Yes. International SEO is a recognized specialty, and an SEO company that has done this work before can take a site that ranks in one country and prepare it to rank in others. The work is different enough from standard domestic SEO that it is worth confirming a company has direct experience with it before you sign on. International SEO is not translation, and it is not simply running the same campaign in more places. It is the technical and structural work that helps search engines show the right version of your site to the right audience in each country.
What the work involves
The starting point is usually the URL structure. A site that wants to serve multiple countries has to decide whether to use country-code top-level domains such as example.de, subdirectories such as example.com/de/, or subdomains such as de.example.com. Each option sends a different signal to search engines and carries different costs. A country-code domain gives the clearest geographic signal but requires building authority for that domain from scratch. Subdirectories keep all the work consolidated under one domain, which is usually the more practical choice for a business entering new markets. An SEO company should walk you through this decision early, because changing URL structure later is disruptive and slow to recover from.
The next core task is hreflang. Hreflang is an HTML annotation that tells search engines which language and regional version of a page to show a given user. It has strict requirements: every page in a set must reference every other version, every page must reference itself, and the language and country codes must be valid. Hreflang errors are common across the web, so getting the basics right is itself an advantage. An SEO company implementing international SEO will set up these annotations, verify they are symmetric across all versions, and confirm they appear in the server-delivered HTML rather than being added by JavaScript after the page loads.
It is worth noting one change in tooling. Google Search Console previously offered a manual country-targeting setting, but that feature has been deprecated. Targeting is now communicated through domain choice, hreflang, URL structure, localized content, and links from sources in each market. A current SEO company will work with these signals rather than relying on a setting that no longer exists.
Content, hosting, and regional factors
International SEO also includes localized content. Translating text is not enough on its own. Content should reflect the language, spelling conventions, currency, units, and search habits of each market, since people in different countries search for the same product using different words. An SEO company can identify the keywords that actually matter in each target country rather than translating the keywords from your home market.
Hosting and site speed can also play a role. Serving a site from a location far from your audience can slow it down, and an SEO company may recommend a content delivery network or regional hosting to address this. Other multi-region considerations include earning links from sites within each target country, accounting for the search engine that leads in a given market, and making sure local versions are crawlable and indexed.
What to confirm before hiring
Because international SEO is specialized, ask a prospective company about its specific experience: which markets it has worked in, how it has handled hreflang at scale, and how it decided on URL structure for past projects. Ask how it will measure progress separately for each country, since combined reporting can hide a market that is underperforming. A company with genuine international experience will be able to describe its approach in concrete terms rather than treating international SEO as an add-on to a standard package.