We get a version of the same brief from at least two or three prospective clients every month. The company has strong rankings in India. They want to expand into the UAE, or Germany, or Southeast Asia. They have tried running their Indian content strategy in the new market, sometimes with translations, sometimes in English as-is, and nothing has worked.
SEO is relevant in those markets. The strategy just does not travel the way they thought it would.
Why Indian SEO Fails Abroad
Search behaviour in different markets reflects different buying cultures, different decision-making processes, and different levels of category maturity. A user in Bengaluru searching for a real estate developer types "2BHK flats near Whitefield under 80 lakhs." A user in Dubai searching for the equivalent property types "apartments for sale in Dubai Creek Harbour", no mention of price, because price transparency norms in that market are different.
If you are targeting Dubai with content optimised for Indian search intent patterns, you will rank for keywords no one in Dubai is actually searching. Your traffic numbers will look fine in Search Console. Your enquiries from that market will be near zero.
Technical Signals That Markets Require
Beyond keyword research, international SEO involves a set of technical signals that many agencies building for a single domestic market never need to think about. Hreflang tags tell Google which version of a page to serve in which country. Without them, your UAE content may be competing against your Indian content for the same rankings, causing both to underperform.
Domain structure matters too. A subdirectory (gomarkiq.in/ae/) signals to Google that the UAE content is part of the same authoritative domain. A subdomain (ae.gomarkiq.in) is treated more like a separate site, which means you are starting from zero authority in that market. Most businesses default to subdomain because it is easier technically. It is usually the wrong call for SEO purposes.
What the Right Approach Looks Like
For a jewellery brand we have been working with across India and the Gulf, the process started with market-specific keyword research conducted with local consultants in Dubai and Riyadh, not translated from Hindi, not approximated from English generic terms, but researched directly in the markets they were targeting.
We found that Gulf consumers searching for gold jewellery used terminology and intent patterns that had almost no overlap with Indian search behaviour. We built entirely new content clusters for those markets, structured the domain correctly, built local backlinks through Gulf-based lifestyle publications, and set up the technical hreflang architecture properly.
Eight months later, that brand ranks on page one in the UAE for seven of its twelve target keywords. None of that ranking came from repurposing Indian content. It came from treating each market as its own project.