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
-
Possible to expand organic reach in multiple countries/markets without localized content?
Hi everyone, I was recently hired as Content Lead for a SaaS company. We are based in Germany with plans to expand into the UK, Ireland, Spain, and the Netherlands. All of our website content is entirely in English and we don't have plans to localize content for any of the new markets. At least not yet.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | localyze_mason
One of my responsibilities will be to expand our organic reach through, mostly through SEO content. Though I'm comfortable with the fundamentals of SEO, I'm no expert and I certainly don't have experience with international SEO. I consulted a couple of resources like this guide to international SEO from Moz and this video from Semrush. In a nutshell, this is what I gather: if you want to expand organic reach in foreign countries/markets, you need to 1) decide what kind of domain you want to use and then implement the necessary technical configurations and 2) create localized content in the target market's language. As I mentioned, we won't be localizing any content at first. My question, then, is can we go about creating content in English and hope to gain any kind of meaningful organic exposure in non-English speaking markets? If so, what's the best approach? I apologize in advance if any of this isn't clear or if the answer is super obvious. Happy to provide further details upon request. Thanks in advance for any help that can be offered!0 -
How do I know if I am correctly solving an uppercase url issue that may be affecting Googlebot?
We have a large e-commerce site (10k+ SKUs). https://www.flagandbanner.com. As I have begun analyzing how to improve it I have discovered that we have thousands of urls that have uppercase characters. For instance: https://www.flagandbanner.com/Products/patriotic-paper-lanterns-string-lights.asp. This is inconsistently applied throughout the site. I directed our website vendor to fix the issue and they placed 301 redirects via a rule to the web.config file. Any url that contains an uppercase character now displays as a lowercase. However, as I use screaming frog to monitor our site, I see all these 301 redirects--thousands of them. The XML sitemap still shows the the uppercase versions. We have had indexing issues as well. So I'm wondering what is the most effective way to make sure that I'm not placing an extra burden on Googlebot when they index our site? Should I have just not cared about the uppercase issue and let it alone?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webrocket0 -
Reviews not pulling through to Google My Business page
OK, a local SEO question! We are working with a plumbing company. A search for (Google UK) shows the knowledge panel with 20+ reviews. This is good! However, if you search for "plumbers norwich" and look at the map, thecompany is on the third page and has no reviews. I've logged into Google My Business, and it says the profile is not up to date and only 70% complete with no reviews. This is odd, as there was a fully complete profile recently. Any ideas on how best to reconcile the two? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ad-Rank1 -
My site has a loft of leftover content that's irrelevant to the main business -- what should I do with it?
Hi Moz! I'm working on a site that has thousands of pages of content that are not relevant to the business anymore since it took a different direction. Some of these pages still get a lot of traffic. What should I do with them? 404? Keep them? Redirect? Are these pages hurting rankings for the target terms? Thanks for reading!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
Why does our business directions page rank above business profile page
Hi All, We are having an issue at the moment where our business direction page is ranking above the main business profile page. Our website is zodio.com, similar to Yelp but for South East Asia. An example of each page is below: Business Profile Page - http://www.zodio.com/business/detail/126037914/chowking Business Directions - http://www.zodio.com/business/direction/126037914 On many of our long tail searches for particular businesses, the business directions rank above the business details. Does anyone have any idea of why this would happen? I have researched Yelp and they do not have this issue. A few search examples in Google are as follows (one is in Thai): agonos dental clinic เวิลด์ชาร์มมิ่ง kawanku elektrik I have been rattling my brain and search for answers but cannot find anything. The communities help would be much appreciated. Many Thanks, Neil W
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zodiothailand0 -
Google Places for Business for a national company?
A national business has one HQ. it's possible for customers to visit. Could there be any disadvantages to listing a national company on Google Places for Business? I'd see it as an advantage as they'll have a greater presence for local searches. From what I understand it won't affect the organic rankings of the company as that's a separate algorithm. There are already some discussions about this in the Q&A, but nothing I can see that's recent and concrete.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alex-Harford0 -
Client has country specific (.co.uk) but no international domain name
Is there any issue re: SEO? I usually go for a local and international domain just to protect brand but these guys only protected local .co.uk domain. I'm thinking there aren't any specific SEO implications, but please let me know if there are any...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Best strategy behind moving country subdirectory to dedicated TTLD wo/ loosing organic search volume?
Community, We are about to move one of our most popular country sub directories from brandname.com/de/.. to brandname.de . We have just purchased the domain so while the domain has been registered in 2009 the URL has zero domain authority. What is the best strategy to execute the move while being cautious about loosing too much organic search volume the subdirectory is receiving right now? Obviously it will take some time to build up DA on the TTLD so maybe it is a good idea to keep the country directory for a little longer and start on the TTLD with just a static landing page, place some links, wait until it receives some DA builds up and then perform the move. Thoughts? /TomyPro
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomypro0