Multilingual SEO services, checked on 195 sites

Before writing about multilingual SEO services, I checked the one thing every one of these services promises to get right: hreflang, the tags that tell Google which language version to show to whom. On 24 October 2026 I ran the same script on 195 sites. 45 companies that rank in Google US for «multilingual seo services» and «international seo services», the Fortune 100, and 50 of the largest Ukrainian brands.

The companies that sell this work mostly get it right: 14 of the 16 that use hreflang in their HTML have no errors. The Fortune 100 do not. Of the 20 that use it, 9 have at least one real mistake, and HP announces 81 language versions with 47 invalid codes.

That gap is the whole case for hiring someone. Multilingual SEO is not hard to understand. It is hard to keep correct once a site has ten languages, three CMS teams and a few years of history.

Key takeaways

• 9 of 20 Fortune 100 sites with hreflang have at least one error. Wrong codes (HP, IBM, Chevron), alternates that redirect or return errors, pages that forget to list themselves, one-way links.
• The most common mistake in Ukraine is history. Big brands removed their Russian versions, but four still announce «ru» in hreflang, and those URLs now redirect to the Ukrainian homepage.
• Half the companies selling «multilingual SEO services» are translation agencies. In the top 40 for that query, 10 results are translation or localization companies. For «international seo services», there are none.
• Published prices sit mostly between $1,500 and $5,000 a month, with hreflang setup alone quoted at $3,000–8,000. Every one of the 9 «best agency» lists in the top results was written by a company that put itself first.
• Check one thing before you sign: ask the vendor to run an hreflang audit on your site in the first call. If they cannot read the result to you, they will not fix it.

What multilingual SEO services actually include

The word «multilingual» hides two jobs that used to belong to different companies.

The first is language: researching what people in each market actually type, writing or adapting the content, and keeping the tone native. A Spanish speaker in Mexico and one in Spain search with different words. A German product page translated word by word reads like a manual. That is where translation and localization companies are strong.

The second is search engineering: URL structure, hreflang, canonical tags, sitemaps, redirects, crawl budget across versions, links from each market, and measuring each country separately. That is where SEO agencies are strong.

You need both. And the search results show the market is still split down the middle:

For «multilingual seo services», 10 of the top 40 results are translation or localization companies: BLEND first, PoliLingua second, DEMA third, then Tomedes, Day Translations, Ulatus, Acolad and others. For «international seo services», not one. Same work, two vocabularies, two different kinds of supplier. The term you search with decides which kind you find.

Neither kind is wrong. But if a translation company sells you «multilingual SEO», ask who will handle hreflang and redirects. If an SEO agency sells it, ask who will write in Polish.

We checked hreflang on 195 sites

The test is simple, and you can repeat it on your own site. For each homepage the script:

• reads every hreflang tag in the HTML (and, if there are none, looks for hreflang in the XML sitemap);
• validates each code against ISO 639-1 for the language and ISO 3166-1 for the region;
• checks that the page lists itself, that there is an x-default, and that no code appears twice;
• opens up to 10 alternates without following redirects, checks they answer 200, and checks that each one links back to the homepage.

Google needs those links to go both ways. If page A says «my German version is B» and B does not say «my English version is A», Google may ignore the pair. That rule is the source of most of what follows.

The vendors of multilingual SEO are the cleanest group: 14 of 16 without a single error. Not every vendor needs hreflang on its own site, and 15 of 38 that opened have none, which is fine for an English-only agency. The Fortune 100 are the messiest: 26 of 75 declare hreflang at all, and only 11 of the 20 that do it in HTML pass every check.

Wrong codes: the mistake that looks like nothing

A language code looks like trivia until you see what happens when it is wrong. Google simply ignores the tag, and the version you built for the UK competes with the US one.

HP is the clearest case I have seen. Its US homepage lists 81 alternates, and 47 codes are invalid. They are written country first, language second: «gb-en» instead of en-GB, «jp-ja» instead of ja-JP. Several use internal region names with underscores, like «emea_africa-en». IBM uses «en-uk», but there is no country UK in ISO 3166; the code is en-GB. Chevron uses «in-id», where «in» is the retired code for Indonesian.

Alternates that redirect, and one that leads to «/undefined»

Every URL in hreflang should be the final address. Not a redirect, not a 404. 5 of the 20 Fortune sites break that rule. Home Depot's Canadian alternate redirects to another domain. IBM's Taiwan English version sends visitors back to the US homepage. PepsiCo and ADM point at addresses that redirect to a slightly different spelling of the same URL.

