switch between languages or international websites in a single click. This is a nice UX feature, and it might help visitors once they have landed on that site. But it won’t contribute to the search rankings that bring more people to your website and help to grow your business.

To understand this, consider the needs of the user.

When a customer is researching their problems or suitable products and services, they need to be sure that the vendors under consideration can credibly serve their local needs. And as discussed earlier in the article, there are many good reasons why most companies cannot sell effectively across borders.

For this reason, translating the core content of a site won’t have any bearing on whether the same company will rank as well for ‘workforce management platform’ in the United States as it does for ‘plateforme de gestion des effectifs’ in France. Nor will publishing in a given language have much bearing on your rankings in other countries that share that language.

Instead, companies must invest in ensuring that they appear credible to both people, and to search engines in the destination market.

In short, that means running a dedicated local content marketing strategy in parallel to your home market, with a steady stream of blogs, case studies and social media activity. It could potentially also imply creating local website landing pages, or versioning your main website for local customers.

That said, there are efficiency savings to be gained, when international teams collaborate and share resources. Localising an existing content marketing initiative for a new market, for example, might only represent a 50% increase to the cost of running it in your domestic market.

Let’s take the hypothetical example of an ecommerce platform vendor, which sells into both the UK and the Netherlands, and which has written an article about how their technology helps retailers manage sales taxes.

In the UK, VAT is applied to a certain basket of goods, the Dutch equivalent BTW is also applied to a certain basket of goods but the two don’t perfectly overlap. There are regulatory differences in how retailers in the two countries must charge and account for sales tax, and which types of business must register for sales tax.

This means that an exact translation of this hypothetical article could be largely invalid in the foreign market.

However, the decision to write on this topic can still be part of the same content strategy. The same structure, and much of the same narrative, could be used to flesh out the article – and that could confer a significant efficiency saving.

Translation and transcreation as part of an international content strategy

This process – of adapting your marketing messaging for different markets – is known as ‘transcreation’: seeking to achieve an equivalent impact on an audience where a direct translation is either not possible or simply inapplicable.

Taxes, cultural assumptions, social media channels, and many other common reference points differ widely between regions. As such, many businesses will use transcreation rather than translation when creating the same content for different markets: filling the same gaps in their content strategies, from the same data and strategy, but localising the details appropriately.

Of course, sometimes translation is necessary. Your main website landing pages, for example, will often need to say basically the same thing in different markets, and many sections of individual blogs and case studies should probably be recycled where the messaging is applicable in more than one market.

AI-assisted translation can save many of the costs of translation, but it should be used carefully and with human oversight.

The most important local differences – such as market positioning and the local business context – cannot be translated. And when it comes to translation, the generative AI tools won’t always identify hard-to-translate turns of phrase: examples that have no relevance in your new market, and points that simply don’t apply, like market-specific business practices or costs.

Furthermore, many languages have context-specific nuances which may be beyond the understanding of AI bots.

When writing in German (and various other languages), there are strict formality rules depending on the topic being discussed. These rules may affect choices of words and even the use of grammar, that local readers will expect in conjunction with certain topics. A German content creator or transcreator will be able to identify whether there is a mismatch between topic and presentation in a way that AI-translation still can’t reliably do.

So, when AI-translating content, you still need a native speaker to review the translated output because most people don’t realise how idiosyncrasies of their own languages may be open to interpretation, or how specific details may need to be further localised.

Speaking from my own experience of selling and marketing in both English and Portuguese: if I didn’t have good-enough Portuguese to be able to read the output, I wouldn’t feel comfortable trusting the technology. It’s simply made too many errors that undoubtedly would have undermined my credibility with my audience and prospects.

International SEO best practices: sites, social media and content strategy

Some companies assume that launching in a new market means launching a new website and new social media channels. I have had to resist many such calls from employers and clients, over the course of my career (and similarly for new products, short-term needs such as events, etc.), because it’s almost always a terrible idea.

The reason this is ill-advised is that when you fragment your digital footprint, you also fragment your audience and your domain authority. This impairs content marketing KPIs for the entire business.

‘Domain authority’ is effectively a way of describing how important, trustworthy and influential a website is. Stronger domain authority thereby increases the probability that anything published on that domain will rank highly.

Larger companies tend to have stronger domain authority for the following reasons:

• more content: blogs, case studies and landing pages published more frequently
• a stronger backlink profile, with their website being referenced by more other companies’ websites
• higher levels of social media activity – which isn’t a ranking criterion in conventional search, but which can have a positive effect in AI search, since generative AI tools can cite social platforms in their output
• dedicated investment in SEO and GEO with teams actively working on improving their positions

…and this is why you’ll often see the same huge companies ranking in nearly all markets, even when there are local suppliers which may have a more tailored value proposition.

Domain authority is so influential, in search rankings, that many smaller businesses often feel that competing with larger firms, in SEO and GEO, is an uphill struggle.

In fact, it’s eminently possible to compete against these larger firms, by structuring your website in the right way, and pursuing the right content marketing strategy.

Single global website, local sites, or subdomains?

For optimal content marketing performance, you should set yourself up for success by structuring your web presence to build up its own domain authority.

Most large firms with strong, international SEO and GEO positions take the following approach:

1. Canonical URL paths used for different countries

To take Salesforce’s website as a well-known example, their international sites are structured as follows

• Brazil: com/br/
• European Union: com/eu/
• UK: com/uk/
• USA / global: com/

This means that all marketing teams in every country can contribute to the domain authority of one strong, central domain, increasing the chances of high traffic volumes and leads for all global teams.

Of course, having all global stakeholders working on one website may require some central coordination. You may also need to build additional functionality into the Content Management System (CMS) to assign editing permissions to different areas of the website, so that each international team can run its marketing with relative freedom.

