International SEO Keyword Research Starts in Search Console

Between 2025-05-01 and 2026-08-31, Google put this site in front of searchers in 193 countries. It is written in English, publishes no localized content, and carries a Domain Rating of 13. That country report arrived without being requested, and it is where international SEO keyword research begins for most site owners: a table of markets nobody targeted, compiled by a search engine that does not care which one you meant.

Most guides skip it. They open at “choose a target market”, then move to a keyword tool with a country dropdown and a volume column. The table you already own goes unread, and it holds one number worth acting on plus several that will mislead you if you read them the obvious way.

Everything below comes from one Search Console export for swapbiswas.com, pulled 2026-09-03, search type Web, covering 2025-05-01 to 2026-08-31: 164,564 impressions, 186 clicks, a 0.11% sitewide click-through rate across 147 posts. That is one small site over sixteen months, so treat the method as portable and the numbers as mine.

193 Countries, 186 Clicks, and One Row Worth Reading

Search Console sorts the Countries tab by clicks. Here is the top of mine, with every column the report gives you.

Country	Clicks	Impressions	CTR	Avg position
India	91	7,850	1.16%	23.98
United States	53	110,088	0.05%	24.33
United Kingdom	5	7,461	0.07%	40.84
Australia	4	1,580	0.25%	26.78
Germany	3	1,846	0.16%	32.55
Canada	2	3,353	0.06%	26.19
France	2	1,563	0.13%	23.84
Philippines	2	992	0.20%	35.27
Indonesia	2	713	0.28%	26.33
Pakistan	2	413	0.48%	19.55
China	2	305	0.66%	8.66
Hong Kong	2	187	1.07%	9.50
Netherlands	1	2,197	0.05%	31.65
Spain	1	1,561	0.06%	36.11

Those fourteen rows hold 172 of the site’s 186 clicks. The remaining 179 countries in the export share 14 clicks between them.

For scale on the sitewide 0.11%: Ahrefs publishes median whole-site organic CTR by Domain Rating tier, measured across 422,421 sites using anonymized Search Console data, and for the DR 10-20 band the median is 0.56% (Ahrefs, June 2026 data month). Ahrefs is explicit that the figure is whole-site CTR rather than position-1 CTR, computed for each site by dividing its total clicks by its total impressions for the month, so a single country row from my table is not a like-for-like comparison against it. India’s 1.16% is one row inside a site, not a site.

Impressions From 193 Countries Do Not Prove Demand

An impression is cheaper than it looks. Google’s own definition: “In general, an impression is counted whenever an item appears in the current page of results, whether or not the item is scrolled into view, as long as the user need not click to see more results” (Search Console Help). Indonesia’s 713 impressions mean Google assembled 713 results pages in Indonesia carrying one of my English posts, at an average position of 26.33. Nobody had to read a word for that row to exist.

The second limit is harder to see, and it is the one that kills the naive reading. A country report can only describe pages that exist. This site has never published a page in any language except English, so no local-language query has ever had anything of mine to match against. There is no row for the Hindi, French or Bahasa Indonesia phrasing of any concept I have written about, and the missing row is a fact about my publishing history rather than about demand in those markets.

Third, the position column is an average over a distribution Google will not show you. Google warns against reading it as a slot on a page: “a position number can mean different things in different situations, and so you should not make simple assumptions” (Search Console Help).

So the 193 records where Google was willing to show English pages. It says nothing about whether a head term exists in Bahasa Indonesia for the same concept, because I have never given Google anything that could rank for one.

Where Should International SEO Keyword Research Start?

It starts with the country rows in your own Search Console that already earn clicks at a working average position, because those are markets where you have evidence instead of a forecast. A keyword tool’s country dropdown gives you volume for a market you have never served. The country report gives you behaviour from people who have already been shown your pages.

The order that follows: read the country table for click-through differences between rows at matched positions, add a country filter to Search Console and read the queries behind the row that stands out, publish or rewrite one page against what you find, and price a translation last. A keyword tool belongs at the end of that list, not the front of it.

