International SEO Services: Top Global SEO Agencies for 2024

Updated February 2024.

A global SEO agency is the ideal solution for any company that wants to target multiple countries and languages simultaneously. However, finding one with the required expertise isn’t so easy.

In this article, you’ll learn what an international SEO agency can do for your business, why you should hire one, and how you go about doing it.

We’ll also provide a curated list of the five best international SEO agencies in this space.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Top 5 Global SEO Agencies for 2024

Scroll down for tips on how to choose a reputable global SEO agency, what international SEO entails, and the top three reasons to hire global agency.

But first, here are our top five picks of the best international SEO agencies.

1) Single Grain: Top-Rated Global SEO Company

• Top Clients: Amazon, Uber, Airbnb
• Countries Covered: Worldwide
• Pricing: Projects start at $10,000+

Single Grain is one of the top SEO firms with over 12 years of experience in SEO consultancy and strategy implementation. We have worked with both enterprise-level clients and SMBs from dozens of industries all over the world.

We use the latest international SEO services and a customized, effective international SEO strategy to consistently see high search engine rankings for competitive terms and hit the featured snippet — the famous “rank zero” — despite all of the changes Google has made to its search algorithm. We have a team of certified SEO experts with a great work ethic and lots of experience who generate excellent results (in local and global markets).

Our full-service digital marketing agency will provide you with these international SEO services:

• In-depth keyword research and competitor analysis
• Technical SEO and infrastructure analysis
• Link profile audit and outreach link-building services
• Voice search optimization (VSEO)
• Core web vitals optimization
• High-authority link building
• A/B testing
• Web design and user experience (UX) evaluation
• Google Search Console and Google Analytics monitoring
• Conversion tracking
• On-going SEO goal evaluation and KPI metrics setting

Check out Single Grain CEO Eric Siu’s SEO playbook:

In this playbook, we’ll cover

1. SEO strategy in a nutshell

2. All SEO tools you need

3. Programmatic SEO and utilizing AI

Let’s dive in 👇

— ericosiu (@ericosiu) September 14, 2023

Kim Cooper

Director of Marketing, Amazon Alexa

Single Grain enables us to increase our impact without increasing our headcount

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2) Boostability: Affordable Global SEO Services

• 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.

Dive Deeper: How to Use Multicultural Marketing in Your Digital Advertising

3) Victorious: Expert in Global SEO Best Practices

• Top Clients: Lime, SoFi, Spotify
• Countries Covered: Worldwide
• Pricing: Projects start at $1,000+

Victorious is an award-winning agency that offers international 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.

Dive Deeper: How Zero Search Volume Keywords Can Generate a Ton of Traffic

4) Pearl Lemon: Multilingual Global SEO Services

• 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 own global market reach.

5) Brainlabs: Leading SEO Agency for Global Brands

• Top Clients: American Express, CloudFlare, Walmart
• Countries Covered: Worldwide
• Pricing: Custom

Brainlabs is a large global SEO company 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 offers SEO services like international keyword research to create SEO campaigns for clients in dozens of industries, with an emphasis on retail, technology, and finance.

Learn more about the future of SEO here:

What Is International SEO?

If you’re a brand that’s expanding internationally and you need to get more targeted traffic and visitors at low costs for each new country, you need to work with one of the best international SEO agencies. They will create an SEO campaign for each country, hire marketers to handle the work and manage them individually.

• 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 different search engines’ results, without necessarily focusing on specific locations or languages.

Let’s say you’re a multinational e-commerce business that operates in the USA, Germany and Japan, and you hire a global SEO company. Their goal would be to make sure that your website is visible and ranks high in search results for each of these markets.

For instance, Amazon has country-specific domains for all its international locations:

In contrast, if you needed general SEO services for your local business (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.

This involves several international SEO strategies, such as:

• Website Structure: You may need to create separate subdomains or subdirectories for each geographical area. For instance, for the German market, the URL might be “de.yourwebsite.com” or “yourwebsite.com/de“. This makes it clear to both users and search engines that this version of your website is specifically for German speakers. And depending on your international footprint, the global SEO services provided might involve using country code top-level domains (ccTLDs), subdomains or subdirectories.

• 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: These HTML tags indicate to search engines what language and geographical area a webpage is intended for. For example, for a webpage intended for English speakers in the USA, the hreflang tag would be “en-us”, and for German speakers in Germany, the hreflang tag would be:

• 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.

Learn More About SEO:
* How to Rank Your Brand-New Website When You Don’t Know SEO
* 21 Paid & Free SEO Tools That Will Improve Your Ranking
* 9 Quick SEO Tactics That Only Take 10 Minutes to Implement
* The Complete White Hat SEO Guide: Google-Validated SEO that Works like Magic!

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.

1) Adherence to International SEO Best Practices

International SEO focuses on optimizing a website so that the search engines recognize the countries and languages in which you want to rank your site.

The differences between traditional SEO and its international counterpart are minor but crucial. An SEO practitioner who’s not trained or experienced in executing global SEO campaigns will have a hard time ranking a website for multiple countries and languages.

In contrast, international SEO agencies take 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.

2) 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.

3) 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 global search engine optimization strategies that can effectively improve the presence of a website internationally are international keyword research, multilingual content marketing and content optimization, global link building and hreflang tag implementation.

Dive Deeper: 14 Effective SEO Techniques to Drive Organic Traffic in 2023

How to Choose the Best Global SEO Agency for Your Business

It’s like selecting any search engine optimization company, except you’ll be looking for international SEO services. When choosing a global firm, here are three important things to look for.

A Strong International Network of Account Managers

First and foremost, a global SEO agency must have people working in or experienced with the country your business operates in. Ideally, that should include having offices in your target market or countries, although having qualified employees who target those markets works almost as well.

For example, if your social media marketing company is located in France and wants to target North America, hire an agency with offices in both regions.

Also, if your business is in expansion mode, make sure the agency is located or experienced in the markets your company will expand to. So be sure to discuss this point thoroughly before hiring an agency.

Deep Industry Expertise and SEO Knowledge

Any search engine optimization 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 and key international SEO services in your specific industry, including:

• 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

Clear and Effective Global SEO Strategy

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 strategies clearly — and that includes the implementation of best practices for international SEO.

Here are four questions you should ask that will help you understand their strategy:

• Can you explain your SEO approach in under 60 seconds? If they can’t explain their process succinctly, beware.
• What’s your favorite URL structure for international SEO? Take notes and think about the cost-benefit relationship of their suggestions.
• How do you acquire links? Anything content or outreach-related is good; anything purchased is a big no-no.
• How do you measure results? If they say organic traffic increases, sales, and leads (among other metrics), great. If their answers include words like “rankings” and “brand awareness,” think twice about hiring them.

Summary: Key Points for 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 marketing world, it’s best to start small, get an initial set of results that motivate your team, and scale from there.

We want to close this article with a quick summary of how to hire a global SEO agency:

• Decide what countries your business is expanding to.
• Make a list of all of the languages these countries speak—that includes country-specific variations of the same language, such as American and British English.
• If your aggregate list of countries and languages is less than three, you may want to follow our guide on international SEO and see if you can do it yourself.
• If your team can’t handle this work or if your list of targeted countries and languages is greater than three, pick one of the five agencies we mentioned in this article.

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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