This international SEO checklist covers the 28 checks I run before a business launches in a new country or language, in the order they happen: proving demand, settling structure, localising pages, building them cleanly and measuring each market separately.
By Kristijan GjorgjioskiIndependent SEO consultantPublished 18 October 2026 · 7 min read
Most international launches I'm asked to rescue failed before anyone wrote a line of code.
The market was picked on a hunch, and the translations went live without a keyword in sight.
This international SEO checklist is built to stop that: 28 checks in five phases, each with a pass or fail you can confirm.
Copy it into a spreadsheet with an owner and status column before you commit a budget.
You don't need to start at check 1 if part of the work is done. Use this router:
Priority note: the checks marked (blocker) can silently stop a market from ranking at all. Fix those before anything else.
These checks decide whether the rest of the list is worth doing.
Open your Performance report in Search Console and add a country filter.
Then do the same in your analytics and your enquiry or order records.
Pass: you can name the countries already sending impressions, visits or leads without any localised pages.
That existing demand is the strongest evidence you'll ever get.
Run your keyword research in the target country's own language, set to that country.
Pass: you have volume estimates for native-language terms, not translated English ones.
Have a native speaker sanity-check your list. My keyword research process works the same in any language.
Search your main terms from the target market, using a local VPN or a rank tracker set to that country.
Pass: you know whether results are led by local specialists, marketplaces, global brands or forums, and roughly how strong they are.
Check delivery, payments, local regulation, language support and time zones with the people who'd handle your customers.
Pass: operations sign off in writing. A market you can't serve well turns rankings into refunds.
Agree what success means for you before launch: impressions, indexed pages, enquiries or revenue, by a set date.
Pass: each market has its own target, separate from your home market.
Decide these before translation starts. Changing them later means redirects.
Pick country domains, subfolders or subdomains, and write down your reasoning: budget, teams and existing authority.
Pass: one documented decision. My ccTLD vs subfolder vs subdomain comparison walks through the trade-offs.
A Spanish version can target all Spanish speakers, or Spain specifically.
Pass: each version has a defined audience and a matching code, such as es or es-mx. If you'll run several languages, my explainer on multilingual SEO covers the language side.
You don't need every one of your pages on day one.
Pass: a written list of launch pages, led by the ones that earn money: core services, categories or products, plus the trust pages that support them.
Pass: a pattern for every page type per market, such as /de/leistungen/ (translated slugs) or /de/services/ (shared slugs), applied consistently.
Decide where your visitors from untargeted markets should land.
Pass: a global page or country selector is chosen as the x-default destination.
This is where most of the effort goes, and where translated sites fall behind localised ones.
Pass: every launch page has a primary keyword and supporting terms in the local language, checked against the live results there.
Hand your translators the map, a terminology list and the purpose of each page.
Pass: translators know which phrase belongs in each title and heading, and which terms to avoid.
Pass: prices appear in local currency, with tax shown the way local buyers expect.
Pass: each version shows a local phone format, a relevant address where you have one, and support hours in the market's time zone.
Google's guide to multi-regional and multilingual sites lists local addresses and phone numbers among the signals of a site's intended audience.
Pass: each market shows reviews, case studies, accreditations or standards a local buyer recognises, not only home-market ones.
Titles, meta descriptions, image alt text, form labels, error messages, cookie banners and structured data text.
Pass: a crawl of the new version shows no home-language leftovers in any of them.
Technical faults here can hide a whole market. Run these on staging first, then again on production.
Pass: every page in each cluster lists itself and all its alternates, using valid codes and absolute URLs.
Google's localised versions guide says tags are ignored if two pages don't point to each other. My free hreflang generator builds the full set from a list, and my guide to what hreflang is explains the rules.
Pass: the German page canonicalises to itself, not to the English original.
Google advises against automatically redirecting users between language versions.
Its crawler usually comes from the US without an Accept-Language header.
Pass: visiting any version from any country loads that version. A dismissible banner can suggest a better match.
Pass: the selector on each page links to the same page in each other language, not to the homepages.
Pass: sitemaps include each market's URLs and are submitted in Search Console.
Staging blocks often travel to live.
Check your robots.txt, meta robots tags and HTTP headers on the new folders.
Pass: sample URLs from each version show as indexable in URL Inspection.
Pass: key templates load acceptably for visitors in the target country, using a CDN where your origin server is far away. My guide to Core Web Vitals covers what to measure.
Pass: a full crawl shows 200 status codes, valid hreflang return links and correct canonicals across every version.
The same crawl belongs in any technical SEO checklist you run after a release.
Pass: URL-prefix Search Console properties or saved filters for each folder, and analytics segments per market. A GA4 measurement plan keeps enquiries tracked the same way everywhere.
Pass: your top launch pages per market have been inspected in Search Console and requested for indexing.
Your new version needs signals from its own market: local press, partners, associations and directories.
Pass: a list of local link and citation targets exists for each market. My guide to local citations explains how listings work, and if you have a real address there, a Business Profile for that location helps too.
Filter your Search Console data by country and check which URLs receive the clicks.
Pass: searchers in each country mostly land on their own version. If the home-market pages still collect the clicks, go back to checks 17 to 19.
Start with phase 1 for your next market, and don't skip check 4.
Most expansion budgets I've seen wasted were spent on markets the business couldn't serve.
If you're already live, run the five blockers today: structure, hreflang, canonicals, redirects and indexability.
They take an afternoon and catch the faults that quietly cap every market at once.
Moving an existing site into a new structure is a migration, so pair this list with my website migration SEO checklist.
When you'd rather have someone own the whole list, my international SEO services cover market prioritisation, structure, hreflang and per-market research. You can also see how I plan new market launches before deciding.
Fixes to an existing setup can show within weeks of Google recrawling the pages. A new market built from scratch usually takes several months, because the new version has to be crawled, indexed and earn some authority and local references of its own. Set expectations around impressions and indexing first, then rankings and enquiries once the pages have settled.
Rarely. I prefer launching the pages that drive revenue first, such as core service, category or product pages, plus the supporting pages needed to make them credible. A smaller set of well-researched, properly localised pages tends to do better than a full site of thin translations, and it is easier to check and fix.
You do not have to, but it helps. A domain property shows everything, and adding URL-prefix properties for each language folder, such as /de/ or /fr/, gives each market team a clean view of its own clicks, queries and indexing without filtering every report. Country domains need their own property in any case.
The checks are the same, but some carry more weight. Currency, tax display, delivery times, returns and payment methods decide whether a foreign shopper buys, and product feeds or structured data often need a version per market. Category pages usually matter more than blog content for an online store entering a new country.
About the author
Kristijan Gjorgjioski
Independent SEO consultant · 6+ years in SEO · 60+ client websites worked on
I'm an independent SEO consultant with 6+ years in SEO. I run audits, migrations and content programmes for businesses in Europe, the UK and the USA, and I build the automation behind my own research.
Book a free 30-minute call. I look at your site first and tell you plainly what I would fix, and in what order.