How International SEO Agency and SEO Content Writing Agency Align?

I was on a Zoom call that felt routine. The kind where you already know how it will end before it starts. The prospect had come through organic search. He’d booked a demo. He’d read our site. All the usual signs were there.

Halfway through, he stopped me.

He said, “I read the article you have on this topic. It explains things clearly. I just couldn’t tell who it was written for.”

That sentence didn’t land right away. I nodded, answered his next question, closed the call. Only later did it start bothering me.

I pulled up the article. The numbers looked fine. Traffic was steady. The page did what it was meant to do, at least on paper. Still, his comment stuck in my head longer than the metrics ever had.

I thought splitting responsibilities would reduce risk

Months before that call, I made what felt like a safe decision. We were expanding into multiple regions. I didn’t want shortcuts to come back and hurt us later.

So I hired an international seo agency. Their job was clear. Structure the site so search engines could tell which pages belonged where. Handle regional signals. Keep things clean.

Separately, I hired a content team to write articles for those regions. They knew how to explain things. They understood long-form writing. They worked fast.

In my mind, these two efforts would meet naturally. Like two roads merging without needing signs.

What I didn’t see was how easy it is for them to pass each other without ever crossing.

The article wasn’t bad, it was misplaced

When I reread the page the prospect mentioned, nothing jumped out as wrong.

The writing made sense. The examples sounded professional. The tone felt confident.

Yet it felt like it belonged somewhere else. Another market. Another stage. Another reader.

The article assumed certain workflows. It assumed certain frustrations. Those assumptions were accurate in one region and quietly off in another.

No single line caused the issue. It was a collection of small things. A reference that felt slightly dated. A link that led to a page hidden for that country. A framing choice that made sense if you were already familiar with our space.

None of this showed up in reports. It only showed up when someone tried to use what they read.

I stopped asking who wrote the content

My first instinct was to look for ownership. Who approved this? Who missed the context? That line of thinking didn’t go far.

Instead, I started asking a different question.

Who did we expect to land here?

Not in broad terms. Not “buyers” or “decision-makers.” I meant something more specific. Someone sitting at a desk, in a particular place, dealing with a particular kind of pressure.

When I asked myself that, I realized no one had really answered it.

I put both teams in the same call and stayed quiet

I scheduled a meeting with both agencies. No agenda full of slides. No performance review.

The SEO team talked about search patterns, regional differences, and how people phrased queries in different countries. The writers talked about clarity, pacing, and making ideas readable without sounding stiff.

They weren’t disagreeing. They just weren’t talking about the same moment in the reader’s head.

I asked one question and let it hang.

“When someone lands on this page, what do they already believe?”

There was a pause. Not an awkward one. A thinking pause.

That pause told me more than any presentation could have.

I realized alignment doesn’t start at drafts

Before this, alignment meant reviewing finished work. If something felt off, we adjusted later.

That approach assumes the problem shows up at the end. In my case, it started much earlier.

The writers were reacting to briefs that focused on topics and length. The SEO team was reacting to data about demand and structure. Both were doing exactly what they were asked to do.

No one was reacting to the same mental picture of the reader.

I changed how information moved, not the people

I didn’t replace anyone. I didn’t rewrite contracts. I made smaller changes.

Writers started joining early calls where keywords were discussed. They didn’t pitch ideas. They listened to how regions were described. What felt uncertain. What felt settled.

SEO reports changed shape. They still included numbers, but they ended with short observations. Notes about behavior. Things like, “Visitors here scroll but don’t click,” or “People land on this page and then search the site again.”

Drafts stopped being treated as finished just because they were delivered. We read them with one question in mind: does this sound like it belongs to one specific person, in one specific place?

Some pages slipped before they settled

I won’t pretend everything improved overnight.

A few pages lost ground. One region never really recovered and was quietly deprioritized. That stung more than I expected.

At the same time, sales calls started changing tone. Prospects referenced details instead of headlines. Questions became narrower. Fewer calls ended with someone saying they needed more time just to understand what we did.

That shift didn’t show up cleanly in dashboards. It showed up in conversations.

The second keyword showed me the gap more clearly

Much later in this process, I noticed something else. Our seo content writing agency had been doing exactly what content teams are usually asked to do: write pieces that stand on their own.

Those articles made sense in isolation. The problem was how they landed inside a larger structure built for search across countries.

The writers weren’t wrong. They just didn’t have access to the same signals the SEO side saw daily.

Once they did, the writing changed in small ways. Fewer broad statements. More situational framing. Less assumption about what the reader already knew.

I stopped expecting one team to fix the other’s work

For a while, I thought alignment meant correction. If content felt off, SEO would catch it. If structure felt odd, writers would adjust.

That thinking created quiet tension. Each side assumed the other would flag problems early.

What worked better was shared exposure. Letting both sides see the same raw inputs before decisions hardened.

Not everything needed to be discussed. Just enough to make sure both teams were reacting to the same reality.

I learned to watch where things break, not where they perform

High-performing pages can hide problems. They bring traffic, so no one looks too closely.

The pages that taught me the most were the ones that almost worked. The ones where people arrived, read, then hesitated.

Those moments pointed straight at misalignment. Not technical issues. Not writing quality. Misplaced assumptions.

I don’t think alignment is something you finish

Even now, this drifts. New markets bring new blind spots. Old habits sneak back in.

The difference is that I know what questions to ask earlier.

• Who is this for, right now?
• What does this person already believe?
• What might feel obvious to us but strange to them?

When those questions stay present, the work feels less stitched together.

Not smoother. Just more honest.

And honesty, I’ve learned, travels better than polish when you’re trying to speak across borders.