The strangest one is in the Ukrainian sample. On SOCAR's Ukrainian site, the hreflang link for the Ukrainian version redirects to «/undefined». That is what a JavaScript template prints when a variable never got a value. The Russian alternate returns 404.

The Ukrainian mistake: the language is gone, the tag is not

This one I did not expect, and it is very specific to Ukraine. Over the last few years many big brands removed their Russian-language versions. The pages are gone. The hreflang tags are not.

ATB, MOYO, MAKEUP and MHP still announce a «ru» version on their homepages. Follow the link and you land back on the Ukrainian homepage via a 302 or 308 redirect. Google keeps being told there is a Russian page, keeps checking it, and keeps finding a redirect. Nothing catastrophic, but it is exactly the kind of leftover that nobody owns after a redesign.

The Ukrainian sample is otherwise clean on codes: none of the 25 sites wrote «ua» instead of «uk», a mistake I often see on smaller Ukrainian sites. But 16 of 25 have no x-default, and 8 have at least one alternate that does not answer 200.

We ran it on our own site

A test like this is only fair if you run it on yourself, so I crawled all 743 URLs in the seoquick.com.ua sitemaps, in three languages. Every page has hreflang, every code is valid, every page lists itself and every pair links back. We found one page pair where the Ukrainian alternate was an old address that redirects, and we fixed it in the same release as this article.

Our client sites that run hreflang in the HTML passed too: a Moldovan kids' store in Romanian and Russian, and two Ukrainian stores in two languages each. Four of four, no errors.

Want this check on your site?

Send me your domain. I will run the same hreflang audit on your key templates and send you the list: wrong codes, redirects, missing return links, the leftovers from old versions. You get the raw results, not a pitch.

Free, and it commits you to nothing.

Book a call

How to check your own hreflang

For one page, your browser's «view source» and a search for «hreflang» is enough. For a site, use a crawler or an SEO platform; both SE Ranking and Semrush report hreflang errors in their site audits, including missing return links and wrong codes. And for a quick look from the terminal, this prints every hreflang tag on a page with the status code of each alternate:

curl -s https://www.example.com/ \
  | grep -o '<link[^>]*hreflang[^>]*>' \
  | sed -E 's/.*hreflang="?([^" ]+)"?.*href="?([^" >]+)"?.*/\1 \2/' \
  | while read code url; do
      echo "$(curl -s -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code}' "$url")  $code  $url"
    done

Anything other than 200 in the first column is a problem. Then open two of the alternates and check that each one lists the page you started from. If the list is long, that is a job for a crawler.

One thing the script cannot see: hreflang in sitemaps. Big sites often keep it there instead of in the HTML. Microsoft, Nike and American Express do, and so did 7 of the vendors and one Ukrainian brand. That is a legitimate choice, but then the sitemap is the thing to audit.

The tools I use for this, with a disclosure

SEOquick is a partner of both SE Ranking and Semrush, and the links here are referral links: if you subscribe through them, we earn a commission at no cost to you. We pay for both and use both, so here is what each does for multilingual work.

We compared the two on 26 real sites against Search Console in SE Ranking vs Semrush. Short version: they disagree with each other and with reality more in some countries than in others, so check the market you care about.

What a good multilingual SEO service delivers

When I read a proposal for multilingual or international SEO, ours included, I look for these, in roughly this order.

Keyword research per market, not per translation

A translated keyword list is the most common shortcut and the most expensive one. COSEOM puts keyword research at $1,500–3,000 per market in its own breakdown, and that is the line I would cut last. The phrase that sells in Kraków is rarely the dictionary translation of the phrase that sells in Chicago.

A URL structure decided once

Folders (/de/), subdomains (de.example.com) or country domains (example.de). Each works. Mixing them after launch does not. Ask the vendor why they recommend one for your case, and what it costs to change later.

hreflang that is tested, not just added

Setup is quoted at $3,000–8,000 in COSEOM's list. That number only makes sense if it includes a test like the one above, repeated after every release. Adding the tags takes an afternoon. Keeping 81 versions consistent for three years is the job.

Links from each market

A German page ranks with German links. On LinkedIn I put it this way, about link building in general: «Remember! Relevance is more important than authority and traffic.» For a new market that means local media, local directories, local partners, not more links from the domain that already ranks at home.

