Can an SEO company help with international SEO?

Yes, if it has done this specific work before, because international SEO is mostly structural decisions that are expensive to reverse. The company has to help you choose how each country or language gets its own URLs, tell Google which page serves which audience, adapt the content to each market rather than translate it, and avoid redirects that hide versions from searchers and crawlers. Translation is a part of it, not the whole of it. Before hiring, ask for examples of each of these decisions on a past project.

Choosing the URL structure

The first decision is where each version lives. Google’s guide to managing multi-regional sites compares the options. A country-code domain such as example.de gives clear geotargeting but is more expensive, needs more infrastructure, and targets only one country. Subdomains such as de.example.com and subdirectories such as example.com/de/ are easy to set up, but users may not recognize the targeting from the URL alone; subdirectories are lower maintenance because everything stays on one host. URL parameters are listed as not recommended. A company should explain which option fits your markets and budget, because changing the structure later means a site move.

Telling Google which page serves whom

Google uses several signals to work out a page’s intended audience, including the domain, hreflang annotations, local addresses, currency, and links from local sites. On server location, its guide notes that “Some websites use distributed content delivery networks (CDNs) or are hosted in a country with better webserver infrastructure, so it is not a definitive signal.” Server location is therefore one signal among several, not a decisive one.

Hreflang annotations are the explicit way to state which page is for whom, and Google’s page on localized versions sets strict rules: “Each language version must list itself as well as all other language versions.” Links must also be returned: “If two pages don’t both point to each other, the tags will be ignored.” On a site with many languages, keeping every set complete and reciprocal is detailed work, and a company should check it systematically after every change rather than once at launch.

Content for each market

Searchers in different countries can use different words for the same thing, and spelling, currency, units, and expectations differ. Keyword research has to be done in each market rather than translated from the home market, and pages need local details that make them useful there. Links from sites in each country also signal the intended audience.

Letting users choose

Google’s multi-regional guide advises: “Avoid automatically redirecting users from one language version of a site to a different language version of a site.” Redirecting visitors by guessed language or location can stop both users and crawlers from reaching the other versions. Links that let people switch versions are the safer route.

Asking for results country by country

Ask which markets the company has worked in, how it chose the URL structure on past projects, how it maintains hreflang at scale, and how it reports results for each country separately, since a combined total can hide a market that is not working.