India Beats the United States by 23x at the Same Position

Six countries in my report sit inside a three-position band, which is what makes their click-through rates comparable at all.

Country	Avg position	Impressions	Clicks	CTR
France	23.84	1,563	2	0.13%
India	23.98	7,850	91	1.16%
United States	24.33	110,088	53	0.05%
Canada	26.19	3,353	2	0.06%
Indonesia	26.33	713	2	0.28%
Australia	26.78	1,580	4	0.25%

Average position varies by under three places across that band, and CTR varies by a factor of 23. Only two of the six rows carry enough clicks to constrain anything: India at 91 and the United States at 53. The other four rest on two to four clicks each and sit in the table to show how little they settle.

India sends 7% of the impressions the United States does and returns 1.7 times the clicks. Canada, English-speaking and two positions behind India, returns 0.06%, within a rounding error of the United States. Position is held roughly constant across the band, so a ranking gap cannot account for the spread.

That is a real difference in this data, and it is not a localization mandate. Several explanations survive this export, and the export cannot separate them:

• Query mix. Average position is an average across whatever queries each country sent, and two countries at position 24 can be sitting on entirely different query sets with entirely different intent.
• Branded search. The strongest query on this property is my own name, at position 2.7 with 289 impressions and 35 clicks, which is 35 of the site’s 186 total clicks. The country table carries no query dimension, so I cannot rule out that a large share of India’s 91 clicks are people who already know the name.
• The results page. I have captured no SERP for either country, so I do not know what sat above, beside or in place of my result in each one.
• Small numbers. France’s 0.13% rests on two clicks. Twelve of the fourteen rows in the first table rest on five clicks or fewer, and at that size one extra click moves the CTR column by more than the gap I am describing.

I have not run a localized-content experiment. No Hindi page exists on this site, so nothing here tests whether one would have ranked or converted. The honest reading of the India row is that it has earned a query-filtered look inside Search Console. It has not earned a translation budget.

How to Pick a Market for International SEO From One Table

The rules I apply to the table above, in order:

• Match position before comparing CTR. A country at position 40 and a country at position 24 are not running the same experiment, and a CTR difference between them tells you about rankings.
• Set a click floor and hold it. Pakistan’s 0.48%, China’s 0.66% and Hong Kong’s 1.07% all read as strong, and all three rest on two clicks. China and Hong Kong also sit at average positions of 8.66 and 9.50 on 305 and 187 impressions, better placed than any large market in my table. That is a curiosity worth noticing and not a market worth funding.
• Read impressions as reach. The United States supplies 110,088 of my 164,564 impressions and 53 clicks. Reach on that scale tells you where Google is willing to show you, and it is not a demand signal on its own.
• Treat a surviving row as a hypothesis about queries. The next artifact is a country-filtered query list, and it is free.

Applied to my table, one row survives: India. Sixteen months, 193 countries, one market with evidence behind it, on a site with a Domain Rating of 13 and no deliberate link building ever done. That is a thinner answer than a tool would give me, and it is the one I can defend. A country list ranked by impressions is decoration, the same failure as every other vanity number I catalogued in what belongs in an SEO report.

The United Kingdom Sits 16 Positions Behind the United States

The United Kingdom row is the one I would fix first, and it needs no translator. It shows 7,461 impressions, 5 clicks, a 0.07% CTR, and an average position of 40.84. India, on a comparable 7,850 impressions, sits at 23.98 and returns 91 clicks.

Two countries, comparable impression volume, the same English pages, and a gap of roughly 16 positions. The click difference between those two rows has a candidate explanation sitting in the position column, and that is the explanation the India versus United States comparison does not get to use.

A page averaging position 40 in one market and 24 in another is a ranking problem wearing a country filter. The work is ordinary position work: find the pages sitting just off page one for the queries that market sends, and fix those. I go through that selection in how to find striking distance keywords, and the country filter in Search Console is what turns it into a UK list rather than a global one.

