Target inside pages for specific country

[arielbortz]

Hi! How are you?

I'm having the following problem: I have a client that has a big multilingual website, in spanish, portugese and english. The server is in Brazil, but he wants to migrate it to USA. I think that this will affect my SERPs in Brazil, and Brazil is the most important country where we need to be first in SERPs.

I'd like to, somehow, tell Google that http://website.com/pt is for Brazil and http://website.com/es is for Argentina, so I can avoid the problem that I'll have when the migration is completed and I lose my brazilian IP.

Do you have any tips on what should I do?

Thanks!

Best wishes,

Ariel

[arielbortz]

Thank you both!

I was able to geotarget the subfolder via Webmasters Tool. Now I'll check the results.

Thank you!

Ariel

[gfiorelli1]

Actually what you're saying is not correct. In fact you can geotarget also at subfolder (and subdomain) level via Google Webmaster Tools.

So it is perfectly possible for Ariel to tell to Google that all the content under the subcarpet /es/ for Argentina (but then would be better to call the subfolder /es-ar/) and /pt/ for Brasil (again: maybe is better to call the subfolder /es-ar/).

How to tell to Google that you want to geotarget a subfolder or a subdomain? Doing this: once you’ve added your main site (e.g. domain.com) and verified it in Webmaster Tools, simply register a new site in the same account – but set the new site as domain.com/es (or whichever your root subfolder is named). You can use that account to geo-target to Argentina – the option is in ‘settings’ in the left-hand panel. You can repeat the same process for as many folders as you want to geo-target.

[BenFox]

I don't think you can "tell" Google that different parts of your site are targeting different locations. If you were using multiple domains you could use the targeting section of GWMT but unfortunately that doesn't apply here.

There are ways that you can send a strong signal to Google that content is targeted at a specific country such as;

1. Use of local language
2. Using local currency
3. Local addresses/phone numbers
4. Links from other local sites

It might also be worth using the markup for places/organizations on Schema.org. I'm not sure if Google are using that particular microdata but it can't harm anything.