International Keyword Research: Understanding Markets

Why international keyword research goes beyond translation

Companies expanding into new markets often start by translating their existing keyword list. That is the most expensive mistake in international SEO. Moving a keyword list into another language produces grammatically correct terms that nobody searches for. Search behavior is shaped by culture: people phrase problems, products, and purchase intentions differently from one language area to the next, use their own synonyms, and fall back on colloquialisms that no dictionary lists.

This matters especially for the DACH region and for Austrian B2B providers. Austria is a strongly export-oriented online market: 16.2% of Austrian SMEs sell online across borders, almost twice as many as the EU average of 8.7%. According to the underlying Eurostat data, that makes Austria the European champion in cross-border e-commerce. If you want to become visible from Austria in Germany, in Switzerland, or in other EU markets, you need a keyword base built for each market instead of a translated one.

The business lever is clear. According to an international study by CSA Research, 76% of online shoppers prefer products with information in their native language, and 40% never buy from foreign-language websites. Content in the right language is a prerequisite for conversion, not a convenience. International keyword research is the first step toward hitting the right terms in the right language at all.

How it works: search volume, intent, and the search engine landscape per market

Search volume does not transfer

The same keyword has very different volumes and levels of competition depending on country and language. Three factors interact: market size, linguistic variation, and local competitors. A term that generates five-digit monthly search volumes in Germany may reach only a fraction of that in Austria or Switzerland, if only because the population is smaller. Conversely, regional spellings or synonyms in a smaller market can carry relevant volume of their own that does not exist in the large neighboring market.

In practice, a high-volume German keyword does not automatically justify a separate page for the Austrian market, and a term that barely registers in Germany can be the dominant search pattern in Switzerland once Helvetisms come into play. Volumes have to be collected per market, not extrapolated.

Map search intent per market

Same phrase, different intent. A query can be mainly informational in one market (users want to get their bearings) and mainly transactional in the neighboring market (users want to buy). If you adopt the intent from your home market, you produce content that misses demand: a guide where a product page should rank, or the other way around. That is why international keyword research always includes a SERP analysis for each target region. Only the results that actually rank show which content format Google expects for the phrase in a given market.

Search engine landscape per target market

Which data source matters depends on the target market. Google clearly dominates the DACH region. In Austria, 81.87% of searches go to Google, 9.01% to Bing, and 2.75% to DuckDuckGo (StatCounter, May 2026). For Austrian and German target markets, Google-based data sources are therefore sufficient. Once markets outside the DACH region come into play, the picture changes: Yandex is strong in Russia, Baidu in China, Naver in South Korea. There, Google-only tools give a distorted picture, and your research has to include the leading search engine of each market.

Best practices: localization, DACH specifics, and tooling

Localization instead of translation

A clean process starts in the target market, not in the source language. Instead of translating a list, you have native speakers or in-market experts formulate seed keywords, add synonyms and colloquialisms, and build market-specific long-tail clusters from them. Only then do you check them against volume data. This order keeps the quirks of your home market from slipping unnoticed into the target language.

DACH specifics: AT vs. DE vs. CH

The German-speaking region is not a uniform market. Austrian German, the standard German used in Germany, and Swiss Standard German differ in vocabulary and spelling, and these differences matter for search:

• Austrianisms: Terms such as Jänner instead of Januar (January), Sackerl instead of Tüte (bag), or Erdäpfel instead of Kartoffeln (potatoes) shape Austrian search queries. If you optimize for the Austrian market, you should know these variants and check whether they carry volume of their own.
• Helvetisms and no ß: Swiss users never write ß; they use ss throughout. A keyword list with ß formally misses Swiss search queries. On top of that come Swiss terms that are common neither in Germany nor in Austria.
• Regional spellings: Even when the meaning is identical, spellings and compound words vary. These variants belong in the research, not in a later correction.

For Austrian providers, this means you know the Austrianisms, but for the much larger German market you have to switch deliberately to the phrasing used in Germany, and for Switzerland you have to account for the ss spelling.

Tooling for international research

Professional keyword tools such as Ahrefs and Semrush provide country-specific databases for a wide range of markets. What counts is less the sheer number of countries than the data quality for each target market. Three features are decisive: country-specific search volumes, the volume-by-country view (which shows how a term's volume is distributed across countries), and region-specific SERP analysis. The last one is essential for assessing intent and competition correctly in each market.

