How to optimise a site for 2 countries

[dnaynay]

Hi there - Any help with the below much appreciated

I am helping an Australian company, producing packaging products for businesses. Their site is hosted in Australia and their offices are in Australia.

They have asked me to take care of both on-page and off-page SEO so that they rank for keywords related to their products - e.g. 'cardboard boxes'.

This should be fairly straightforward for Australian based (.com.au) searchers, but they also supply their products to South Africa, and so want their results to show up also for South African based (.co.za) searchers.

Also consider:

it is not typical for searchers for these products to use geomodifiers in their search terms

there is no unique content for the South African market versus the Australian... the product information is essentially identical.

What should we do to ensure their results show up equally for those in South Africa as well as Australia?

I am considering building a completely separate site, hosted in South Africa and specifically for the S.A market, but will the duplicate content effect be an issue? Also, this would essentially mean double the SEO effort, is there no way I could achieve our goals more efficiently?

many thanks to any help

[dnaynay]

Thanks all very much for your help - great advice.

D

[Mark_Jay_Apsey_Jr.]

David-

Ian is right on the money. Dont build two sites....waste of time.

Create additional content related to the southafrican market for the core site and make sure you properly identify it in the URL and sitemap so there is a distinction.

Definitely use markup for mutilingual.  You can provide people a south african content tool/link  on the home page that takes them to the south african content within your site.

Ther is absolutely no way you can duplicate 100% of the content....In fact, absed on several companies we have worked with that have done something very similar, we were forced to write 80% new content for all of the associated pages...made a huge difference in the SEO and the localization.

Make sure you are utilizing google + in africa so that you can localize the address and the applicable SEO.

Good luck.

Mark

[wrttnwrd]

I wouldn't do two sites - while there's still some argument about this, most international SEOs say that's no longer helpful.

I would:

1. Write localized English versions of your content for each region.
2. Use location markup and microformats on each page.
3. Use language markup per this post: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html - even if you're using English, it can help to indicate regional dialect.
4. Try not to have 100% duplication. Be sure to re-write content to match local idioms, show the right pricing and shipping info, etc.

That should get you started.