u/MerchySulica

I been comparing French or EU SERPs against US SERPs and it reminding me that US SEO advice doesn't always transfer cleanly.

Same general topic, same business goal, but the SERP can be very different depending on the country.

A few things I keep noticing:

• Local brands show up more often than expected.
• Marketplaces are much harder to beat than in the US version, in some ecommerce searches.
• Comparison pages sometimes beat big ultimate guide style content.
• Trust signals is more important, especially for stores. Shipping, returns, business info, reviews, payment options, all that stuff is important.
• Translated content often feels weak, even when the keywords are technically correct.

This is why I don't really like building one content brief from the US SERP and then only translating it for France, Germany, Italy, etc.

Translation changes the words, but the market can change the type of winning page. For example, if Google.fr mostly showing local retailers and comparison pages, but Google.com showing blog guides, copying the US content structure can be a bad pointing start.

>

For people working across countries, do you create separate SERP briefs per market or adapt from one main brief?

I been comparing French or EU SERPs against US SERPs and it reminding me that US SEO advice doesn't always transfer cleanly.

Same general topic, same business goal, but the SERP can be very different depending on the country.

A few things I keep noticing:

• Local brands show up more often than expected.
• Marketplaces are much harder to beat than in the US version, in some ecommerce searches.
• Comparison pages sometimes beat big ultimate guide style content.
• Trust signals is more important, especially for stores. Shipping, returns, business info, reviews, payment options, all that stuff is important.
• Translated content often feels weak, even when the keywords are technically correct.

This is why I don't really like building one content brief from the US SERP and then only translating it for France, Germany, Italy, etc.

Translation changes the words, but the market can change the type of winning page. For example, if Google.fr mostly showing local retailers and comparison pages, but Google.com showing blog guides, copying the US content structure can be a bad pointing start.

>I'm not saying every country needs a totally separate SEO strategy from zero, but I do think each important market needs its own SERP check before deciding the page type, angle, and content structure.

For people working across countries, do you create separate SERP briefs per market or adapt from one main brief?

Been noticing something weird in the last few months. A bunch of pages I'm tracking that are 600-900 words are outranking 2000+ word pages on the same topic. Not just on my sites either, I've seen it on competitor pages and clients' sites too.

Five years ago, the SEO advice was basically write longer than whoever ranks first, and that worked. Now it feels like the opposite is happening, the shorter pages that just answer the question are winning.

My guess is it's tied to how Google is using AI to evaluate pages now. Long pages with padding and intro fluff probably look worse to whatever scoring model they're running, while a tight page that gets straight to the answer reads better both to humans and to AI. Search Generative Experience also seems to pull from shorter, cleaner pages way more than from the long SEO-style stuff.

Anyone else seeing this in your own data? Curious if it's a real pattern or if I'm just looking at a small sample and reading too much into it. Also, if you've tested cutting word count on existing posts, did rankings actually move?

One thing I keep coming back to is that a lot of sites blame SEO for being slow, when the real issue is that they still haven't validated the offer, message, or angle well enough.

If the positioning is weak, the page focus is messy, and nobody really knows what people respond to yet, SEO ends up carrying a lot of uncertainty it was never supposed to solve.

That's part of why I think some teams get better SEO results after running paid, not because ads improve rankings magically, but because they learn faster what people actually click, care about, and convert on.

Then the SEO work gets built around something clearer instead of guessing.

Have you ever looked at an SEO problem and realized it was actually a validation/positioning problem first?

Been wondering about this lately. I work around content or SEO stuff, and sometimes it really feels like a lot of the visible SEO space is men. Not saying women aren't in it obviously, just that the loudest voices, agency owners, X/Linkedin people, conference types, even a lot of the outreach or sales side of it... Feels super male-heavy a lot of the time.

Maybe I'm just looking in the wrong places, IDK.

For any women here who work in SEO, growth, content strategy, technical SEO, linkbuilding, whatever, does it feel that way to you, too? And if u are in SEO, how did u end up there?