International SEO Services: Top Global SEO Agencies for 2023
Updated August 2023.
An SEO firm with a global presence is the ideal solution for any company that wants to target multiple countries and languages simultaneously. However, finding one with
2) Boostability
- Top Clients: 11th Street Coffee, Ivanti, JD Power
- Countries Covered: Worldwide
- Pricing: Custom
Boostability is a global white label SEO company with local agencies distributed around the world. They work mostly with small businesses and scale their agencies with full-service white label SEO campaigns.
The agency works with partners in 17 countries across Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Oceania. Their translation services include French, German, Finnish, Dutch, and English.
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3) Victorious
- Top Clients: Lime, SoFi, Spotify
- Countries Covered: Worldwide
- Pricing: Projects start at $1,000+
Victorious is an award-winning agency that offers SEO services for small and large businesses alike throughout the world. With a reported 98% customer satisfaction rating, Victorious’ SEO experts leverage the latest technology to conquer ultra-competitive search terms.
As one of the top SEO companies located in the heart of Silicon Valley, they provide their clients with international keyword research, multilingual SEO-optimized content, and technical solutions.
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4) Pearl Lemon
- Top Clients: Astteria London, EmergeOne, IndieLaw
- Countries Covered: Worldwide
- Pricing: Projects start at $1,000+
Pearl Lemon is a London-based SEO agency that works with international clients in industries such as e-commerce, gambling, and gaming. Founded in 2014, Pearl Lemon has developed an integrated approach that allows their clients to rank their pages for multiple languages effectively.
As the highest ranked company in DesignRush’s list of the best SEO companies in the UK, Pearl Lemon offers international SEO services for companies looking to increase their global reach.
5) Brainlabs
- Top Clients: American Express, CloudFlare, Walmart
- Countries Covered: Worldwide
- Pricing: Custom
Brainlabs is one of the largest SEO agencies with over 700 employees distributed in a dozen cities around the world. Founded in 2012, this firm recently bought several major agencies such as Distilled (SEO), Hanapin (PPC), User Conversion (CRO), among others.
Their team of country account managers creates SEO campaigns for clients in dozens of industries, with an emphasis on retail, technology, and finance.
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What Does a Global SEO Agency Do?
If you work for a brand that’s expanding internationally and you need to get more targeted visitors at low costs for each of its global subsidiaries, you need to plan your international SEO campaign. You could create an SEO campaign for each country, hire marketers to handle the work, and manage them individually.
Or you could hire an international SEO agency to do this work for you.
A global SEO agency is responsible for executing search engine optimization campaigns for clients with a multi-national presence, applying international SEO techniques to rank a website for all of their clients’ international markets.
Global SEO, used interchangeably with international SEO, focuses specifically on optimizing a website for different geographical locations, languages and cultural nuances. General SEO, on the other hand, optimizes a website to rank well in search results, without necessarily focusing on specific locations or languages.
For example, let’s say you are a global SEO company working for a multinational e-commerce business that operates in the USA, Germany and Japan. The goal of your international SEO services would be to make sure that the website is visible and ranks high in search results for each of these markets:
In contrast, if you were providing general SEO services for a local business or a business that operates in a single language and country, your focus would be much different.
You would still care about website structure, content and link building, but you wouldn’t need to worry about localizing for different languages or using hreflang tags. Your strategy would instead be centered around understanding the competitive landscape, optimizing for relevant keywords, improving website speed and usability, and earning quality backlinks.
What Does an International SEO Strategy Look Like?
If you were to engage with a global SEO company, they would develop an international search engine optimization strategy tailored to enhance your website’s performance across various global markets, languages, and search engines.
Here’s a look at the comprehensive international SEO services such a company might offer:
- Website Structure: Depending on your international footprint, the global SEO services provided might involve using country code top-level domains (ccTLDs), subdomains, or subdirectories. This approach signals to search engines and users the country and language the content is tailored for.
- Language and Localization: The global SEO company would localize your website’s content to match the language and cultural nuances of each target market. This isn’t about a simple translation but adapting the content to align with local expressions, units of measurement, and date formats.
- Keyword Research: Just like with local SEO, keyword research is a critical part of global SEO services. The company would carry out this research for every target market to discover the terms your international audience is using in their searches:
- Hreflang Tags: Your global SEO company would employ hreflang tags on your website. These tags inform search engines about the language used on a specific page, helping direct the right users to your content.
- Local Link Building: An essential part of their global SEO services would be to devise a link-building strategy that focuses on securing high-quality backlinks from reputable websites within each target country.
- International SEO Audit: Regular SEO audits are crucial to identify and remedy any issues such as broken links, slow page speed, or duplicate content. The company would also monitor your SEO performance to tweak the strategy as necessary.
- Local Search Optimization: If you have physical locations in different countries, they would also optimize your website for local searches. This might involve creating and optimizing Google My Business listings for each location, gathering local reviews and conducting competitor research in country-specific search engines (and not just Google.com, since different sites rank higher depending on the target location and language):
- Compliance: Each country has its own set of laws and regulations regarding digital content and privacy. The international SEO services would ensure your website adheres to these laws, such as Europe’s GDPR.
The specific strategies and services an agency offers would depend on their expertise and your unique needs and goals. Before engaging with a global SEO company, it’s vital to discuss your objectives and ensure they can provide the international SEO services necessary to meet them.
