Best Global SEO Agency: Top 5 Picks for 2023
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An SEO firm with a global presence is the ideal solution for any company that wants to target multiple countries and languages simultaneously. However, finding one with the required expertise isn’t so easy.
In this article, you’ll learn what a global SEO agency can do for your business, why you should hire one, and how you go about doing it.
We’ll also provide a curated list of the five best international SEO agencies in this space. Let’s get started.
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Top 5 Global SEO Agencies of 2023
Now that you know how to choose a reputable agency and what to avoid, here are our top five picks of the best global SEO agencies.
1) Single Grain
- Top Clients: Amazon, Uber, Airbnb
- Countries Covered: Worldwide
- Pricing: Projects start at $10,000+
Single Grain is a leading SEO firm with over 12 years of experience in SEO consultancy and strategy implementation. We have worked with both enterprise-level clients and SMBs from dozens of industries all over the world.
We use the latest international SEO strategies to consistently rank for highly competitive terms and hit the featured snippet—the famous “rank zero”—despite all of the changes Google has made to its search algorithm. We have a team of certified SEO experts with a great work ethic and lots of experience who generate excellent results.
Our diverse portfolio of clients includes large international companies like Uber, Amazon, Airbnb and Lyft and we pride ourselves in taking a multi-market agency approach that engages audiences natively.
Book My Free Global SEO Marketing Consultation
2) Boostability
- Top Clients: 11th Street Coffee, Ivanti, JD Power
- Countries Covered: Worldwide
- Pricing: Custom
Boostability is a global white label SEO company with local agencies distributed around the world. They work mostly with small businesses and scale their agencies with full-service white label SEO campaigns.
The agency works with partners in 17 countries across Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Oceania. Their translation services include French, German, Finnish, Dutch, and English.
Dive Deeper: How to Use Multicultural Marketing in Your Digital Advertising
3) Victorious
- Top Clients: Lime, SoFi, Spotify
- Countries Covered: Worldwide
- Pricing: Projects start at $1,000+
Victorious is an award-winning agency that offers SEO services for small and large businesses alike throughout the world. With a reported 98% customer satisfaction rating, Victorious’ SEO experts leverage the latest technology to conquer ultra-competitive search terms.
As one of the top SEO companies located in the heart of Silicon Valley, they provide their clients with international keyword research, multilingual SEO-optimized content, and technical solutions.
Dive Deeper: How Zero Search Volume Keywords Can Generate a Ton of Traffic
4) Pearl Lemon
- Top Clients: Astteria London, EmergeOne, IndieLaw
- Countries Covered: Worldwide
- Pricing: Projects start at $1,000+
Pearl Lemon is a London-based SEO agency that works with international clients in industries such as e-commerce, gambling, and gaming. Founded in 2014, Pearl Lemon has developed an integrated approach that allows their clients to rank their pages for multiple languages effectively.
As the highest ranked company in DesignRush’s list of the best SEO companies in the UK, Pearl Lemon offers international SEO services for companies looking to increase their global reach.
5) Brainlabs
- Top Clients: American Express, CloudFlare, Walmart
- Countries Covered: Worldwide
- Pricing: Custom
Brainlabs is one of the largest SEO agencies with over 700 employees distributed in a dozen cities around the world. Founded in 2012, this firm recently bought several major agencies such as Distilled (SEO), Hanapin (PPC), User Conversion (CRO), among others.
Their team of country account managers creates SEO campaigns for clients in dozens of industries, with an emphasis on retail, technology, and finance.
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What Does a Global SEO Agency Do?
If you work for a brand that’s expanding internationally and you need to get more targeted visitors at low costs for each of its global subsidiaries, you need to plan your international SEO campaign. You could create an SEO campaign for each country, hire marketers to handle the work, and manage them individually. Or you could hire a global SEO agency to do this work for you.
A global SEO agency is responsible for executing search engine optimization campaigns for clients with a multi-national presence, applying international SEO techniques to rank a website for all of their clients’ international markets.
These SEO agencies generally have offices around the world that implement their clients’ strategies and content in each country.
Book My Free Global SEO Marketing Consultation
3 Reasons Why You Should Hire an International SEO Agency
Although it’s reasonable to think that any ol’ SEO agency can help you expand your business around the world, the key to a successful SEO campaign that reaches an audience outside of your local or national demographic is international SEO.
Let’s take a look at the top three reasons to hire a global SEO agency.
Follow International SEO Best Practices
International SEO focuses on optimizing a website so that the search engines recognize the countries and languages in which you want to rank your site.
The differences between traditional SEO and its international counterpart are minor but crucial. An SEO practitioner who’s not trained or experienced in executing international SEO campaigns will have a hard time ranking a website for multiple countries and languages.
In contrast, an international SEO agency takes an integrated approach that follows all the best practices to rank a website for any country and language, such as:
- Using the hreflang tag properly: Google uses this tag to understand which language and country-specific version of it should a page rank for. Hreflang tags also prevent a duplicate content issue because you explicitly indicate that there are alternative pages on your domain.
- Choosing a correct URL structure: This includes deciding whether to use a country or language-specific domain, subdomain, subdirectory, or dynamic parameter.
- Building links on local websites: Getting links from sites located in the country a website wants to rank for can make a difference.
Shape Your Marketing Strategy for Each Global Audience
Two challenges you’ll face when trying to sell your products or service in a different country are:
- Acquiring traffic from different countries
- Providing content to visitors in their regional language
International SEO (aka multilingual SEO and global SEO) is the solution for both these challenges. When brands take into consideration the native cultures and traditions of other regions, connecting with the people of that country is a lot more streamlined.
