Working notes on international SEO and AI search visibility — checklists I actually use and opinions I am willing to defend. One substantial piece a month, each carrying something you could not get from a generic SEO blog.
Your second market underperforms and the technical audit came back clean. The five-dimension matrix that explains it in an afternoon — and why the fix is rarely more translation, and sometimes fewer pages.
Read the note →Translation optimises for meaning; SEO localisation optimises for how people search. The eight things a translator cannot know from your source page, and the brief that closes the gap.
Read the note →The usual first EU market and the most often underestimated. The competitive set you did not analyse, compound nouns that break translated keyword research, the trust signals German buyers look for, and the imprint German law actually requires.
Read the note →Ranking first does not mean being cited. How engines actually choose sources, why they answer the same question differently in every language, and why your smallest market is the one to win first.
Read the note →The cost comparison against an agency and an in-house hire, stated plainly — and the three situations where a fractional lead is the wrong answer, which most articles on the subject leave out.
Read the note →Architecture, hreflang, content parity, per-market intent, geotargeting and measurement — the checks I run on a multi-market site, in the order I run them, with the three findings that account for most of the damage.
Read the checklist →What changes when health content crosses a border: YMYL scrutiny, medical review as a scheduling constraint rather than a checkbox, claims that do not survive a border, and E-E-A-T a machine can actually read.
Read the note →One substantial piece a month rather than a stream of short posts. Each one carries either an original checklist, a dataset, or numbers from my own site — if a note has nothing in it you could not get from any other SEO blog, it does not get published.
No client case studies yet. I cannot publish my employer's data, and I will not write a case study about a client without their written permission. When there is one, it will appear here with real figures and a named client, or not at all.