How to Localise per Region (Europe, America, APAC, EMEI) and not per country as best SEO practise?

[Atalig2]

Hi SEO expertises!

I am currently working with a client that initially have an English website targeting UK users but want to expand their market into four new regions (Europe, America, APAC and EMEI) keeping English as a main language. I would like to request your help here as I told the client ISO location and hreflang it will be just possible per language and they must need to localise each English region with local keywords, however I would like to double check if it will be any way (Sitemap, Hreflang) we can tell Google we are targeting per region and not per country?

Thanks a lot!

[seoelevated]

I currently manage a site which is localized per region, as opposed to country. For some regions, like US and Australia, it is 1:1 with country, so we do not have issues there. But for Europe, that is where we do have some issues currently. We took the following approach (below), but I have to first say that it is quite problematic and has not performed very well so far (implemented about 1 year ago).

The approach we took was to implement HREFLANG within our sitemap, and for Europe, we generate specific alternate locations for each of the countries where we do business in that region, all with the same URL. Here (below) is a redacted version of one page's LOC node in our sitemap (I've only included a partial list, and only showing English, as the full list of alternate URLs for this one LOC has 150 alternate links to cover every EU country x 5 languages we support). But, the general approach is that for Europe, we create one alternate link for each EU country, in each of our supported languages (we support 5 languages). So, we don't assume, for example, that German speakers are only in Germany, or that English speakers are only in the UK. We cover every country/language combination and point many of these to the exact same alternate link.

Again, as I mentioned, this hasn't achieved all we had hoped. But sharing the approach for a reference point here, as an option, and open to any other ideas from the community. We also struggle with EU in terms of Google Search Console geographic targeting. Unfortunately, Google does not allow a property to be targeted to "Europe". And they only allow one single country per property. In our case, we really need to target a single domain to "Europe", not to a specific country. But we can't, and that is a problem currently.

Here is the example from our Sitemap (partial cut-and-past of the first few entries from one URL node):

<loc>https://www.example.com/example-page-path</loc>

<priority>1</priority>

... remainder of alternate links removed to shorten list here

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