An international SEO audit checklist for businesses selling abroad: targeting, URL structure, hreflang, localisation, local links and per-market reporting.
If your site already sells into more than one country, you've probably seen it happen: a buyer in Germany lands on the UK pricing page, or the Irish version outranks the UK one at home. An international SEO audit tells you how often that's happening and what it's costing. It checks, market by market, whether search engines are showing the right page to the right buyer, and whether each market has what it needs to compete once they arrive.
The reassuring thing about international audits is that most of what they find is small. Hreflang tags pointing at redirected URLs, a country selector that hides pages from Google, a currency that doesn't match the market. Each one is fixable in a sprint. The expensive problems are rarer and structural, and those are the ones worth finding early.
This is the checklist we work through, in order. It assumes you're already live in at least two markets. If you're still deciding whether and where to expand, our international SEO guide covers that side; this piece picks up after launch.
What should an international SEO audit cover?
Seven checks, grouped under three questions. Can Google tell your markets apart? Is each market's content fit for the people searching there? And can you see what each market is earning? The first is technical, the second editorial, the third measurement. The technical checks tend to get the attention, but the other two are where a lot of the revenue sits.
The checklist in full:
- The page ranking in each country is that market's page
- URL structure is consistent, with no automatic redirects by location
- Hreflang is complete, reciprocal and points at live, canonical URLs
- Content is localised where language changes buying behaviour, and left alone where it doesn't
- Keyword coverage is built from local demand rather than translation
- Each market is earning some local authority
- Search Console, analytics and the CRM can report each market separately
Is Google showing the right page in each country?
Start with the evidence rather than the code. In Search Console, filter the performance report by country and look at which URLs are earning impressions there. If your French pages are picking up French impressions, good. If your UK pages are taking most of the French impressions while the French pages sit near zero, Google hasn't accepted your targeting, whatever the tags say.
We do this for the queries that matter most in each market, then spot-check live results from inside the country using a SERP tool with location settings. Together they show where targeting is working and where it isn't. Just so you know, for reference: Google retired Search Console's International Targeting report in 2022, so the country filter is now the main first-party view you have.
Does the URL structure make each market unambiguous?
Subfolders, subdomains and country domains can all work. Trouble starts when they're mixed, or when a site moves between them without a full redirect map. We list every market's URL pattern and check it holds across every template, including the ones people forget: blog, help centre, PDFs and checkout.
Then we look for automatic redirects based on location. Google's own guidance is to avoid them, because Googlebot mostly crawls from US addresses and a redirect by IP can stop it ever seeing your other markets. A banner suggesting the local version does the same job for visitors without hiding anything from crawlers.
Is hreflang complete and pointing at the right pages?
Hreflang tells Google which language and country each version is for, and which pages are alternatives to each other. Our hreflang implementation guide covers how to set it up. The audit's job is different: to measure how much of what's there actually works.
We crawl every version and check four things for each set of alternates. Every page lists the others and itself. Every URL in the set returns a 200 rather than a redirect or a 404. Every URL is the canonical version. And the language and country codes are valid. The output is a coverage figure per market, meaning the share of pages with a clean set, plus the templates causing the failures.
That last part is good news for your developers. Hreflang problems are nearly always template problems, so fixing one template can clear thousands of errors at once rather than needing page-by-page work.
Is the content localised, or only translated?
This is where an international audit earns its fee, and it's the question tools can't answer for you. For each market we read the commercial pages as a buyer would, ideally with a native speaker, and check what changes buying behaviour: prices in local currency with tax shown the way that market expects, contact details and hours that suit the time zone, proof from customers the buyer would recognise, and legal or compliance details that differ by country.
We also check the opposite: markets translated when they didn't need to be. Our work with Hubject, a global eRoaming platform for EV charging, is a good example. Their campaigns in non-English markets relied on manual translation that added cost and slowed execution without improving results. We cut translation back to the regions where local language made a measurable difference and moved the budget into acquisition.
That was paid media rather than SEO, but the question carries across directly, and the wider programme delivered 610% year-on-year growth in customer acquisition. In plain English: translate where the market buys in its own language, and don't pay to translate where it doesn't. Your Search Console country data will usually show which is which.
Is each market built on local demand and local authority?
Two checks here. The first is keyword coverage. We compare what each market's pages target with what buyers there actually search for, using the local keyword databases. Translated keyword lists leave gaps you can't see from home, and our piece on international keyword research sets out how local demand is built. The audit measures the gap between the pages you have and the demand that exists.
The second is authority. A strong UK link profile helps the whole domain, but it doesn't fully carry into a local results page where every competitor has links from that country's trade press, associations and partners. We list referring domains per market, along with the local sites linking to whoever outranks you there. International SEO best practice on links is steady and local rather than bulk and generic.
Can you see what each market is earning?
The last check is measurement, and it decides whether any of the others can be proven. We look at whether Search Console, analytics and your CRM all record market the same way, so a German enquiry is labelled German from first click to closed deal. Where they disagree, reporting drifts into a blended view that hides which markets are working.
This is usually a small job: a country or language field in the CRM, consistent page grouping in analytics, and a saved Search Console view per market. It turns the audit from a one-off report into something you can check against every quarter.
How long does an international SEO audit take, and what does it cost?
Our SEO audits start from £2,000 plus VAT and take 2 to 4 weeks. International sites usually sit above the starting price, because each market adds templates, languages and a set of local results to review, and a large multi-market site tends to need the full four weeks. We scope by market up front, so you know the price before we begin.
At the end you get a plan per market and a shared list of template fixes, each ranked by what it's likely to be worth. A fix that clears hreflang errors across twelve markets comes first; a translation question on one low-revenue market can wait.
Questions we get asked
What is an international SEO audit?
It's a review of a multi-country or multi-language website that checks whether search engines show the right version to each market, and whether each version is built to win there. It covers URL structure, hreflang, localisation, local keyword coverage, local links and per-market measurement. It should end in a ranked plan, not a list of errors.
Can you audit or fix our hreflang?
Yes. We measure hreflang coverage for every market, trace failures back to the templates causing them, and write fixes your developers can apply. Once the changes are live we're glad to recheck them with a fresh crawl and Search Console.
What are the most important international SEO best practices?
Keep each market unambiguous with one consistent URL structure and complete hreflang, avoid automatic redirects by location, and build content from local demand rather than translation. After that, earn some authority in each market and measure each one separately. Most of what we find in audits traces back to one of those.
Do we need a separate audit for each country?
No. One audit covers every market, because most issues sit in shared templates and fixing them once helps everywhere. The audit does include a section per market, since content and competition differ by country.
What's the difference between international and multilingual SEO?
Multilingual SEO is about languages, international SEO is about countries, and most businesses selling abroad need some of both. Spanish pages for Spain and for Mexico are an international question inside one language; English and Welsh pages for the UK are a multilingual question inside one country.
Where we fit
We run international SEO for UK businesses selling into Europe and North America, and an audit like this is usually where we start, because it shows both of us where the money is. If you'd like to see how the wider work runs, our page on working with us as an international SEO agency sets it out.
If you're live in several markets and not sure which are pulling their weight, send us the site and the markets you sell into. We'll tell you what we'd check first.
