One structure, many markets, none of them fighting each other.
A multi-country architecture for pharmaceutical companies operating across markets where country sites currently compete against each other and against the global domain, corrected with technical targeting and a governance model that prevents it recurring.
The pattern is familiar: fifteen country sites, near-identical content, no declared technical relationship between them, all competing for the same search terms. The content is rarely the problem; the missing technical structure is.
See global template vs local freedom for how that balance actually gets decided case by case.
An audit of current targeting and canonical signals, correction of the technical relationship between markets, a governance model for adding future markets, and documentation your local teams can follow.
We build and govern the technical structure that translated content publishes into, so whatever your local teams and translation partners produce has a solid architecture ready to receive it.
The scope our multi-country architecture work has operated within.
The specific cause differs by company structure. A multi-country architecture starts from that cause.
What comes up when country sites are competing with each other.
Not necessarily, since subdomains, subdirectories and separate ccTLDs can all work equally well when the technical targeting behind them, such as hreflang tags and server location signals, is implemented correctly. Consistency across the chosen structure and correct implementation matter far more to search engines than which structural option a company picks.
Generally the opposite is true, since the problem being fixed is usually competing country or language versions splitting ranking signals between themselves in the first place. Correcting that competition, through clear hreflang and canonical signals, tends to recover visibility that was already being lost rather than risking anything that is currently working.
Related, but distinct in what each one fixes. This work addresses the technical targeting layer — which URL or domain search engines should show for which country — while see multilingual content architecture covers the content-model side of keeping translated content accurate and consistent, and the two are frequently implemented as one combined project.
Yes, and that independence is the specific point of the governance documentation we hand over. It sets out the naming conventions, hreflang rules and technical steps required, so a local team or agency can add a new market themselves following that reference, without needing to bring us back in for every future addition.
Multi-country architecture often connects to these related problems.
Country sites competing with each other, or a new market about to launch without a plan. Tell us your markets and we will tell you how we would approach the multi-country architecture.