Internationalise all or just part of website?
-
Hi
We are a UK company looking to expand our sales into the US market. We will be setting up a US office.
Our (.com) site has a number of main sections relating to different products and services - but only two of these sections will be selling products to the US.
/service1 - UK only
/products1 - UK and US - different product names/descriptions for different markets
/service3 - UK and US - not much difference for uk/us pagesSo the query is do we fully internationalise the site with sub folders /us & /gb and make all content on the site have a different language version. Or do we only give an alternate language version for the two areas that need it? Perhaps /products1/us & /products1/uk
We also have top rankings and are concerned about changing the urls. Is one option to keep the existing urls as the 'default' language? The default perhaps being US as it is a .com domain. If not then how do you redirect a url that going forward splits into US or GB sub directories?
Another option is to have the current .com become US only and create a .co.uk site. We are in a position to easily do this but research suggests subdirectories is the better way forwards due to aggregated link authority.
Many thanks for any thoughts,
Tristan -
Good Answer Tim, but I am going to add a bit.
Since there are varying services, Tim's recommendation of domain.com/us and domain.com/uk is spot on. If you don't want to change URLs, I understand. You can keep the current URLs, you can geo-target the root to the UK and /us to the US. This route is easier to scale and if you grow each country as it launches, the domain gets stronger which helps each expansion in the years to come.
Now, if you are geo-targeting, there won't be much need for hreflang. If there are some product pages that are IDENTICAL across the two countries other than a few changed words, you can add HREFLANG. Technically speaking you wouldn't need it if the content were written and the pages crafted to each country, but until you get to that point, you can use HREFLANG for the pages that are duplicated. Mind you, this isn't best for your audience, but I get that for starters, that's easier. Do test the pages in each market to see if any modifications can be made for each market.
I don't recommend launching a .co.uk unless your customers/market demand it. That's a lot of marketing work to build up each one.
It sounds like your best bet is / geotarget to GB using Search Console, create a /us for the US, claim that in Search Console and geotarget to the US. Then use hreflang for any duplicated content.
Hope that helps!
-
Hi Tristan,
I'm sure you will get a range of different opinions on this, so I will throw my hat in the ring first.
First of all I don't think you should look to create two separate sites. I'm assuming the current site lives on the .com. Any site migration to a .co.uk structure could put you rankings at risk and you will see some flux in organic traffic. Building a .com/us would also allow you to leverage any authority from the existing site to help new pages rank quickly.
So.... should you build a .com/us and a .com/uk
This really depends on what the business plan is going forward. If the site is going to continue to scale, particularly in the number of products, it may be worth taking this hit now and rather than further down the line. If the number of pages are limited and you don't see this as much of a problem, you may look to continue using the .com for the UK and generate a .com/us for the US audience.
I'm inclined to recommend just building out the product pages, however you should also consider how this would be incorporated within navigation. How would a user return to a US page for example if they visited a UK page?
Hopefully this give you a few answers and a few more points to consider moving forward.
Tim
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
-
How do you optimise a website for European traffic?
I have a design portfolio website here https://www.nicholsoncreative.com/ which uses a .com but is currently configured through the Search Console to appear in results for Google.co.uk. I am going to be restructuring the website and optimisation and I want to bring in more traffic/enquiries/business from around Europe. As there's no Google.eu, and as Google also serves results based on the searchers geographic location it would seem difficult to structure and optimise content so that results can be found across all of Europe. I assume simply switching to a .eu domain extension for my own website wouldn't solve the problem? I also assume that creating content in different languages would be a logical (if time consuming) option? Are there any other tried and trusted techniques that can be used to target traffic throughout Europe? I'd appreciate any advice.
International SEO | | JCN-SBWD0 -
Redirect entire website or not?
