SEO often has a reputation for being “free traffic.” But like any other marketing channel, it requires time, dedication, and, of course, a budget to actually use it for growth.

This is especially true in regard to international markets, where you need to take some additional steps that involve language localization as a crucial part of international SEO.

So before diving in and doing a mass website translation (which often has little to no impact on SEO performance in new markets), it’s essential to check whether there is even potential within your target region.

Do people actually need your product or service?

Do they actually search for it online?

If they do, what types of phrases do they use?

Who are your local competitors, and how well does your target audience know them?

To strategically answer these questions and ensure your SEO strategy drives growth in international markets, the best way to get started is to create a business case.

This will allow you to get all of the budgetary resources you need for international SEO to be successful long term.

Let’s now take a deeper look at how this works.

Before doing SEO, the first thing you need to ask yourself is the “why.” Why is SEO worthwhile for my business, and how can SEO help us build visibility and convert customers in a new market?

Many businesses give international SEO a wholehearted “yes” because these conditions provide them with clear benefits:

• Market variety helps combat economic volatility: with the COVID-19 pandemic and recessions, businesses have learned to be more flexible than ever before. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. While one market struggles, another may flourish, and international SEO helps you build momentum across multiple markets.

• Many companies have met market saturation, so a new market is the most logical way to scale: massive amounts of competition often make large markets (especially the US and UK) more difficult to build sustainable growth around, so going international provides new opportunities due to less competition.

• Customers want personalization now more than ever: One major way to be more personal is to speak to customers in the target language and understand their needs at the local level. This is where international SEO is one of the most valuable tactics a company can implement to generate sales, leads, and conversions.

Now that you know the “why,” let’s go over the “how.” Follow these steps to establish a business case for international SEO by forecasting the results your effort will yield, as well as the budget you’ll need.

1: Gather comprehensive data

The first step to building your business case is to gather as much data as possible. A strong foundation of data is the best way to understand where you currently are and how to bridge the gap from there to where you want to be.

Gathering data is especially important for new international SEO, as you have a completely different search landscape in new markets and languages. You’ll need to check its potential and understand search behavior, as they’re often entirely different from your home country.

For example, you wouldn’t want to duplicate SEO KPIs you have in US markets if you’re going to expand to Germany because you have different competitors, different levels of search volume, and entirely different buying behavior.

Analyze your current state of SEO

Use a tool like Moz Pro to check your current state of SEO for a specific domain. Look at basic SEO KPIs such as keyword rankings and organic traffic. If you have a website in another language that you want to grow traffic for, check the KPIs in the subfolder or separate language domain specifically.

For example, let’s take a look at the basic state of SEO for eventbrite.com (the US site) compared to eventbrite.com.au (the Australian site). The images below show that the Australian site ranks for far fewer keywords has fewer backlinks, and has a lower Domain Authority.

While this case is absolutely normal and nothing to fret about, it’s important to note that you need to set your KPI milestones according to the specific market. Because if you copy/paste what’s going on in the US, then you’d always see other markets as falling behind when that’s not necessarily accurate.

Do localized keyword research and competitor analysis

You may already know which websites you’re competing with in your native market. However, it’s important to understand that they will most likely not be your organic search traffic competitors when you enter new markets.

To prepare yourself for the transition, start identifying both local keywords and new competitors by using MozBar. MozBar is a helpful plugin for comparing SERPs in different languages and countries.

For example, if you want to rank for the main keyword “marketing automation” in English, enter it into Google and search. Then, MozBar will show you the English SERPs for the US, as you can see below.

Now, here’s the SERP for the German equivalent for that English term in Germany:

You’ll notice from this that the pages ranking in the SERPs are different, which shows that there are different competitors in each country. This is understandable, as not all US companies operate in Germany, and vice versa. So, you’ll want to dig deeper with your keyword research and competitor analysis to have a more accurate understanding of what you’re up against. You’ll also want to compare their performance to get an idea of how much potential that international market actually has.

If you want to ensure that your keyword research is done naturally rather than relying on a translation tool that often misses a ton of local opportunities, it’s best to work with a native speaker of the target language. For further information here, I’ve covered this process of keyword localization in further detail in the Wix SEO Hub.

Identify international markets with growth potential

Once you have identified competitors, the next step is to check the amount of search volume in the local market and in the local language. Then, once you know there is enough local search volume and you know the performance of the local competitors, you can determine if this new market is worth expanding into.

If the search volume for your product or service is high, the effort that will go into SEO for that market will likely be worthwhile, and you can proceed full speed ahead. If the search volume is low or non-existent, it may not be worth the investment, and you may want to consider an alternative market, or you may need to use other channels that grow market visibility for your products and brand first, such as public relations (PR) and paid search (PPC).

This also helps you prioritize specific areas, for example, for countries within the EU. It’s much more effective to hone in on specific markets and languages rather than localizing for the whole EU at once (which is around 50 countries and languages, so a massive effort for international SEO). Treating the entire EU as one market is not very likely to be effective unless you have a super well-known and easily usable product with a large target market. However, this often excludes about 95% of businesses, so individual localization is often much more successful.

