International SEO is the practice of optimizing a website to rank well in search results across multiple countries and, often, multiple languages. It combines technical setup — deciding on a site structure (subdirectories, subdomains, or country-code domains), implementing hreflang correctly, and configuring geotargeting — with market-specific strategy: localized keyword research, content that reflects real local search behavior rather than direct translation, and country-relevant link building.
Getting the technical foundation wrong is a common and costly mistake — sites frequently end up with duplicate content across country versions, or search engines showing the wrong country's page to the wrong audience, undermining the whole international effort regardless of how good the market-specific content is.