This is also the distinction that gets collapsed inside the phrase international SEO. Ranking an existing English page better in another English-speaking country and publishing a new page in another language are separate projects with separate costs, and only the second one needs a translator. A third case again is geographic targeting inside a single country, which has its own requirements in the local SEO checklist.

Germany, the Netherlands and Spain Sit in the Thirties

If a localization vendor read this report, these are the three rows they would point at.

Country	Impressions	Clicks	CTR	Avg position
Germany	1,846	3	0.16%	32.55
Netherlands	2,197	1	0.05%	31.65
Spain	1,561	1	0.06%	36.11

Between them they hold 5,604 impressions against India’s 7,850, and they return 5 clicks against India’s 91. All three sit deeper than position 31.

That combination is the argument against translating first. A translated page does not inherit a ranking from an English page that was never ranking in the market, so it starts from nothing on a domain rated 13, against local-language competitors I have not looked at. The German row does not report German demand for my topics. It reports that Google occasionally shows an English page to somebody in Germany, somewhere past position 31.

The questions I would need answered before spending anything: whether a local-language head term for the concept exists, and who holds the top three results for it today. Search Console can answer neither, because I have no page in that language for it to report on. That is where a keyword tool with a country dropdown finally earns its place, once a row has already survived everything above.

What Search Console Country Data Cannot Tell You

These limits sit under every country row in the report.

Local-language volume is invisible to it. The report describes impressions your existing pages earned, so every language you do not publish in returns an empty set. No setting inside Search Console fixes that; you have to go outside it to find out whether a local head term exists.

Some queries never appear at all. Google omits queries to protect privacy: “Some queries are omitted from the report to protect user privacy. These are called anonymized queries. They’re included in chart totals, unless a query filter is applied” (Search Console Help). The quantified threshold Google has published is queries that “aren’t issued by more than a few dozen users over a two-to-three month period”, from an October 2022 Search Central post (Google Search Central), and I have found no newer figure. A country filter does not close that gap, so a country’s click total can exceed what the query rows underneath it explain.

It aggregates every page you have, including the ones Google never shows. A country row sums whatever the whole site did in that country, and on this property 23 of 147 posts earned no impression at all across the sixteen months, in any of the 193 countries. Those pages contribute nothing to any row, so a country’s average position is an average over the subset of the site Google chose to show there.

The position figure blends devices. Sitewide, this property averages 25.4 on desktop and 29.3 on mobile, and a country row collapses the same split into one number. Two countries with different device mixes can show the same average position and mean different things by it. Checking a ranking by hand from your own browser is a different measurement from either, which I work through in how to check your SEO ranking.

It cannot tell you why. Click-through rate is an outcome of the result you showed, the results around it, and the person searching. The export has a column for none of those three. A 23x difference is a question, and the answer lives in the query-level view and, past that, in a page you publish on purpose and measure afterwards.

International SEO Keyword Research Before You Pay a Translator

The sequence I run on this data:

1. Open the Countries tab and set the window to at least twelve months. A 28-day window on a small site produces country rows built on single-digit impressions, and every CTR in them is noise.
2. Sort by clicks. Rows under about ten clicks cannot support a decision; on my export only India at 91 and the United States at 53 clear that bar.
3. Compare CTR only between rows within about two places of each other on average position. India at 23.98 and the United States at 24.33 qualify. The United Kingdom at 40.84 does not, so its 0.07% says something about rankings rather than about British readers.
4. For any row that stands out, add a country filter and read its queries. That view already exists in Search Console and costs nothing, and it is where international SEO keyword research stops being a guess.
5. Only then price a localized page, scoped to one query in one market, with a measurement planned before it ships.

Sixteen months of accidental international SEO keyword research on this site produced one row worth a follow-up and 192 rows of reach. Open your own Countries tab, discard everything under ten clicks, and compare what is left only at matched positions. Give the survivor a country filter and read its queries.