International SEO: How to Grow a Website in Foreign Markets

International SEO costs from $900 per month for one market and from $1,600 per month for several countries at once. What sets it apart from SEO in your home market: the right multilingual structure, correct hreflang, local link building and adapting to how people search in each country. For six years I ran international SEO for Ukraine International Airlines (UIA) across 40+ countries - here is what works and what just burns the budget.

Who actually needs it

To be honest, not every business needs to go abroad. International SEO pays off if you are:

• An IT or SaaS company - your product has no geographic limits, and the average deal in Western markets is several times higher;
• A product exporter - manufacturing at home, buyers in Europe or the US;
• A service company working remotely - design, development, marketing, consulting;
• A business with a physical presence abroad - a branch, a warehouse, a local office.

If you sell furniture with delivery only within one city, you don't need international SEO - that money is better spent on local SEO.

How international SEO differs from SEO in your home market

1. A different level of competition

In smaller markets such as Ukraine, you often compete with sites whose SEO is done haphazardly. In the US, commercial queries pit you against sites with DR 70+, a ten-year history and budgets larger than your annual revenue. That doesn't mean "impossible" - it means "you need a niche and patience."

2. Expensive links

A placement on a decent English-language site costs $150-500, compared with about $35-100 on Ukrainian sites. Link building is what makes international SEO more expensive, not the specialist's fee.

3. Content must be written by native speakers

An American can tell a translated text from the first paragraph - and leaves. Google sees this too, through user behavior signals. Budget for a native-speaker copywriter: $50-150 per article.

4. Different search habits

Germans search differently from Americans: different query structure, different expectations of the page. In the UIA case we saw that every market had its own keyword set - even pages with identical content needed different copy for Austria and the US.

Site structure: ccTLDs, subdomains or subfolders

This is the first and most important decision - and fixing it later is very expensive.

My conclusion after 13 years: for 90% of businesses, subfolders are the best choice. They build the authority of one domain - links to the English version also help the German one. Separate ccTLDs only make sense if you have a local team and the budget to run each domain as its own project. Otherwise you end up with five weak sites instead of one strong one.

Hreflang: the attribute almost everyone gets wrong

Hreflang tells Google: "this page is for Germans, and this one is for Americans." Without it, the search engine may show a US user, say, the Ukrainian version of your site, and your language versions compete with each other for the same queries.

Here is what it looks like technically - an example for a page with three versions:

The three mistakes I see most often:

• One-way references. The German page points to the English one, but the English page doesn't point back. Google ignores the whole markup. The relationship has to be reciprocal.
• Mixing up language and country. hreflang="en-uk" is a common mistake: the United Kingdom is coded gb, while uk is the code for the Ukrainian language.
• No x-default. Without it, Google doesn't know what to show a user from a country you have no version for.

UIA case study: 40+ countries, 201,000 visitors a month

From 2016 to 2022 I was Head of SEO at Ukraine International Airlines (UIA). The flyuia.com site was promoted simultaneously in Ukraine, Austria, France, Germany, the US and 35+ other countries. At its peak it reached 201,546 organic visitors a month, DR 74.

Sample rankings in the Ukrainian market (2016 → July 2021):

But branded rankings prove little - everyone already knew UIA. So below are only non-branded commercial queries for each market as of July 2021 (Ahrefs data, each country is a separate Google search):

🇮🇱 Israel

🇺🇸 USA

🇵🇱 Poland

🇩🇪 Germany

🇦🇹 Austria

This is only a fraction - the full keyword set covered every route across 40+ countries. Here the user isn't searching for UIA: they are looking for a flight or a ticket and don't yet know who they will buy from. These are the rankings that bring in new customers, not people who were heading to the site anyway. Four takeaways from these tables:

• Hebrew - top 2 for a query with 2,500 searches a month. Israel turned out to be one of the strongest markets: content was written in Hebrew, accounting for right-to-left text and local names for destinations. That is not "translation" - it is a separate project within the project.
• "international airlines" - 3,700/mo and fourth place in the US. A generic query that every airline in the world fights for. Rankings like that are not handed out for free.
• Route queries - top 1 and top 3. "тель авив киев" (Tel Aviv Kyiv), "варшава киев самолет" (Warsaw Kyiv plane), "вена киев" (Vienna Kyiv) - every route had its own page with its own keyword set. This is the highest-converting traffic: the person already knows where they are flying.
• Language ≠ country. Look at Germany and Poland: alongside German queries, Russian- and Ukrainian-language queries work there too ("билеты в казахстан из германии", "варшава львів літак"). Each country has its own language segments with their own demand - a German-only keyword set simply misses half the market. And "berlin baku flug" and "flug wien baku" are flights via Kyiv: people were looking for a flight to Baku, and UIA captured them as transit passengers through its hub.

That is the essence of local keyword research: translating the Ukrainian "Kyiv - Tel Aviv" page and waiting for traffic from Israel would not have worked - the keyword set had to be built separately for each market and for each language within it.

What delivered the results:

• Correct hreflang on every language version - this eliminated cannibalization between markets
• Localized keyword research: a separate keyword set for each market, not a translation of the Ukrainian one
• Content for flight routes reflecting how people search in each specific country
• Technical optimization of a large site: indexing, speed, URL structure
• Link building through international media and partners

The full case with the traffic chart is on the home page. It shows the COVID dip and the stop in February 2022 - the numbers are real, nothing embellished.

How much international SEO costs

That is roughly twice as much as SEO for the Ukrainian market - and almost all of the difference goes to links and native-speaker content, not into the contractor's pocket. I quote and bill in USD or EUR.

Step by step: where to start

1. Assess demand. Use Ahrefs to check whether there is any search demand for your product in the target country and who ranks at the top. Sometimes at this stage it becomes clear it's the wrong market.
2. Choose the structure. Subfolders, subdomains or separate domains - a decision for years ahead.
3. Technical foundation. Hreflang, correct indexing of language versions, load speed from another continent (a CDN helps here).
4. Local keyword research. Build the keyword set in the market's language - don't translate the one from your home market.
5. Native-speaker content. Commercial pages first, then the blog.
6. Local link building. Links from domains in the target country are worth more than generic ones.
7. Analytics by country. Separate reports for each market - otherwise you won't see which one is working.

The biggest mistake when going international

Here is what I see most often: a company takes its existing site, runs it through Google Translate into English, adds flags to the header - and waits for customers from the US. Six months later they conclude that "international SEO doesn't work."

What doesn't work is that approach. A foreign market is a separate, full-scale project: its own keywords, its own content, its own links, its own budget. A half-hearted entry is guaranteed to eat money without results.