Today, the international expansion advice dominating boardrooms and SEO blogs was written for a different era or by those without experience working in a multinational company. In the past week, I have seen multiple experts recommend companies follow Google’s example and move from country domains to single .com sites without mentioning legal or operational considerations. Because Google did it, you should, too. Yet others recommend mirroring physical-world expansion strategies that are a “snap” due to AI translation ital businesses, which is something fundamental that has been lost in translation.
This article series started as a rant driven by frustration with the multiple articles using antiquated information or an oversimplification to follow Google’s lead with your domain strategy that Bill Scully and I discussed on our International Webmastery podcast. After my first cut of that initial rant, I was motivated that there was hope for the industry when Kevin Indig posted a well-balanced and experience-driven deep dive into International SEO in the age of AI. I realized we needed more articles like Kevin’s that focus more on strategic considerations, business decisions, and the need for advanced infrastructure and management changes and fewer articles arguing domain structures and using AI to spin out dozens of sites to maximize SEO goodness. We must be more aware of business requirements than what is best for SEO. Another excellent reference is Brian Casey’s series of Tweets about IBM’s move from market-centric sites to language sites and the business reasons they did it. While clear SEO value was gained, there were more strategic and operational reasons for the move that made sense to IBM.
I’ve channeled this frustration into a comprehensive article series designed to help executives break free from outdated thinking and build international strategies that work for modern digital businesses. Rather than accepting the conventional wisdom that fragments operations and constrains growth, these articles provide frameworks for critical thinking about global expansion by challenging assumptions and traditional wisdom, evaluating trade-offs honestly, and implementing approaches that leverage technology to create competitive advantages rather than operational overhead. The goal isn’t just to critique existing methods but to equip leaders with strategic frameworks and implementation roadmaps that enable sustainable international success in an interconnected world where geography should enhance strategy, not constrain it.
Traditional strategies often fail because of outdated assumptions and because organizations lack the internal agility to respond to modern market dynamics. In our article on Marketing Agility and Web Development at MNCs, we explain how the misalignment between marketing intent and web execution processes keeps even well-funded initiatives from effectively reaching customers.
Today’s digital-first businesses can serve 50 countries from unified API-driven systems, yet they’re building separate websites because that’s what McDonald’s did for physical restaurants. They’re spending 6-18 months per market on custom infrastructure because the prevailing wisdom treats geography as requiring fundamentally different business operations or, even worse, the perpetual migration of CMS infrastructures that cannot connect.
The result? Companies that could expand globally in weeks are taking months. Engineering teams that should be building product features are maintaining location-specific workarounds. Customers encounter broken experiences when they travel because architecture assumes they’ll stay in one place.
This series challenges the conventional wisdom and provides strategic frameworks for executives ready to think differently about global digital expansion:
- Article 1: Why current web architecture systematically undermines international strategies
- Article 2: Language-Only vs. Country-Specific Websites: The Strategic Decision Framework for Global Expansion
- Article 3: Domain strategy and technical architecture decisions that flow from strategic choices
- Article 4: An Implementation Guide for location-native Architecture that Eliminates Traditional Trade-offs
The technology for better approaches exists today, and the business case is compelling. The question is whether you’ll break from outdated conventional wisdom and implement strategies designed for how global business works in 2025.