I have 2 websites: a UK health blog covering a wide range of topics (professional medical advice, diets, mental health), core business, strong brand, content ranks well, lots of valuable traffic, only 100 external links but all of good quality. We also sell some of our UK consultancy services on the site. small niche blog just covering fitness, every page has robots=noindex, 100x more traffic, 100% of traffic is from 500,000 external links on other websites talking about fitness matters (these range from spam to medium quality) , 95% of traffic is from countries we cannot serve, probably only 1% of the remaining 5% of traffic would be considered our target market, but the main concern is that the content is very out of date and should anyone see, it would be damaging to the UK health blog My dilemma is what do we do with the fitness website to make most business use, while ensuring little maintenance? Suggestions have been: Keep fitness blog running but make very basic content updates and remove robots=noindex Redirect fitness website urls to appropriate pages on UK health website We are on the verge of choosing option 2 but I have some SEO concerns about the impact of the redirects on the UK health website. Due to the volume of external links which mostly all reference 'fitness', is there any risk through redirects that Google might start thinking the UK health website is just about fitness? If so, is there any way to prevent this through certain redirects eg 307? Also with the fitness website having some spam related external links, is there any risk to the UK health website if these aren't disavowed before redirects are setup? If so, on which website should these be done? Thanks!
International SEO | | tah061 -
Which Google does a .ie website get shown in?
Hi all, I am working on a .ie website and I was under the understanding that if you have a regional domain, like .ie you will limited to being shown in a search engine like google.ie When I go to International Targeting in Google SEarch Console it says the site is associated with: Ireland Am I limiting my ability to rank well in worldwide Google searches with this domain and if so, how can I counter this? Many thanks.
International SEO | | Bee1590 -
Another website clone issue
My site has been cloned by this f........ http://designer.aimeeprom.com/ original site http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com Still has our logo etc... How can we prevent this from happening, What should I do next. I have pinged them via the interactive chat but they do not reply..
International SEO | | Taiger0 -
'Mini' versions of our website for overseas markets. Does it matter?
Hi Guys. I work for an e-commerce site called TOAD Diaries, we make bespoke diaries and journals. In essence we allow people to design their own diary online, then we make it and send it. We have already sold some products to poeple in many European countries, (Malta, France, Germany) but we want to have a better online presence for those overseas markets. So….. We're want to do an overseas ‘test case’, to see if we can sell more products in Europe. Out thinking is this: We’ll buy a subdomain for a specific country. Then we’ll then build a ‘mini’ version of our site in the appropriate language. This be a country specific landing page with links to our ‘design your own diary’ pages, basket and checkout. All in the language we’re targeting. Question: Will having such a small number of pages in the targeted countries language effect out ability to rank well? It will be maybe 10 – 15 pages in size. Or is it much more to do with on page optimization and quality backlinks? i.e) the site's size has no impact. What other factors should we consider when trying to rank well in other European countries? Many thanks in advance.
International SEO | | isaac6630 -
Are Subdomains better or SubDirectories better for an international website ?
Can anyone explain why the structure of your website: yourbrand.com/es/category is better than es.yourbrand.com for multi language and multi country website.
International SEO | | Tushar_P0 -
Multi Regional website - Folder strategy
Hello Seomoz people ! I've been struggling for some time now with an international website project. It's gonna be an:international website with joomla. To sum up: We have an international company The company has 13 subsidiaries worldwide (same products, different names) The company doesn't have enough resources to get 13 independent websites Some subsidiaries work in one country / one language, some others on a region (several countries, several languages) Thanks to your community we decided to: Get a main website company.com Get subsidiaries folders (middle east, oceania and south america will be easier to link to their subsidiary) .com/asia .com/middle-east .com/oceania .com/south-america .com/uk .com/usa .com/fr .com/es .com/de .com/ma .com/dz .com/it We also need to: Get some websites in different languages .com/asia-cn .com/asia-en etc. Now how do we do to manage: Regional websites (the first 4th on the upper list) Google allows to affect a website to a country not region Will they compete with the .com ? How do we set up them for google ? How do we avoid duplicate content and keep local ranking .com/asia-en/services1.html will have the exact same content that_.com/services1.html_ If we use canonical from _.com/asia-en/services1.htm_l to _.com/services1.html , d_oes that mean /asia will not rank in asia ? Hope you can help us to figure us the best solution for this good project ! Thanks a lot. Florian
International SEO | | AymanH1 -
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