International SEO Services

Most international SEO problems aren't strategy problems. They're structure problems.

When we ran international SEO for an industrial connectors and automation manufacturer targeting 36+ countries, the first thing that broke wasn't content or backlinks - it was hreflang. Pages meant for the German market were showing up in Google's US index. Country pages competed against each other for the same English-language keywords. None of that gets fixed by writing more content; it gets fixed by getting the underlying architecture right first.

ccTLD vs subfolder vs subdomain: the decision that shapes everything else

This is usually the first question on an international SEO project, and it's often answered by whoever bought the domain years ago rather than by anyone thinking about SEO. Each option carries real tradeoffs in authority consolidation, hosting complexity and how clearly it signals country targeting to both users and Google.

For a manufacturer selling into 36+ countries, we generally lean toward subfolders unless there's a hard legal or hosting reason not to: it keeps domain authority consolidated in one place while country-level pages still get clear targeting signals through hreflang and Google Search Console's international targeting settings.

hreflang: small tags, outsized consequences

hreflang tells search engines which version of a page to show a user based on language and region, and it's one of the easiest things to get subtly wrong at scale. Missing return tags, mismatched language-region codes, or pages that reference a URL that's since been redirected are the three errors we see most often on multi-country sites. We audit hreflang implementation as one of the first steps on any international SEO engagement, following the guidance in Google Search Central's documentation rather than relying on plugin defaults.

Multilingual content needs a process, not just translators

Direct translation of English content into a dozen languages usually produces text that reads correctly but ranks nowhere, because it ignores local search intent and phrasing entirely. We run multilingual content as an operating process: native keyword research per market, briefs written for local writers rather than translators, and a review step that checks intent match before checking grammar. This matters even more in industrial and technical B2B categories, where the terminology itself can vary meaningfully by country - the same challenge we cover in industrial B2B SEO.

International GEO: AI visibility doesn't stop at your home market

AI assistants and AI Overviews increasingly answer differently depending on the user's country and language, which means the GEO work that gets you cited in the US doesn't automatically carry over to answers shown in Germany or Japan. We treat international AI visibility as part of the same country-by-country strategy as traditional SEO, rather than a separate global initiative, so structured data, entity signals and content structure are consistent across every market's version of the site.

Google Search Console: setting international targeting correctly

Beyond hreflang, GSC's international targeting settings and clean per-market property setup matter more than most teams realize once you're operating across dozens of countries. We set these up as part of technical onboarding so that Google's understanding of which market each URL serves is unambiguous, reducing the odds of one country's pages cannibalizing another's rankings.

Scope from real work: Katlax

Our engagement with Katlax, an industrial connectors and automation manufacturer, covered international SEO across 36+ countries: structure decisions, hreflang cleanup, and country-level content and technical work coordinated as one program rather than a series of disconnected local efforts. You can read more about how that kind of multi-country engagement is scoped in our case studies, and the broader playbook in international SEO for manufacturers and the full case study.

Timezone: covering EMEA, APAC and the Americas from Bengaluru

Running SEO across dozens of countries means no single timezone works for everyone, so we don't try to force one. From Bengaluru, our working hours give strong overlap with EMEA in the morning, full coverage of APAC markets during the same working day, and enough overlap into the evening to catch the start of the US day for Americas-facing updates. Reporting and coordination are structured around these three windows rather than assuming everyone checks in at 9am IST.

If you're managing SEO across more than a handful of countries and the structure is starting to show cracks, email hello@tikbo.in or reach us through our contact page and we'll look at your current setup together.