Hotel Multi country targeting + Google Local + TLDs => "MesSEO"
-
Hi guys,
I own a guesthouse which is facing a messy structural problem in its own web presence:
Portuguese: www.residencia-aeminium-coimbra.com.pt
English: www.residencia-aeminium-coimbra.com
Spanish: www.residencia-aeminium-coimbra.com/espanol
Looking for success in the long term, a few years ago, we decided to host 3 TLDs: 1 for global international english, 1 for local portuguese and 1 for the main foreign market Spain (we already redirected it to a subfolder in the .com in the meanwhile). We tried to promote each one of these in their targeted markets - mainly the .com got back-links links and authority.
With time, google local appeared and changed the face of google accommodation rankings. Google local are now the top results for most searches, even outside the country, and I came to the conclusion that the TLD assets were now a problem.
For instance, I can only add 1 domain to google local..what language should this be? It is the same for most social media presence..How should international markets be targeted in a local page?
Since TLDs do not seem to be an advantage right now, I am thinking we should be moving to a single domain and use a folder structure so we can use it everywhere.
Questions:
1. In terms of structure (TLD or Folder) and multi-lingual targeting what is the current best practice for hotels that show in local results but promote internationally?
2. What language should I point google local results to? And our Facebook page, etc?
3. If I move things around to a folder structure, what domain should I use?
- the .com is in english and has the most authority and links according to opensiteexplorer
- the .com.pt is in portuguese, our local language and our main market (but only 35% share)
- should I create a new domain ".pt"?
4. I don't think that geo-targeting the languages is worth it in this case, what do you think?
Kind Regards
Ricardo Madeira
Residencia Aeminium Coimbra -
Hi,
Sorry for not answering before but I was expecting some more thoughts from Seomoz or the community..
Although your thoughts are good, I don't think you answered my question. I think the problem was the question itself, after some thought I can rephrase it:
The real question may be: What is the best international/multilingual website structure to target google local, where you only have 1 location and compete in many countries and different languages?
Any thoughts?
-
Sorry about that... must be my bad!
Well yeah Google Places is more focused on delivering the results from the area and surroundings so it’s almost impossible for you to rank in local searches...
I think in that case Matt’s suggestions are helpful in that case and that is to make country specific pages with keyword and make it rank accordingly (not not over optimized to make it look spammy... do it the natural way...)
Hope this helps...
-
In the past when aiming at local search results for different places I have always created pages for the specific locations + term I am targeting. I have made sure the on page factors are naturally optimised well to incorporate this and I have also made sure the url of the page is location+keyword.html. Then I have created an internal navigation structure that points to this content with the appropriate anchor text. I have then built links that point to the specific location pages in terms of local listings etc. I have found this very successful, and yes I am still having success in a post penguin world, as I haven’t done anything in a spammy over-optimised way. I have not done this in terms of international SEO, but I don’t see why you couldn’t successfully do this on your site.
In terms of whether you should bring your sites under one with sub folders or not I think this article is a very helpful guide for international SEO.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday
Bringing your sites under one domain with sub folders and setting geo targetting in webmaster tools, then building links in the specific country as mentioned by Thomas Høgenhaven in the comments might be a good plan.
Good luck with this - I hope my thoughts might have helped give you some ideas...
-
Hi Moosa,
Thanks for your time and personal insights.
I tend to disagree with you on most part. Being a "hotel" we are in a different situation as a, lets say, fashion store. We do not have and will not have any locations at any given point outside our country or city (at least for now) but we do have customers on any given point of the world. Hell, the place where I have less clients is actually the place where we are located.
The thing is that, nowadays, google local results show on the top for most "hotel+city" searches. Those searches will only feature 1 TLD wherever in the world they may come from. We can optimize our local TLD how much we want but if it doesn't rank above google local results we won't be having any benefit. At least for us it would be difficult to rank above google results and keep racing with them.
I think that google places/local was mostly designed for businesses that would be searched for from local customers, but with hotels it is the opposite.
How should this be juggled?
-
Hello Ricardo,
This is actually a difficult question to me or may be the information is too much scattered but I got a way to reply you that might help you come up with answers to many of your questions...
If it would be my business or if I will be working for this website this is something what i would recommend.
- Domain
It is always great to talk to customer in their own language so if we can talk to customer in their own language and with their country TLD this will help them trust us easily instead of a single website that is based in English (universal language).
I would prefer to have 3 domains with content in 3 different languages that is English, Spanish and Portuguese.
Example:
Let’s take English version as the main website (as it’s a universal language) and the other two websites as branches.
- Google Maps
Google Maps does offer local listing for Portugal, Spain and England. If you have physical location available within 3 areas you will be able to register each website within the targeted area.
- Facebook Page
Again as I said it’s great to talk to customers in their own language. If cost is not the big issue the it’s great to have language based pages targeting the right kind of people but if budget is the issue then its great to come up with one but active facebook page (English should be the language).
When you have one page in English you should understand and take care of the customers in other countries as well and entertain them from time to time accordingly.
Hope most of your questions are covered... let me know if you have further question in mind...