AI search in each language

ChatGPT and Perplexity answer in the user's language and cite sources in that language when they can find them. A market without good local pages gets answers built from your competitors' pages. I check AI visibility per language the same way I check rankings per country.

Translation with AI, review by a native speaker

AI translation is now good enough to do the first draft of most pages. I wrote on LinkedIn recently that «The right-crafted prompts can beat well-known experts.» But a native editor still catches the phrase nobody in that country would say, and the price difference is large. Flying Cat publishes $0.50 a word for SEO translation; BLEND's translation plans start at $0.12.

What multilingual and international SEO costs

These are the figures I could find on the companies' own pages or in the lists that rank for these searches. Where the same agency is quoted differently in different lists, I used its own figure.

Two things stand out. First, translation companies and SEO agencies price in the same corridor, roughly $1,500 to $5,000 a month to start. Second, the lists contradict each other badly. WebFX is quoted at $2,900, $3,000 and $8,000 a month in three different lists. Omniscient's own page says $120,000 a year; one competitor's list says $10,000 a month, another says $2,500. Get the number in writing from the vendor.

The ranges the lists give for the whole market: $1,500–15,000+ a month (COSEOM), $2,000–10,000+ (SUSO), $3,000–25,000 (Embarque). The extra cost per additional country, in COSEOM's breakdown, is $1,000–2,000 a month, and content localization runs $200–500 a page.

Who writes the «best multilingual SEO agencies» lists

I read the 9 lists that rank in the top results for these two searches. All 9 were published by a company that put itself at number one: Translated, Loopex Digital, Flying Cat, Embarque, Siege Media, Rock The Rankings, Omniscient Digital, COSEOM and SUSO Digital. One of them is a translation company; the other eight are SEO or content agencies.

The «multilingual» lists and the «international» lists barely overlap. The agency named most often across all 9 is Adapt Worldwide, in 6. Ignite Visibility is in 5, Delante and WebFX in 4. The criteria the lists agree on are sensible: technical depth and hreflang (8 of 9), native-language quality (6), case studies (6), market expertise (5) and price transparency (5).

I am not adding another ranking. The table above has the prices; the test above shows who keeps their own hreflang in order.

Our multilingual and foreign-market work

We have been promoting English-language sites at least since 2017, when I wrote our first case about it, and today I run an English-language project of my own, UNmiss, alongside SEOquick. Here is what we can show without breaking anyone's confidence:

The games platform is the biggest multilingual project we have run: around 30 language versions and rankings in 176 countries by SE Ranking's count. During our engagement its US keywords in Google's top 100 grew by 61%. I wrote more about it in the article on enterprise SEO agencies.

How to choose: questions for the first call

• «Can you run an hreflang check on our site now?» A good vendor will happily do it during the call or send it the same day.
• «Who writes in each language?» Names or at least native speakers per market, not «our translators».
• «How do you research keywords for a market we do not know?» If the answer is translation, keep looking.
• «What happens to hreflang when we remove a language?» Ask for the example from the Ukrainian brands above.
• «Where do links in each market come from?» Local sources, not more of the same.
• «How will you report each country?» Search Console by country and AI visibility by language, not one blended number.

Questions people ask

What is the difference between multilingual and international SEO?

Multilingual SEO targets languages; international SEO targets countries. In practice you usually need both: a site in Spanish for Spain and Mexico is one language and two markets, with two hreflang codes (es-ES and es-MX).

How much do multilingual SEO services cost?

Published prices start around $1,000–1,500 a month for two or three languages and run to $5,000 and more for a full program; hreflang setup alone is quoted at $3,000–8,000. Each extra country adds roughly $1,000–2,000 a month.

Is x-default required?

No. Google recommends it for the version shown when no language matches, and it costs nothing to add. 16 of 25 large Ukrainian sites with hreflang do not have one. It is the easiest fix on this page.

Related reading

• SEO for English-speaking markets
• English-language link building
• Enterprise SEO agencies, tested on the Fortune 100
• Case: an English-language site after a Google filter
• SE Ranking vs Semrush, tested on 26 sites
• How to choose an SEO agency
• Technical SEO audit

The scripts and raw results are ours, from 24 October 2026; prices come from the companies' pages and the lists named above as of the same date. If you run the check on your own site and find something odd, write to me. I collect these.