Help with international targeting
-
Hi all!
Okay, so we've got a site, let's say example.com - we sell training courses worldwide with a particular focus in just 8 countries.
Historically, we've never targeted users in different countries effectively, we've just got the example.com that floats about ranking in different countries, but our content is dynamic (obviously a big SEO no-no - we pick up the IP of the user and show the content relevant for that country without the URL's changing)
This obviously presents an SEO flaw in that we can effectively target people in our key countries effectively.So, we're introducing the targeting as subfolders (/uk/, /ie/ etc) my questions are:
1. Would this be the correct implementation of hreflang AND canonical tags for the URL: https://www.example.com/es/
2. The second thing I was wondering is the 'international targeting' in search console.
We haven't (because of our current set up) set a target country for www.example.com (because of the lack of regional targeting and dynamic catch all) - would we be better leaving that untargeted and only specifying the regional targets for the new subfolder URLs (www.example.com/us/ /uk/ etc) or should we set the .com as the USA as default?
We'd be a bit weary of doing this because most of our traffic comes from the UK and South Africa, so I'm assuming it would be best to leave this alone unless someone else has a different opinion?
I know Googlebot almost always crawls .coms from US, which is why we were thinking of leaving the .com as the 'catch all' and specifying the US version.
3. Finally, we do have a lot pages which don't really change at all (like the about us page) would we give these any special directives to avoid duplicate content (as the content on these won't be changing at all?) or do we just keep the structure as shown above? I.E would the about us page (even though not changing) still be (with the canonical):
URL: https://www.example.com/about-us/ (x-default)
?
Thanks in advance!
-
If I understand the OP's intent, it is to target countries, not languages. Hreflang can specify alternates for a language, or a language-country combination, but unfortunately not just for a country. So, as the OP has proposed, yes you do need to specify the language and the country. And that does bring up a dilema faced by many of us in terms of what language to use. If your content is in all English, then yes you should use like "en-FR". BUT, you might also want to include an "fr-FR" as well, pointing to the same alternate URL. Because there are going to be a lot more France-based visitors on Google whose browser settings are for French language than English. For sure, both do exist (there are native English speakers in France too), but you don't have to choose one. You can include both. Google may not completely respect your directives since the content is in English (assuming that's the case), but it's what I would recommend. So, for each country (assuming the content is in English), include both an English and a language-specific hreflang tag (pointing to the same destination) for that country.
Since your last example uses "es-ES", I assume maybe that you're planning to also publish some content in Spanish language. But if not, again, realize you can include multiple hreflang tags for a single country, and pointing to the same page.
I also don't know where you are based. But if the business is US-based, I wouldn't duplicate US also as a localization. Rather, I would make that the default. Or, if you are based somewhere else, same thing, but with that country.
On question 2, you can set up a GSC property for folder paths (www.example.com/fr/), and target those. I would not target the root level (www.example.com) in your case, because that would also apply to all the subfolders. That's one of the advantages of using subdomains instead of subfolders, is that you can target each independently. But with subfolders, you can target all except the root (because it would cascade downward).
On question 3, you should do the same as you do in number 1, as long as you are duplicating those pages in each subfolder. Otherwise, if you don't give a directive of which page to index, since they are duplicates, Google is going to choose for you. And might not choose the one you prefer.
-
The language codes you are using in the above examples are not correct. The correct languages should be "en", "fr", "it", "es". If you want to specify the country code it must appear after the language code, more info here.
Keep in mind that the hreflang tags are not used by the web browsers to load the preferred language automatically, they are intended for search engines.
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
-
href lang questions - please help
Hi I have a few questions about href lang implementation and I was hoping for some guidance / opinions. An international website is using mostly a folder structure, but for some locations it might have standalone sub-domains. Some folders are there to target locations and languages, with others just targeting languages. See the list below: domain.com/es-mx [Language: Spanish - Location: Mexico]
International SEO | | MarkCanning
domain.com/pt-br [Language: Portuguese - Location: Brazil]
domain.com/ja-jp [Language: Japanese - Location: Japan]
domain.com/en-jp [Language: English - Location: Japan]
domain.com/fr-ca [Language: French - Location: Canada]
domain.com/en-ca [Language: English - Location: Canada]
domain.com/en-ie [Language: English - Location: Ireland]
domain.com/ar [Language: Arabic]
domain.com/ph [Language: Tagalog]
domain.com/it [Language: Italian]
domain.com/tr [Language: Turkish]
domain.com/kr [Language: Korean]
domain.com/fr [Language: French]
domain.com/ru [Language: Russian]
domain.com/vn [Language: Vietnamese] domain.in/en [Language: English - Location Indian]
domain.in/hi [Language: Hindi - Location Indian] My questions are: Is href lang sitemap equally as good as the href lang meta tag in terms of effectiveness. I know that the sitemap is easier to maintain and upkeep but i don't know which one is better as google recommends both. How do you mix your listings when some are targeting language and country and others are just targeting language speakers (not tied to any specific country). So take for example in the list above: there would be a general site for french speakers and then one for french speakers in Canada. Thanks for your advise in advance.0 -
Question regarding international SEO
Hi there, I have a question regarding international SEO and the APAC region in particular. We currently have a website extension .com and offer our content in English. However, we notice that our website hardly ranks in Google in the APAC region, while one of the main languages in that region is also English. I figure one way would be to set up .com/sg/ (or .com/au/ or .com/nz/), but then the content would still be in English. So wouldn't that be counted as duplicate content? Does anyone have experience in improving website rankings for various English-speaking countries, without creating duplicate content? Thanks in advance for your help!
