Localising our business to the correct country
-
Hi
I work for children's furniture business called Tidy Books. We are based in the UK. We have UK site www.tidy-books.co.uk. We also have a US site www.tidy-books.com which is registered in the US.
We have fully dedicated and translated French, German and Italian site (www.tidy-books.fr, www.tidy-books.de, www.tidy-books.it) . These all fall under our UK registered address. What I would like, is to have a French, German and Italian business address for these website. We just need an address only. This would mainly be used to for Google business listing and other business listings sites to help rank are sites correctly in their country domains. T
Do you know of or recommend any companies that can do this?
Is there any implications I need to be aware of, such as tax?
Thanks
-
Hi Geraldine
A client of ours used http://www.regus.fr/ to set up an address in Paris for this purpose and later opened a real office - and a real French company - when sales increased. Regus have offices worldwide see http://www.regus.fr/country-selector.aspx so I imagine that they can help for all countries.
I'll add to Gianluca's comments that Google won't be "fooled" by this address into recognising you as a French company. Google checks this through access to company registration databases rather than its own My Business listings.
But there are plenty of other advantages in having a My Business listing and Paris would be a good base in France for your site (audience reach). For an e-commerce site, potential clients will be reassured by a local telephone number too.
Looking at the French site, I noticed that the HREFLANG is incorrectly implemented. This is more important than the postal address. I strongly suggest you correct that
- Neil
-
Hi Gianluca thanks for getting back to me.
I see your point there's not fooling Google!
-
Hi Geraldine,
unfortunately, even though it is possible to obtain something like local P.O. Boxes and phone numbers, the issue is that Google deprecates their use for MyBusiness (Local Search). In other words, Google wants real offices with real phone numbers et al.
So, I see it hard for you to use Local Search in Google for earning more visibility if you do not have a real office in those countries.
However, you can still consider to buy local phone numbers, which then redirect to your UK customer care/commercial office and show them in your .de, .it and .fr websites, so users can call to those numbers. That would be users friendly and may improve the contacts conversions (something that you'd need to track with analytics).
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Duplicate content across different domains in different countries?
Hi Guys, We have a 4 sites One in NZ, UK, Canada and Australia. All geo-targeting their respective countries in Google Search Console. The sites are identical. We recently added the same content to all 4 sites. Will this cause duplicate content issues or any issues even though they are in different countries and geo-targeting is set? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wickstar0 -
Issues with the apperance of cross country sitelinks
Hi Moz community, My questions is related to the international SEO, esepecially sitelinks. The problem is that the users from US see in the search results the sitelinks which comes from different countries, e.g. users from US see the sitelinks from Australia or the sitelinks from our international website, which has obviously no specification. I must say, that we've done everything to be in accordance with Google interantional SEO recommendations, hraflang & lang attributes, properly set location in GSC. All of these were tripplechecked. I also need to say, that it happens only to the websites that include content written in English nad French. All other branches show proper sitelinks. It think Google can't properly locate the content, if the language is the same regardless country. Previously it could be solved with disavow tool, but today's I don't know about any manual action that could deal with the issue. I also noticed that some other pages are affected with the same issue. To better understand the issue, please see the image link. The image shows the results from US. Despite the location, it shows sitelinks form UK or International website. Do you have similar experience? I will be thankful for any help. 1NNtJ
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eset0 -
Is this correct?
I noticed Moz using the following for its homepage Is this best practice though? The reason I ask is that, I use and I've been reading this page by Google http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html 5 common mistakes with rel=canonical Mistake 2: Absolute URLs mistakenly written as relative URLs The tag, like many HTML tags, accepts both relative and absolute URLs. Relative URLs include a path “relative” to the current page. For example, “images/cupcake.png” means “from the current directory go to the “images” subdirectory, then to cupcake.png.” Absolute URLs specify the full path—including the scheme like http://. Specifying (a relative URL since there’s no “http://”) implies that the desired canonical URL is http://example.com/example.com/cupcake.html even though that is almost certainly not what was intended. In these cases, our algorithms may ignore the specified rel=canonical. Ultimately this means that whatever you had hoped to accomplish with this rel=canonical will not come to fruition.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Do authority brand (business name) anchor text links still drive SEO rankings?
i have a question about links....if you get a link from a really good authority e.g. bbc.co.uk - website but the anchor text for that link is only your business name e.g Moz and not a chosen SEO keyword target..do you still stand to gain in terms of your overall SEO rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CayenneRed890 -
Block a country, will affect my ranking?
Dear Mozzers, I intend to block some certain countries from viewing my website (including proxy), will it affect my Google ranking? Thank you for your help. BR/Tran
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveTran20130 -
'Select your country' page leading to high Temporary Redirects
Hello all, I manage an ecommerce website and product prices are shown depending on what country you select. When a user does a product search or lands on a product page, they are immediately redirected to a 'select your country' page. After selecting their option, the user is redirected back to the product or search result page. The problem I face is that, this is leading to a high 'Temporary Redirects' list in my crawl diagnostic page. Looking at the list of temporary redirects, 90% are users being bounced to a 'select your country' page. Any advice to tackle this? Have you guys faced anything similar? Thanks Cyto
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Geo targeting - same language, different countries
We are in serps in US google, but not in the UK, Australia. Also we have non-english translations of the website - these options works very well. Are there any logic options to make uk.domain.com? We can add United Kingdom in the description and texts. Can this do though in www.google.co.uk ? Same with AU. Website content fits all countries.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bele0 -
Does anybody know about a Penguin recovery for a small business website?
Does anybody know about a Penguin recovery for a small business website and the methodology they used? I have a PR 5 website that lost more than 50% of the traffic in Google. I removed some of the wide site links at the best of my ability but I see little or no results so far.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | S.Adrian0