Most international SEO problems I get called about start the same way: a campaign that worked at home gets copied into a new market, word for word, and then nobody can explain why it flopped. Laura Smith, Head of Client Strategy at ICS-digital, sees that from the other side. Her UK agency works in over 100 languages across digital and translation, and she has spent 15+ years in marketing, most of the recent ones in digital PR and strategy. I pulled the practitioner moves out of our Unscripted SEO conversation and turned them into a playbook you can run before your next new-market kickoff.
Localize the campaign instead of translating it
Laura’s first lesson after moving to ICS was the gap between a translated campaign and a localized one. Plenty of agencies take one strong idea and run it the same way in every market. She doesn’t call that wrong. She just thinks the real work starts after that.
“I feel like the actual exciting bit of the campaign comes from actually localising it to the culture of the market that you’re going live in.”
Her example is a German campaign where she planned to go all in on Twitter, because Twitter was carrying the UK version. Experts in the German market pushed back. Germans didn’t use the platform the same way, and there was a mechanical reason too: “The words are literally too long.” They didn’t fit the character limit.
You won’t catch that from a keyword tool. Laura works at an international agency and says plainly she isn’t fluent in other languages, so she goes to native speakers who know where work can land.
Run five checks before you take on a new market
Everything Laura described about new markets comes down to a short list. Here’s the order I’d run it in.
Audit hreflang, even when it’s already on the site
Hreflang is the technical issue that comes up most in ICS conversations and audits. Laura doesn’t claim to be a technical SEO, but her tech team’s pattern is familiar: the tags exist, and they still aren’t configured for the best outcome, or someone attempted them without thinking through every variation. Present and correct are two different checks. If you need a refresher on the setup, start with our international SEO with hreflang strategy.
Re-run audience analysis for the exact segment
A blanket read on “the French audience” stops helping once your target is UK expats living in Paris. Laura’s team goes back to audience analysis for the specific brief and asks what channels that group actually uses right now. Her line for it is “not being afraid to start from scratch.”
Ask native speakers how the channels behave
That’s the Twitter lesson again. Channel habits, advertising trust and platform mechanics vary by market, and the people who live there will spot the problem in minutes.
Say “I don’t know” before you promise anything
Laura’s biggest pitfall isn’t technical at all.
“I think the biggest pitfall is thinking, I’ve done this before, so I’ll just do it the way I’ve always done it, and not digging into the market, or even just being open that you don’t know.”
Her fix is a sentence you can use with a client this week: we think it’s possible, but let us go away and look into this in more detail so we feel confident. In her words, “you have to be very honest with yourself when you don’t know.”
Turn these checks into a procedure with the SEO SOP: Localize a Campaign Before You Launch It in a New Market – the one-page PDF is free inside The Vault.
Pitch US media differently than UK media
The clearest example of the “I’ve done this before” trap is digital PR in the US. Laura spent years in digital PR and calls it “a completely different media landscape to what we have in the UK.” The US has state media and local outlets that need local stories.
In the UK, breaking a data story down by city can make it relevant to regional press. Take the same campaign, slice it by state, and you can’t expect state and local media to care. That’s the mechanism behind a lot of flat international PR results.
- Build the local angle into the data collection, not the press release.
- Check which outlets in the target market actually cover data stories.
- Treat each country’s media map as its own research task.
If digital PR still feels like somebody else’s department, read why half of SEOs are doing digital PR and don’t know it. Laura remembers the head of SEO explaining to her why a link mattered back in 2017. Now she thinks “the really interesting bit now is the link to brand.”
Settle reporting and red tape in month one
Multi-market clients bring more than analytics headaches. Laura says the teams “can be quite fractured as well,” with separate market teams that don’t talk to each other, so the agency ends up as the go-between.
Two moves from her answer:
- One reporting framework across markets. Start with the overall goal and the indicative metrics that show whether you’re hitting it, then adjust per market.
- Front-load the red tape. Find out where approvals and data gaps will bite during kickoff, and keep checking over the first one to six months. Work with the client’s internal experts instead of around them.
Get remembered as well as retrieved
Laura’s view on AI search is the same in every market: skip “the next hacky thing that might work” and build for the long term. That includes not chunking content in a way that reads badly to a person. She wants content that is “not just appearing, but also the human reading it,” which matters more when the brand has to sound consistent across languages.
That thinking is the core of The Human-Machine Memory Gap, the ICS white paper Laura authored, and its Distinctiveness Intelligence framework. The white paper covers the behavioral science side, what’s affecting AI, and sector examples. For the retail version, read her article The New Shelf Space, which looks at retail visibility moving from search rankings to AI retrieval.
Before your next international kickoff, run the five checks, rebuild the PR angle for the market you’re entering, and find out who on the client side owns each market’s numbers. You can connect with Laura Smith on LinkedIn for more of how ICS-digital approaches it.