Different meta-description per country?

[WeAreDigital_BE]

I have this .com domain which is the corporate website. Next to this domain, we also have local domains. We would like to test with a different meta-description per country on this one corporate .com domain. Does anyone knows if this is possible and how we could integrate this?

[WeAreDigital_BE]

Hi Patrick,

Thank you for your response!

On our local websites, we have specific meta-descriptions in place. Do you know another technical solution to do this on a corporate .com domain (meta-description per country)? This domain is used in the whole world but we want to test multiple meta-descriptions for this .com domain.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

For my vote, you should do this, especially if you're dealing with local markets, products specific to those regions, or deals/sales in those area. This is something you should test, see how they perform, and benchmark.

I would also look into the following:
International SEO (Moz)
The International SEO Checklist (Moz)

Both of the resources above will help you make sure you are targeting properly based on each site variation.

But, again, for my vote, yes, you should have local specific meta descriptions if possible, where necessary.

Hope this helps - good luck!

[WeAreDigital_BE]

Thank you for taking the time to write me this extensive response. This already helps!

[ATP]

Sorry i should have been more clear. This php solution is not a solution, at least in any practical sense.

Basically you would have for example

Descriptions Stored in variables
Meta Description UK
Meta Description USA

The page HTML would be

but the user is already on the website... they have already passed any point the meta-description would have been displayed to them.

The problem with this is that Google displays the meta-description that it has indexed from is most recent crawl. When google crawls your page is loads your page as if it were a user from wherever the bot is located, so wouldn't be able to see the other meta-descriptions for other counties and so couldn't display them if it wanted to.

Even if it crawled your site for various places around the globe, it would just be constantly tyring to update. It can change but each time it does is takes a period of time to be reflected on google. Once its changed the old one isn't stored, its just replaced. Its kinda a 1 description per page rule.

The only solution i could think off is a different landing page for each country (which you have) but there isn't a way to have a dynamic meta description on your main .com (as far as i know) sorry

[WeAreDigital_BE]

Thank you for your answer - very valuable. We would want one fixed meta-descriptions per country. Wouldn't that change in the Google results after a certain period of time (in the right country) if we do this with a php solution. Any articles or guides you know about?

[ATP]

To my knowledge there isn't

Are there are ways with php to dynamically load in a different meta descriptions? Sure.

The problem is that this wouldn't be reflected in google. Google takes days-> weeks or even months to update a meta-description within its index. So even though you could make the HTML code change on the actual page, it wouldn't change on the search listing nullifying the whole point.

I don't believe an option exists around this, but somebody may know something i dont.