2: Align data with business goals

Once you’ve gathered all of your data, you need to start aligning it with your business goals. Having your international SEO strategy align with your overarching business objectives is the best way to maximize results and improve online visibility and organic traffic. It will also make it easier for your marketing team and sales department to work together towards common goals and business growth.

Improve keyword rankings & organic traffic

For starters, try to showcase how international SEO can drive organic traffic growth based on the keyword opportunities you’ve identified. One great way to do this is with SEOmonitor, which shows you how much potential organic traffic you’ll gain over a specific time period if you rank for all the keywords you’ve implemented.

Increase brand visibility

SEO is crucial to enhancing your brand’s visibility in international markets. At first, your business will be new, and people may not trust it. With a strong SEO strategy, your website will slowly increase in rankings in SERPs for localized terms. This, in turn, helps improve brand visibility, which fosters trust and authority in your target market.

When you compare yourself with a local competitor, you can also see how much visibility there is in comparison with you, so you can get a goal to increase visibility within that market by x% within x months.

Drive conversions

The more brand visibility you have, the more likely people are going to visit your website. The more people visit your website, the more conversions you’ll see.

So, based on the figures listed in the two forecast images above, you can determine your target conversion rate and see what you have to do to get there. Most websites are around 2 to 10% on average, depending on the industry, so don’t be too overly ambitious. However, it’s still a great tool because it allows you to see how much your conversions would increase based on the amount of organic traffic you gain.

3: Develop a Strategic Plan with an ROI Forecast

To complete your business case, you’ll need to outline costs, revenue forecasts, and timelines of the entire rollout. This enables you to accurately predict potential gains or losses and help harbor support for international SEO investments.

Resource requirements

Again, SEO is often referred to as “free traffic,” but that’s absolutely not the case. In fact, SEO typically costs more than PPC at the beginning, but it pays off more because of its long-term sustainability. With PPC, you have to keep paying to keep seeing results, but SEO will keep “paying you” for years without you having to touch it.

Of course, this is after the initial SEO engine and implementation workflows are built, which do carry costs. So, in order to determine an accurate ROI forecast, you need to outline these costs ahead of time.

Ensure you have the full costs included for resources, no matter whether you hire an agency or do it in-house. The team implementing the project is all a cost factor, as well as things like gross revenue generated from conversions and profit margin.

Important tip here for cost calculation: make sure you include the cost for a dedicated SEO developer. In my experience, this is the #1 reason SEO projects fail — content doesn’t go live due to a lack of resources. In fact, Aira’s technical SEO survey of 500 SEOs emphasizes this and outlines that technical SEO changes take an average of six months to go live. That’s six months when you could already be generating revenue, rather than changes sitting in an overworked dev’s task list.

Overall, these figures, in comparison with ROI, will be the major factor as to whether or not stakeholders invest in international SEO, so take some time to understand this and be detailed here.

Timelines

Once you have a stronger understanding of resource requirements, you’ll want to create a timeline for the proposed SEO initiatives. Try to highlight the importance of a phased approach here, as this helps give you enough time to see results from your efforts.

Ideally, think in increments of 6-month milestones. This gives you plenty of time for your content to get live, indexed, and start generating conversions. It’s also enough time to establish good operational workflows that are ready to scale over the long run.

ROI forecast

Once you know your costs, timelines, forecasted conversions, and KPI milestones, you can forecast ROI. While this data takes some time to get to, it’s often the single most important factor for getting the budget you need from stakeholders.

I’ll go over a few examples below.

Example 1: E-commerce

Let’s say this e-commerce company wants to expand into Germany. They’ve determined from the search volume available that they can generate an additional 6,000 organic monthly traffic.

They currently have no presence in Germany but want to grow it. They estimate a conversion rate of 2% for the products in which a customer spends an average of €1,290 (the Average Order Value).

The operational costs to implement their SEO strategy are €18,000 per month, which leaves their core growth KPIs at 120 monthly sales from SEO that cost €150 each.

This totals to €154,800 gross revenue from monthly sales and an ROI for their SEO efforts of 760%.

When visualized like this, how likely do you think it is that stakeholders will provide the budget for this vs. when you say that you’ll produce some content and increase keyword rankings? If it were you, which explanation would you perceive as more lucrative?

Example 2: Complex B2B & services

We can use the same approach with a complex B2B company that wants to expand into France. They’re already quite established in France, and based on their research, they can increase their organic monthly traffic by 30% within six months.

They know from experience that organic traffic converts at 2%, so that’s an easy one to uphold, which leaves them with 270 free trial conversions per month, of which 5% of those close to paying customers with the support of the sales department.

They know that their Average Contract Value is $65,000, and with 5% of deals closed, that results in 13 new deals per month, generating a gross revenue of $845,000 per month.

Now, this is how you change the perception of SEO to “slow growth” and “free traffic” into a true money maker that’s worth the effort.

International SEO doesn’t come without costs, but when you’re strategic about it, the long-term benefits are well worth the investment.

In fact, if you’re interested in scaling your business and expanding to new markets, moving forward without an international SEO strategy is like trying to navigate a new city with a blindfold.

Sure, you could probably get yourself from point A to point B, but it will be much easier and much faster when you can see what’s ahead of you and you know what you’re looking for.