But if your priority is stronger SEO and GEO, that effort should be more than worthwhile thanks to the greater volume of inbound new business.

2.    Webpages localized for different markets

On such a global site, you will want to tailor your messaging and value proposition in each region.

Larger companies, or those with particularly high volumes of ecommerce ordering, could handle this tailoring with personalisation software which surfaces different content based on the customer’s location. This may be especially useful when acknowledging local events, customs or public holidays, certainly if they may affect customer service availability or fulfilment times.

Ill-advised ways to structure your global web presence

These would include…

• setting up multiple websites with a different primary domain for each market, e.g., “salesforce-brazil.com”
• subdomains for secondary markets, e.g., brazil.salesforce.com.

Having a different domain for every country can send a strong ‘geotargeting signal’ (in Google’s terminology) – but as mentioned, this is only one ranking factor. If you’ve made the leap, as a business, to recognising the revenue potential from inbound content marketing, you stand to reap far greater rewards by not fragmenting your audience and instead building a strong global site. Your single, global site can rank perfectly well in other markets if you publish a steady stream of high-quality content for each region.

Subdomains – i.e., “subdomain.maindomain.com” – are often used for a member’s log-in area, investor sites, etc. Content published to a subdomain can rank in search tools; the trouble is, the subdomain has its own domain authority. All the work you put into building up the authority of any two domains or subdomains could be used to strengthen one central website – and any content you publish on that site, in whichever language, targeted for whichever market, would be much more likely to rank highly.

One company I’ve spoken with, a multinational plastics manufacturer, has affiliated distribution companies in other markets, all licensing the central brand, all operating on different subdomains. This essentially shrinks their domain authority in the eyes of the search tools by representing them as several smaller, less authoritative domains. As a result, the firm is being outcompeted in all the markets in which it operates, at the expense of the whole group.

If your overseas offices are different entities, such as franchisees or distributors operating your company brand, they should licence a share of your main central website for their own web presence, rather than setting up their own web presence independently.

You can define exactly how this works in the terms of your contractual agreements; that’s up to you. But operating local websites on the group domain should be stipulated as part of operating under the central brand, because getting this right will ultimately increase trade volumes for all stakeholders.

How social media influences your visibility in generative search

People sometimes talk about social media as separate from content marketing. In fact, they’re part of the same discipline of publishing useful customer information, just in different environments.

Social media marketing benefits from cross-pollination of audiences and many of the companies you’re selling to may procure products and services internationally. The procurement team, C-suite stakeholders, or other influential people, who work with the department you’re selling into, may be in a different market from your buyers – so really, you want this whole audience in one place, engaging with the same content.

Historically, social media activity was not part of Google’s ranking criteria. Today, however, social media content can be cited by generative AI tools, which means that social media activity can enhance your performance in generative search. So, getting this right is now more important than ever.

Right approaches to international social media strategy

• operate a single company LinkedIn page (and a single property for other channels such as Instagram, if you use those)
• use that single channel as the output for all company messaging, about all your products, services and news, for all regions, in all languages
• publish for different markets, in different languages, at different times of day, in that single channel. LinkedIn translates content automatically anyway, but the algorithm appears to direct users to posts in their own language, whilst observing time-zone differences will further help individual posts to reach their intended audiences#
• use the personal profiles of your senior team as additional marketing channels. Content from personal profiles produces vastly more engagement on LinkedIn, and your different team members, particularly in sales, will have local networks which will be most responsive to messaging intended for their markets. For more information, read our article on leveraging an executive’s profile as a marketing asset.

Local teams should feel they have freedom to create market-specific content so that the various local strategies of different target markets can run in parallel.

Inevitably, this will require some central coordination, particularly in larger businesses, so that different teams don’t feel they’re competing for gaps in the social media calendar. But in truth, there is hardly such a thing as posting ‘too much’, as long as the content is of consistently high quality.

There’s no replacement for consistently, high-quality content publishing

Aside from the way you structure your website, an arguably more important way to outrank competitors (whether overseas or at home) is by publishing better content.

If you focus on answering specific questions researched by your ideal customer profile (ICP), you stand a good chance of ranking amongst the top results for those queries and holding those positions for years into the future. Few companies’ ICPs are identical, certainly in B2B industries, so every business has the opportunity to rank for the things that they’re best at.

This is largely the approach we take with all our clients here at Navigate B2B, but a good example is Park|Graphius, a commercial printer who we’ve been working with since 2019 (case study here).

Print is a highly competitive industry, for search marketing, since many different companies – from textile printing to commercial printing, to consumer-facing web printing – all compete for similar search terms.

The approach we took was simply to work closely with their sales team, understand the specific areas where the company had unique expertise, and publish more detailed, interesting blog articles and case studies than the market norm. As a result, Park|Graphius has the strongest SEO of any UK commercial printer, despite the company being half the size of its nearest competitor.

Such efforts are a marathon rather than a sprint. The truth is that nearly every business operates in a competitive business environment, and there are fewer business categories today where there is not stiff competition in search marketing. So, most companies should regard SEO and GEO as a long-haul effort and focus on improving their positions over a period of years – with a plan to maintain those efforts indefinitely.

You should expect to invest continuously for 6 months to a year before you see KPIs/market metrics that indicate growth, because frequency of publishing is one of the key ranking factors that search tools use – and it requires a content backlog of some scale to capture meaningful numbers of audience impressions.

But it’s worth highlighting at this point that inbound content marketing is amongst the most capital-efficient of all commercial tactics, with the best articles repaying you with leads and inbound sales for years into the future.

If you’re serious about selling into a foreign market, therefore, the question about taking your international content marketing efforts seriously should be a no-brainer.

For more on the importance of high-quality content marketing, read our whitepaper on AI Slop in B2B content (no data capture required).