What's the best homepage experince for an international site?
-
Greeting Mozzers.
I have a question for the community, which I would appreciate your input on.
If you have a single gTLD that services multiple countires, what do you think is the best homepage UX for the root homepage and why?
So the example would be you own website www.company.org and target content to Germany, Japan and Australia with content through the folder structure eg. www.company.org/de-de
If someone comes to the www.company.org from a region, would you:
- Redirect them based on location IP – so if from Germany they land on www.company.org/de-de
- Let them land on the homepage which offers location selection
- Let them land on a page with content and offer location selection eg. pop-up or obvious selection box
- Something I’ve not thought of…
I'd appreciate your input.
Thanks
-
Hello Robert,
This is a question many businesses struggle with, as you might imagine. There really is no "perfect" solution for every situation so I won't try to speak in best practices other than to say don't annoy the user. If I'm trying to get to your .com home page but I just happen to be travelling in Germany for business an automatic redirect to the German page would drive me nuts.
If it were my site I'd probably take the third option. Specifically, I'd sniff out the geolocation based on their IP address and serve a custom pop-up in the language of that country offering something like "Would you like to see the [Country-Language] version"?
If I'm in Germany and land on the English default ".com" page I will not be surprised or frustrated by a pop-up or a custom message on the page asking "Möchten Sie die deutsche Version zu sehen?". I'd probably just X-out of it and move on.
That's pretty much what this site does when I view from a US location: https://www.gsport.no/herre/klaer/bukse-shorts .
It asks me, in English, if I want to translate to English, and offers two clear options along with a third x-out option. Or I could ignore it because it's pretty unobtrusive on desktop.
No matter which approach you choose, be sure to research best practices on using attributes and tags like rel="alternate" hreflang="x" and rel="canonical".
I'll leave this question open for discussion since there are many potential approaches that might answer your question.
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
-
International targeting search console, why did my rankings dropped?
hi reader, i changed the settings in console to USA, since then my rankings have dropped. my current data center or host is is Asia singapore, i am changing that USA this month question is, am i too late? or tageting should be done after changing ip address
International SEO | | maria-cooper90 -
International SEO Two Subdomains Showing Up in Google Search Results
Hi I have a client that is having two subdomains showing up SERP when you Google their name. Here are the details. They have two subdomains us.companyname.com and en.companyname.com us.companyname.com is for the US and has completely different products and content than en.companyname.com en.companyname.com is the site designed for Europe and it is in English. How can I make it so that only the us. version shows up in the search results? Thanks in advance!
International SEO | | JohnWeb120 -
An International SEO Conundrum
Hello all, I'm looking for opinions on this. Imagine there is a website example.com in English and the company 'Example' wanted to translate some of the pages (not not all) in to Russian. So they set up example.com/ru and translate the key pages into Russian. But half of the pages on.com/ru are left in English and there are no plans to translate them. How would you handle the pages in Engish on .com/ru? My thoughts are that they should: Canonicalise to the same versions on .com, and... Remove RU hreflang tags from the pages on .com/ru which are in English Otherwise, users searching in English with Russian browser settings could land on a page in English but then navigate to a translated page in Russian (+the menu navigation items will be in Russian) = bad UX. Not to mention they would be telling Google a page is in Russain but Google would be crawling English. So IMO, the best option is to use canonicals for this so that the .com version of the page is indexed. Then when a user lands after searching in English they will always be served English pages within that session. If English speakers/searchers land on the .com/ru page that would lead to a website half in one lang and half in another. I'm aware that Google recommends not using rel="canonical" across country or language versions of your site, but I believe they are making that recommendation based on an assumption that all pages are going to be translated to another language. In this case, there is no intention to do that, ever. Thanks for your thoughts and opinions. Cheers, Gill.
International SEO | | Cannetastic0 -
Is using JavaScript to render translations safe for International SEO?
Hello World! Background: I am evaluating a tool/service that a company wants to use for managing the translated versions of their international/multi-lingual websites: https://www.transifex.com/product/transifexlive/ Transifex is asking webmaster to "simply add a snippet of JavaScript" to their website(s); the approved translations are added by the business in the back-end; and the translated sites are made live with the click of a button (on/to the proper ccTLD, sub-domain, or sub-directory, which is specified). CONCERN: Even though I know Google reads JavaScript for crawling and ranking,
International SEO | | SixSpokeMedia64
I am concerned because I see the "English text" when I view the source-code on the "German site", and I wonder if this is really acceptable? QUESTION: Is a service like this (such as Transifex using JavaScript to render translations client-side) safe for indexing and ranking for my clients' international search engine visibility, especially via Google? Thank you!0 -
International Link Building Vendors
I'm working with a large enterprise site with many international domains. I have most of the markets covered but am having trouble identifying link building specialists/vendors in APAC - specifically Japan and Korea. Any recommendations from the community? Many thanks in advance!
International SEO | | JonClark150 -
Changing server location for a global targetted site
Hi, I am just in the process of purchasing a site from someone. The site has a global target audience (well global English speaking anyway). The site is on a .info domain and is currently hosted in Germany. Checking on SemRush it looks like 70% of traffic comes from English speaking countries (US, Australia, Canada, UK). Now I need to move the hosting to one of my own when I change ownership of the site. Now does it overly matter where I choose my hosting as currently it is hosted in Germany (around 4% of visitors from Germany) but I want to do my best not to knock any rankings but I was thinking of moving it to a UK or US based host but still want to keep a general worldwide userbase. As the US accounts for the largest part of traffic (39%) would I be best choosing hosting based over in the US or does it not overly matter too much (I am in the UK so most hosting I use is UK based). I have read a number of posts on server location but most seem to be for site which have a country specific target audience. Thanks for your help! 🙂
International SEO | | Wardy0 -
Same website in different countries, best practices for SEO?
Hey Guys, I have read several similar questions regarding mine, but none seem to truly cover my question. Basically, we have a company named Junair. We created the website for the company here in Australia (http://www.junair.com.au). As can be seen throughout the page, it mentions that it caters for both Australia and NZ (NZ has its own phone number). It does ok in the rankings at the moment, but rankings will continue to rise in the future once more links are getting picked up. Now however, the Junair team in NZ purchased the NZ domain http://www.junair.co.nz and redirected it to the Australian page. No matter which page you visit on the NZ URL, the URL will never change, and neither will the page title. They have now contacted us and asked to perform SEO on the NZ domain so the NZ domain would show up in searches on Google NZ. At the moment, when searching for "Junair" on google.co.nz, the Australian domain is coming up. How could I change this so the NZ URL would show instead? And what would be the best practices to perform SEO on the NZ URL, should I just create links pointing to http://www.junair.co.nz ? Thank you, Roderic
International SEO | | Michael-Goode0 -
Will duplicate content across international domains have a negative affect on our SERP
Our corporate website www.tryten.com showcases/sells our products to all of our customers. We have Canadian and UK based customers and would like to duplicate our website onto .ca and .co.uk domains respectively to better service them. These sites will showcase the same products, only the price and ship from locations will change. Also, the phone numbers and contact info will be altered. The sites will all be on one server. On each of the sites there will be a country selector which will take you to the appropriate domain for the country selected. Will doing this negatively affect our rankings in the US, UK and Canada?
International SEO | | tryten0