Most of the work in a new market can be corrected. A weak page gets rewritten, a bad keyword choice gets replaced, a slow quarter gets a new plan. Five decisions do not work like that. They are made in the first month, usually by whoever is in the room, and every page built afterwards sits on top of them. Reversing one later is a migration, with a migration’s cost and a migration’s risk. This is the order I make them in, and the reasoning behind each.
The five: which market goes first, one domain or several, which pages exist in each market, what stays identical everywhere, and how you will know it is working.
Decision 1: Which market goes first
The instinct is to start with the biggest market. The better question is where you can be found soonest.
Three things decide that, in this order:
- Demand you can verify. Not a market size estimate. Actual search volume for the problem you solve, in that language, in that country. Sometimes a smaller market has more searchable demand than a bigger one where the category has a different name.
- Competition you can realistically beat in a year. Pull the first page for your three core queries. If every result is a company with ten years of local content, that is a year-three market.
- Where you can earn citations. AI answers and Google both lean on what third parties say about you. A market where you already have customers, press or partners gives you sources to work with. A market where you have nothing gives you a site nobody references.
Start where all three line up, even if it is not the market on the board deck.
Decision 2: One domain or several
This is the decision most often made by the IT team, or by whoever registered the domains, and it is the hardest to reverse.
A subfolder on one domain (/de/, /fr/) keeps all the authority you build in one place, and a strong market lifts a weak one. Country domains (.de, .fr) split that authority from day one, and each one starts from zero. Google’s documentation on multi-regional sites lays out the structure options and their trade-offs.
The honest rule: a separate country domain is justified when there is a separate legal entity, a local team, or a regulatory reason. If the only argument is that it looks more local, it does not justify starting every market from zero.
And if the structure is already wrong and working, changing it is a migration. Sometimes the right call is to leave it, and to say so in writing.
Decision 3: Which pages exist in each market
The default is to translate the whole site. It is the wrong default.
A market needs the pages its buyers search for, written for those searches, and nothing else. Some pages exist only in one market because the demand only exists there. Some pages should not be translated at all, because a thin version competes with the original and both lose.
Decide the page list per market before anything is written. A useful test: if a page would not be worth building for that market on its own, translating it does not make it worth having.
Decision 4: What stays identical everywhere
Markets differ in language, competitors and keywords. Some things must not differ at all, and the list is short.
- The entity. One company name, one description of what you do, the same founders and the same facts in every language. Engines that see three versions of who you are trust none of them.
- The hreflang set. Every version lists every other version, every page canonicalises to itself, and pages with no counterpart carry no annotation. Most broken sets fail exactly one of those, and the failure is silent. The mechanics are in the four ways hreflang breaks.
- Who decides. One person owns the cross-market structure. When each market runs its own SEO with no one above them, the versions start competing with each other within a year.
Decision 5: How you will know it is working
Decide the measurement before the first page goes live, per market, not blended.
Search Console filtered by country, not the site total. Organic conversions per market, not sessions. And a fixed set of buyer questions asked in each market’s language, on a schedule, to see whether you are named inside AI answers there. The method is in how to measure AI search visibility, and it matters more in a new market than at home, because at home you already know what people say about you.
A blended dashboard hides exactly the thing you need to see: which market is working and which one is quietly not.
One brand, six markets
The clearest version of all five decisions I have worked through was one brand entering Sweden, South Africa, Kuwait, the UAE, Korea and Mexico at the same time. Six separate strategies instead of one playbook translated six times, an hreflang set that made the versions help each other instead of compete, and a page list per market that an external agency produced against a brief, 15 to 20 pages a month. The full account is in six markets, six strategies.
Where this sits
These five decisions are the first month of any international SEO strategy I write, and the execution afterwards is what I do as an international SEO consultant. For a single market, usually the US, the scope is SEO for companies entering the US market. If a market entry is on your roadmap, tell me which market is next and I will tell you which of the five decisions is already made, whether you meant to make it or not.