International SEO | | Billywig0 -
Search visibility increase with international SEO
Hi Moz Community, I am wondering if there is any tool and/or any sort of standard increase in search visibility I can assume that we will have with our website if we expand to start targeting Spanish with our site. At the moment we receive about 6000-7000 visits a day with 75% of that coming from the US and UK. I am wondering is there any way to make a rough assumption on visibility that will increase by launching a new Spanish speaking website. It would be a subdirectory, not a subdomain or gTLD. I am struggling to find a concrete answer on this and i'd like to make a semi-accurate forecast of the traffic we can expect based on the increase in search visibility that our Spanish language site will provide us. Thanks
International SEO | | Brian_Dowd0 -
Any Idea for International SEO in this complex situation?
Hi,
International SEO | | teconsite
a client of mine has a site with a domain name brand.es. They are a furniture manufacturer. They has a well known brand in its sector.
brand.com is registered by a US company. (Completly different activity) This client registered its domain name 10 years ago, and its audience was in Spain.
As it is a .es ccTLD it is directly geotargeted to Spain. 5 years ago, they began to export to other countries, and today they have distributors in a lot of countries like Italy, France, England, Portugal, Germany, and many more... As they are manufacturers and they sell their products to multiple locations worldwide, the language aproach seems to be the more efficient way to reach they users. The problem is that they are using a ccTLD domain brand.es, beacuse the .com domain was registered.
Actually the international organic traffic is very poor, mostly related to queries with the brand name. My question:
Is it possible to do international seo with a geotargeted domain .es?
Should they register a .com that doesn't match exactly their brand name? (it is a little difficult, beacause brandfurniture.com would be good for England, but not for Spain or France. )
Or should they focus their strategy with some ccTLDs for 3 or 4 of the main countries? (Not sure this would be an alternative... too much cost) I know, that in this situation there is no perfect solution, but I would appreciate your opinions.
Any Ideas ?????? Thank you!!0 -
International SEO Question with regards to Sub Folders in Webmaster Tools
So, we have a website in 18 or so different languages. bluewidgets.com/br bluewidgets.com/cn etc I have added each sub folder in Google Webmaster Tools and 'pointed' them to be at their respective geographic specific. However, the United States version of the website is sitting on the root domain. Is there any issue with me pointing the root domain at United States Google, considering there are 18 sub folders already pointed at different regions?
International SEO | | LukeyJamo0 -
Website Internal Search
Hi I'm looking for ‘location search’ functionality to cover an extensive range of global locations to help increase the visibility I have been looking to use Google Places functionality, which has an extremely broad list of locations Would anyone have any experience in using Google places to power their websites internal search as well as if there is a cost to integrate it and other factors to be aware of? Thanks Simon
International SEO | | simonsw0 -
Keyword selection for international company
Hi everyone, I am working on a new project for a telecommunications company with its target audience in various countries around Europe and USA. They only have 1 website in English and don’t have content specific to different countries. Ineed to choose keywords for this project but I am finding it quite challenging as usually my keywords are localised. In this case I cannot restrict keywords to any particular country. At the same time I know that it would be extremely tough to rank for generic keywords. What do you suggest?
International SEO | | ICON_Malta0 -
Geo targeting issue and hosting
Hi guys and gals, this is not a problem per se, but an oddity that I would appreciate some insight on from the big juicy brains in this community. Our site had hosting in the US, and I was concerned that therefore our relevance to our own country (Australia) was diminished because of it. For one of our main keywords we were a few spots behind the competitor on the 1st page for an australian searcher, but when i searched the same keyword from Google.com with gl=us to show US only results, we outranked the competitors by a few spots. On page elements aside (if anything we had more geo identifiers on the ranking page in question) I wanted to move hosts anyway and got hosting in Australia. The next week our search traffic jumped by 25%. But it was almost all US traffic. Australian traffic was unchanged. Any idea how this could happen? It's an .AU domain, hosted in Australia, with on page clearly identifying Australia. I checked webmaster tools and our geo is properly set to Australia. I checked the keywords that the traffic increased for and they are not geo specific at all. Besides that I don't know how else to pin this down. Thanks.
International SEO | | Digital3600