SEO SOP: Localize a Campaign Before You Launch It in a New Market

Laura Smith, Head of Client Strategy at ICS-digital, says the most useful thing she learned at an agency working in over 100 languages was “the importance of not just translating a campaign, but localising it.” On Unscripted SEO she walked through what goes wrong when a campaign that worked at home gets copied into a new country: a Twitter plan that could not work in German, and a UK-style data story that US state media ignored. This SOP turns her answers into eight checks you run before the brief is signed, so the new market gets researched instead of assumed.

Objective

You finish with a one-page pre-flight for each new market: what your team has not done there before, who the audience is this month, which channels and formats fit the language, how the local press is structured, whether the site is technically ready for the market, and one goal with the metrics each local team will see. The point is to catch the “it worked last time” assumption before it costs a campaign. Laura calls that assumption the biggest pitfall in international work: “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.”

Key Steps

1. List what you have not done in this market, before the brief is signed. Write down every market the campaign touches and mark each one where your team has not run this exact kind of work. For those, tell the client you need time to check before you commit. Laura does this out loud: “sometimes I just have to be like, I don’t actually know. I’ve not done a digital PR campaign in that market or we’ve not done this exact thing in that market.” Writing the list down is our addition; Laura describes saying it to the client.
2. Re-run audience research for this brief and this month. Do not carry the last market’s persona over. Laura’s team uses GWI for audience analysis and goes back to basics on each brief: which channels the audience uses, and how it reacts to advertising. Her rule is “not being afraid to start from scratch,” and the question is what is “relevant to this brief in this specific month.” If you do not have GWI, the same questions work in SparkToro audience research.
3. Profile sub-audiences apart from the country average. If the target is an expat or diaspora group, research that group on its own. Laura’s example: a French audience might be slower to trust a paid ad, “but actually if you’re then targeting people from the UK who are living in Paris, for example, blanket how you market to France isn’t relevant anymore.”
4. Have a native speaker check the channels and formats. Before creative is locked, ask someone who knows the language inside out whether each planned channel and format works there. Laura planned a German campaign around Twitter because the UK version ran on Twitter. Experts in the market told her “Germans don’t use Twitter in the same way. Like the language, the words are literally too long.” She is not fluent in other languages herself, so, in her words, “I do really need to speak to native speakers.”
5. Map the local media before you design the story. For digital PR, find out how the market’s press is structured before you build the data story. In the UK, a city-by-city breakdown can interest regional outlets. The US has state and local media that need stories about their own area. Laura: “you can’t just take a campaign and just break it down by state and just expect all of the state media and local media to think that’s interesting. It just doesn’t work in the same way.”
6. Check the site is technically ready for the market. Confirm hreflang exists and is set up correctly for the target language and region before you send traffic to localized pages. Against Google’s localized-versions documentation: every version lists itself and every alternate, the links are reciprocal, language codes are ISO 639-1 with an optional ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 region, and Google recommends an x-default for visitors who match no version. Laura names hreflang as the issue that comes up most in ICS audits, “even if it is on a site.” For the wider setup, see the international SEO with hreflang strategy. (inferred – Laura names the problem but says she is not a technical SEO and gives no audit steps; the checks come from Google’s documentation.)
7. Set one goal, then pick the metrics each market reports. Keep the overall goal the same in every market and choose the indicative metrics that show progress in each one, adjusted to the work you are doing there. Then decide which numbers each local team sees. Laura’s framing: “what’s the overall goal and what are the indicative metrics that can help us know if we’re hitting that overall goal. And then how does that need to change dependent on the market.” International teams are often split by market and not talking to each other, so the aim is that “each individual person gets to see actually what’s relevant to them.”
8. Front-load the stakeholder map in months one to six. At kickoff, find where the red tape sits across offices and local teams, and bring the client’s internal experts in early instead of working around them. Keep checking over the first one to six months whether data is reaching the right people. Laura: “it kind of comes in at the kind of the kickoff, the set up, the kind of making sure that we get everything in place as early as possible.”

Cautionary Notes

• Translation is the input, not the finish. A correct translation of a campaign built for another market is still a campaign built for another market. Steps 2 to 5 are the localization layer.
• Present is not the same as correct. Finding hreflang tags in the source does not pass step 6. Laura’s tech team regularly finds tags that exist and are still misconfigured.
• Do not slice home-market data by region and call it local. It is the US state-media trap from step 5. Build the local angle into the data collection, not the press release. (inferred)
• Do not chase a hack for AI answers. Laura’s team avoids “the next like hacky thing that might work,” such as chunking content so it reads badly to a person. Write for the human reading it, which matters more when the brand has to sound the same in several languages.
• Be careful with memes in a market you do not know. Laura’s first reaction to brand memes is “it’s cringe.” She thinks some brands can do it, but only with a detailed understanding of the local culture and where the brand fits in it.
• This is practitioner advice, not a measured result. Laura gave these as the way ICS works, with two examples, not as a test with numbers attached. Track your own launches against the goal from step 7.

Tips for Efficiency

• Run steps 1 to 5 before the budget is split by market. The answers change which markets get which channels, so they are cheapest to act on before money is allocated. (inferred)
• Keep the “not done here before” list from step 1 in the kickoff deck. It makes step 8 easier, because the client sees the open questions and who can answer them. (inferred)
• Give the native-speaker check a fixed short brief. Channel list, formats, character-heavy assets and any wordplay. Five questions get a faster answer than “does this work?” (inferred)
• Reuse the goal, not the metrics. The goal from step 7 travels between markets. The indicative metrics are the part you rebuild each time.
• Plan for being remembered as well as found. Laura’s white paper, The Human-Machine Memory Gap, argues that when an AI answer might name only three brands, visibility is not enough; a person has to remember and choose you. Her article The New Shelf Space applies the same idea to retail visibility moving from search rankings to AI retrieval.
• Bring digital PR in early. Step 5 is a PR question as much as an SEO one. If PR still sits in another department, read why half of SEOs are doing digital PR and don’t know it.

Sources & Relevant Episodes

• Laura Smith, ICS-digital – she framed the difference between translating and localizing a campaign as the biggest thing she learned moving to an international agency, and “I’ve done this before” as the biggest pitfall.
• Full interview recap: International SEO Playbook: 5 Checks Before a New Market
• Episode page: Laura Smith on Unscripted SEO · listen on Castos · watch on YouTube
• ICS-digital white paper: The Human-Machine Memory Gap and Distinctiveness Intelligence · Laura’s article: The New Shelf Space
• Google Search Central: Tell Google about localized versions of your page
• More procedures: the full SEO SOP library