Why Hire an International SEO Agency? Top 3 Reasons
Although it’s reasonable to think that any ol’ SEO agency can help you expand your business around the world, the key to a successful SEO campaign that reaches an audience outside of your local or national demographic is international SEO.
Let’s take a look at the top three reasons to hire an international SEO agency.
Adherence to International SEO Best Practices
The differences between traditional SEO and its international counterpart are minor but crucial. An SEO practitioner who’s not trained or experienced in executing international SEO campaigns will have a hard time ranking a website for multiple countries and languages.
In contrast, an international SEO agency takes an integrated approach that follows all the best practices to rank a website for any country and language, such as:
- Using the hreflang tag properly: Google uses this tag to understand which language and country-specific version of it should a page rank for. Hreflang tags also prevent a duplicate content issue because you explicitly indicate that there are alternative pages on your domain.
- Choosing a correct URL structure: This includes deciding whether to use a country or language-specific domain, subdomain, subdirectory, or dynamic parameter (as seen in the image below):
- Building links on local websites: Getting links from sites located in the country a website wants to rank for can make a difference.
Customization of Marketing Strategy for Each Global Audience
Two challenges you’ll face when trying to sell your products or service in a different country are:
- Acquiring traffic from different countries
- Providing content to visitors in their regional language
Translation is essential here because of language and cultural differences. Even the small but noticeable differences between languages like American and British English can break a marketing campaign without proper translation.
Mr. Beast, a renowned YouTuber, embraced international expansion by dubbing his videos in different languages and creating multiple international YouTube channels:
This approach allows him to tap into diverse markets, which resulted in exponential growth.
Note: I don’t recommend machine translations for different languages because auto-translations are not always accurate, and if you don’t speak that language, you won’t catch the errors. Inaccurate translations hamper the user’s experience (and may make your site look like fraudulent), as well as cause duplicate content issues. Always get a native speaker to translate your content into the targeted country’s regional language.
This is why hiring an international SEO agency is an excellent idea: They will have an expert network of local linguists to rewrite their client’s content for each market they operate in.
Expertise in the Latest Global SEO Trends and Tactics
Any SEO agency — global or locally focused — must stay informed with the latest SEO trends. Since international agencies are large enough to have offices around the world and hire the best local talent, hiring one almost guarantees they will execute the latest, most effective SEO tactics.
Some of the international SEO services and strategies that can effectively improve the presence of a website internationally are:
- International keyword research
- Competitor analysis
- Multilingual content marketing
- User experience optimization
- Multilingual content optimization
- Global link building
- Site speed optimization
- Hreflang tag implementation
- Site architecture optimization
- Technical SEO implementation
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How to Choose the Best SEO Agency for Your Global Business
Like selecting any search engine optimization company, when choosing a global firm, there are certain things to look for. Here are three important points.
- A Strong International Network of Country Account Managers. A global SEO agency should have offices in your target countries, although having qualified employees who target those markets works almost as well. For example, if your company is located in France and wants to target North America, hire an agency with offices in both regions.
- Deep Industry Expertise and SEO Knowledge. Any SEO expert can audit a website, optimize its tags, and research keywords regardless of their clients’ country. However, uncovering intent, defining a keyword plan, and knowing which outlets are ideal to pitch for links requires a lot of experience in a given industry. Hire an SEO agency that has proven technical excellence in your specific industry.
- Clear and Effective International SEO Strategies. There are countless horror stories of companies that hire SEO firms that use a lot of jargon to sell their services and end up underperforming — or, worse yet, they end up with a penalty.
Before you hire a global SEO agency, make sure they can explain their SEO strategy clearly — and that includes the implementation of the global SEO best practices.
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Avoid These 3 Red Flags When Choosing Your SEO Agency
Continuing on from the last section, let’s examine three potential red flags you may come across.
🚩 Lack of Successful Case Studies or Portfolio
Look for case studies that detail how the agency handled past clients or a portfolio of happy clients:
The crucial aspects you want to research are:
- The way the agency discovered the problems the client had
- The metrics they defined to measure the campaign’s performance based on the problems previously found
- The solution they presented (and the logic they used to develop it)
- The way they executed their solution
- The results they generated from it
Also, prioritize companies that have worked with clients in your space approximately within the past three years in your target geographic regions.
🚩 Recent Results Matter More than Just Years of Experience
The SEO world changes extremely fast thanks to Google’s changes in its ranking algorithm. Agencies that boast about their “years of experience” in the field prove little about their capacity to generate results today.
Recency and relevancy are more important when it comes to results than the years they have been driving them. This isn’t to say that it’s bad if an agency has 20 years in the field; it’s only irrelevant when they can’t show any recent results.
🚩 Unclear Team Structure and Account Managers
Some unscrupulous marketers out there hire a bunch of freelancers from around the world and call it “international SEO.” Do we have to tell you that’s not how it’s done? 🙃
Ensure that the agency you hire can present you with the account managers who will handle your campaigns in each country in which your business operates. If they are in the same city as you are, have a meeting and see their offices. These are the people who will help you expand and conquer the global markets; it’s the least you could do.
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Summary: Hiring the Right Global SEO Agency
Let’s face it: Hiring a single agency capable of handling SEO campaigns in multiple geographic regions can be tough. In today’s digital world, it’s best to start small, get an initial set of results that motivate your team, and scale from there.
Remember that SEO is a channel that takes time to work. The earlier you start working on your global SEO strategy, the better it will be for your business’ growth.
If you’re ready to expand your reach globally, Single Grain’s international SEO services experts can help!👇
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