International Keyword Research

The instinct is reasonable: you have a keyword list that works, you are entering a new market, so you translate the list. The problem is that a keyword is not a concept, it is the specific string a population types — and the mapping between concept and string is cultural, not linguistic.

Three ways it breaks. Regional vocabulary: Spain searches "móvil", Mexico searches "celular", and a translator given "mobile phone" will produce whichever their own dialect prefers. Borrowed English: in many markets the English term outranks the native one — German developers search "cloud hosting", not a translation of it. Different demand shape: the same product can be a high-volume commodity search in one country and a near-zero niche in another, so a page worth building in one market is not worth building in the next.

Start from the market rather than from your list. Pull search volumes with the country and language actually set, not defaulted. Read the pages currently ranking there — they show you the vocabulary, the page type that wins, and how local competitors frame the product. Ask someone who searches in that market to look at your candidate terms; the ones that read as translated are obvious to a native speaker and invisible in a spreadsheet.

Then map intent to page before writing anything. Two markets frequently need a different page structure for the same product: where one searches for the category, another searches for the problem. Building the same site five times in five languages is the failure this step prevents.

Keyword research is wasted if the localised pages cannot be served and indexed independently. Each language or market version needs its own URL — a subdirectory such as /de/ is the usual choice and inherits the domain's authority. Every version in a set needs hreflang pointing at all the others including itself, with reciprocal return links; broken reciprocity is the most common hreflang error by a wide margin. The lang attribute has to match the content, and each page needs its own title and meta description in its own language.

Switching currency or language by IP address on a single URL is the pattern to avoid: search engines only ever see whatever the crawl location returns, so the other versions effectively do not exist.