Translation is essential here because of language and cultural differences. Even the small but noticeable differences between languages like American and British English can break a marketing campaign without proper translation.
I don’t recommend machine translations for different languages because auto-translations are not always accurate, and if you don’t speak that language, you won’t catch the errors. Inaccurate translations hamper the user’s experience (and may make your site look like fraudulent), as well as cause duplicate content issues. Always get a native speaker to translate your content into the targeted country’s regional language.
This is why hiring an international SEO agency is an excellent idea: They will have an expert network of local linguists to rewrite their client’s content for each market they operate in.
Leverage the Latest SEO Trends and Tactics
Any SEO agency—global or locally focused—must stay informed with the latest SEO trends. Since international agencies are large enough to have offices around the world and hire the best local talent, hiring one almost guarantees they will execute the latest, most effective SEO tactics.
Some of the global search engine optimization strategies that can effectively improve the presence of a website internationally are:
- International keyword research
- Competitor analysis
- Multilingual content marketing
- User experience optimization
- Multilingual content optimization
- Global link building
- Site speed optimization
- Hreflang tag implementation
- Site architecture optimization
- Technical SEO implementation
Dive Deeper: International SEO: How to Optimize Your Website to Capture a Global Audience
How to Choose a Global SEO Agency
Like selecting any search engine optimization company, when choosing a global firm, there are certain things to look for. Here are three important points.
A Strong International Network of Country Account Managers
First and foremost, a global SEO agency must have people working in or experienced with the country your business operates in. Ideally, that should include having offices in your target countries, although having qualified employees who target those markets works almost as well.
For example, if your company is located in France and wants to target North America, hire an agency with offices in both regions.
Also, if your business is in expansion mode, make sure the agency is located or experienced in the markets your company will expand to. Discuss this point thoroughly before hiring an agency.
Deep Industry Expertise
Any SEO expert can audit a website, optimize its tags, and research keywords regardless of their clients’ country. However, uncovering intent, defining a keyword plan, and knowing which outlets are ideal to pitch for links requires a lot of experience in a given industry. Hire an SEO agency that has proven technical excellence in your specific industry.
A Clear SEO Strategy
There are countless horror stories of companies that hire SEO firms that use a lot of jargon to sell their services and end up underperforming—or, worse yet, they end up with a penalty.
Before you hire a global SEO agency, make sure they can explain their SEO strategy clearly—and that includes the implementation of the international SEO best practices.
Here are four questions you should ask that will help you understand their strategy:
- Can you explain your SEO approach in under 60 seconds? If they can’t explain their process succinctly, beware.
- What’s your favorite URL structure for international SEO? Take notes and think about the cost-benefit relationship of their suggestions.
- How do you acquire links? Anything content or outreach-related is good; anything purchased is a big no-no.
- How do you measure results? If they say organic traffic increases, sales, and leads (among other metrics), great. If their answers include words like “rankings” and “brand awareness,” think twice about hiring them.
Dive Deeper: 14 Effective SEO Techniques to Drive Organic Traffic in 2023
3 Red Flags to Avoid
Continuing on from the last section, let’s examine three potential red flags you may come across.
🚩 Lack of Case Studies
Look for case studies that detail how the agency handled past clients. The crucial aspects you want to research are:
- The way the agency discovered the problems the client had
- The metrics they defined to measure the campaign’s performance based on the problems previously found
- The solution they presented (and the logic they used to develop it)
- The way they executed their solution
- The results they generated from it
Also, prioritize companies that have worked with clients in your space approximately within the past three years in your target geographic regions.
🚩 Recent Results > Years of Experience
The SEO world changes extremely fast thanks to Google’s changes in its ranking algorithm. Agencies that boast about their “years of experience” in the field prove little about their capacity to generate results today.
Recency and relevancy are more important when it comes to results than the years they have been driving them. This isn’t to say that it’s bad if an agency has 20 years in the field; it’s only irrelevant when they can’t show any recent results.
🚩 Unclear Team and Account Managers
Some unscrupulous marketers out there hire a bunch of freelancers from around the world and call it “international SEO.” Do we have to tell you that’s not how it’s done? 🙃
Ensure that the agency you hire can present you with the account managers who will handle your campaigns in each country in which your business operates. If they are in the same city as you are, have a meeting and see their offices. These are the people who will help you expand and conquer the global markets; it’s the least you could do.
Summary: Hiring a Top Global SEO Agency
Let’s face it: Hiring a single agency capable of handling SEO campaigns in multiple geographic regions can be tough. In today’s digital world, it’s best to start small, get an initial set of results that motivate your team, and scale from there.
We want to close this article with a quick summary of how to hire a global SEO agency:
- Decide what countries your business is expanding to.
- Make a list of all of the languages these countries speak—that includes country-specific variations of the same language, such as American and British English.
- If your aggregate list of countries and languages is less than three, you may want to follow our guide on international SEO and see if you can do it yourself.
- If your team can’t handle this work or if your list of targeted countries and languages is greater than three, pick one of the five agencies we mentioned in this article.
Remember that SEO is a channel that takes time to work. The earlier you start working on your global SEO strategy, the better it will be for your business’ growth.
Schedule your FREE consultation with Single Grain’s experts to discuss your global SEO marketing requirements. 👇