For non-Google markets such as Russia, China, or South Korea, you should also bring in local data sources and, ideally, local consultants. Also, do not read tool data as absolute truth: search volumes are estimates that differ between providers. For reliable decisions, compare several sources and add the real impression data from Google Search Console for each market as soon as your first content is live.

Connection to hreflang and domain strategy

Keyword research is the foundation of the technical architecture. It feeds two key decisions:

• Domain strategy: If the research shows that a market has substantial volume and search patterns of its own, that tends to justify a separate ccTLD or a dedicated subfolder. If markets overlap heavily (for example AT and DE for many technical terms), a leaner structure can be enough.
• URL and hreflang mapping: The market-specific keyword clusters determine which URLs need to exist for each language and region in the first place and how they are linked via hreflang. Without clean research, this is where gaps or duplicates appear.

This connection is delicate because hreflang is error-prone in practice. An international study found that 31.02% of multilingual websites contain conflicting hreflang directives, 16.04% lack self-referencing tags, and 8.91% use invalid language codes (sample of 18,786 sites). At the same time, according to the Web Almanac, only 9.6% of sites use hreflang on desktop, compared with 9.0% in 2021. International SEO is therefore not widespread, and where it is used, it is often flawed. Precise keyword and URL planning up front reduces exactly these sources of error.

Programmatic and scalable international research

With many markets or large keyword sets, research quickly becomes hard to keep track of. Programmatic approaches help: keyword clusters are organized across markets in uniform templates, so that every phrase is assigned to a language, a region, an intent, and a URL type. The benefit is scale; the risk is cascading errors. A wrong language code or a 1:1 translation propagates through the entire template. That is why every scalable process needs native-speaker quality assurance as a control step before content is generated automatically.

Common mistakes and quality assurance

• 1:1 translation instead of research: The classic. Translated keywords are grammatically correct but do not match real search behavior.
• Ignoring local competitors: If you only look at your competitors from the home market, you overlook strong local players who shape the SERPs in the target market and define the realistic competition.
• Wrong language codes and hreflang errors: Mixed-up or invalid language and region codes cause Google to ignore the localization. The error rates cited above show how common this is.
• Missing native-speaker validation: Without review by native speakers, synonyms, colloquialisms, and regional spellings go undetected.
• Extrapolating search volume instead of collecting it: Carrying volumes over from the home market to other countries leads to the wrong prioritization of pages and topics.

Metrics and market prioritization

International keyword research goes beyond the list of terms: it provides the data basis for choosing markets. Useful selection criteria are market size and internet penetration, purchasing power, competitive density, and the cross-border maturity of the market.

For the assessment, what counts are hard reach figures for each target market. According to DataReportal, in January 2025 there were 8.69 million internet users in Austria at a penetration of 95.3%, 78.9 million in Germany at 93.5%, and 8.86 million in Switzerland at 99.0%. All three markets are almost fully reachable online, so size makes the difference: Germany has about nine times as many internet users as Austria or Switzerland. In Switzerland, only part of that audience counts for German-language research: around 61% of the permanent resident population name German or Swiss German as their main language (Swiss Federal Statistical Office, 2024).

On the supply side, the share of companies selling via e-commerce shows how far a market already sells digitally. In Austria, 31% of enterprises with ten or more employees sold via e-commerce in 2023, and 19% of total turnover came from these sales (Statistik Austria). The survey follows a questionnaire harmonized across the EU, so the figure is comparable with Germany: there, in the same year, 23% of enterprises with ten or more employees sold via e-commerce (Eurostat, 2024 survey).

For a global view of language priority, the distribution of website content languages helps: English is used by 49.7% of all websites whose content language is known, Spanish by 6.0%, German by 5.9%, Japanese by 5.0%, and French by 4.5% (W3Techs). This puts the perceived size of the German-speaking market into global perspective and shows why English is often chosen as the first expansion step.

Suitable ongoing metrics after market entry are keyword rankings per market, organic traffic per region, brand visibility compared with local competitors, and the conversion rate per language version. The last one is the real proof of success: it shows whether the researched keywords bring visibility and business.

Further topics

International keyword research is the starting point of a larger internationalization process. Follow-up topics include domain strategy (ccTLD, subfolder, or subdomain), correct hreflang implementation, content localization beyond language alone, international link-building strategies, and technical aspects such as CDN and server location. For Austrian B2B providers with cross-border ambitions, it pays to connect the research with the technical architecture early, so that keyword clusters, URL structure, and hreflang fit together from the start.