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
-
Country and Language Specific URL Paths
Wanted to ask everyone a questions: So our company is going to be doing a website that is going to be full of videos. The url path will be country.domain.com/language/slug/content-id. We redirect the user when they go to the different country. So if you're in spain on a train to france your URL will change from es.domain.com/es/slug/content-id to fr.domain.com/es/slug/content-id. Each country can listen to each video in all languages. My question is with hreflang tags and canonicals. Aside from targeting users in a certain country via Google Search Console, how do I eliminate duplication and tell Google which I'd like to show up via which country. In spain I would like es.domain.com/es/slug/content-id to show in Google and would have hreflang tags on each of the es.domain pages but what about fr.domain.com/es/slug/content-id since it would show the same content? I can't canonical to one of them since I need them to show in their respective country. How do I show the difference in language and country without showing duplication?
International SEO | | mattdinbrooklyn0 -
What is best practice of using google translate
Hi, I'm thinking of adding google translate to our retailing site so that we could reach more international customers. what about the pros&cons? Any experience of success of utilising it and what potential issues should I be looking at? Thanks
International SEO | | LauraHT0 -
Geo Targeting & Geo Keywords
Kindly clarify the below scenario. I have set Geo Targeting for my Website to 'India' in Webmaster tools. So Google should give preference for the searches happening from India. Is there any preference given for the Geo keywords? Like 'SEO Services in India' or Web Design Companies India' while searching from USA. Thanks
International SEO | | FlavoursMedia0 -
How to Use Additional Country Domains
Greetings Mozlings We have a .co.uk address but mostly sell to South East Asia. Is there a benefit to getting .com.my, .com.sg, .co.id addresses If we do how should we use them - a simple redirect to the .co.uk? A single page site with a link to the .co.uk Some other way We're resource and time lite so we're looking to maximise the benefits with the minimum time investment Cheers Denis
International SEO | | Zippy-Bungle0 -
Sub-domains or sub-directories for country-specific versions of the site?
What approach do you think would be better from an SEO perspective when creating country-targeted versions for an eCommerce site (all in the same language with slight regional changes) - sub-domains or sub-directories? Is any of the approaches more cost effective, web development-wise? I know this topic's been under much debate and I would really like to hear your opinion. Many thanks!
International SEO | | ramarketing0 -
"Hreflang=x" tag and multinational websites
Hello, We have multiple websites targeted at multiple countries and languages, each with the correct country extension. We have a corporate blog for each of these websites, where the blogs are subdomains of the main website. Currently we have a process of rewriting our blog posts completely – while keeping the same subjects – in order to have original content on each of our blogs, although we have up to 3 blogs in the same language. These are the languages we target: French – FRANCE French – SWITZERLAND French – BELGIUM Italian – ITALY Italian – SWITZERLAND German – GERMANY German – SWITZERLAND German – AUSTRIA Spanish – SPAIN Spanish – COLOMBIA Spanish – PANAMA Czech – CZECH REPUBLIC Swedish – SWEDEN Dutch – BELGIUM / NETHERLANDS English – UK English – INTERNATIONAL The process is obviously very tedious, and not always applied rigorously – i.e. some of the texts are posted on 2-3 different blogs, creating duplicate content.
International SEO | | ESL_Education
The questions : Would there be any reason for us to privilege the use the rel="canonical" tag over the "hreflang=x" tag, thus giving privilege to a "master" version for each language? Are there any risks in using the "hreflang="x" tag for our blogs considering that the posts would be very similar, except for references to additional content? Could there be any risk that Google would consider our sites as duplicate content after all? Should we specify on each blog that we have all the above versions, or should we only specify the other markets versions in each language? For example, should we specify on our French, Swiss and Belgium blog that we have 3 different French versions, on our UK blog that we also have an international version, and so on, or should we list all versions on each of the blogs? Does the "hreflang="x" tag facilitate the indexation of each of the versions in the SERPs of their targeted market? Lastly, are there any precautions we should take in order to put this in place? Looking forward to your feedback. Best wishes, Maëlle0 -
Moving webserver to another country and downtime
Hi all, We are going to move our server location to another country, and our webpage will be down for about 24 hours. Is there anything that I should be aware of with SEO while doing this?
International SEO | | helgeolaussen
Any way to tell SE that our site will be down, without having alot of errors in Webmaster tools etc? Best regards, Ceran0 -
International SEO - auto geo-targetting
I read with interest the recent post on international SEO and the top level domain architecture approaches to local content: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/folders-vs-subdomains-vs-cctld-in-international-seo-an-overview#jtc135670 The issue I have is a little more complex: The business sells a wide variety of products (37) but one is by far and away the biggest and most popular. This means that due to the link profile of the various country sites and HQ site, search engines categorise the site according to this product (this is easily seen with the Google Adplanner) and the other product lines suffer as a result. The current architecture is to have a .com site and then individual ccTLD country sites, again with all products on each site. This creates an issue as in most countries the brand is not strong (compared to the keyword names and search volumes of the products) and so it is not that effective in generating organic traffic. The .com hogs much of the inbound links and the country sites themselves are not that well optimised for a number of reasons. A proposed solution has been to leverage the strength of the .com and the search volume for the product names, and to produce thematic sites based on each product: productA.brand.com
International SEO | | StevieCC
productB.brand.com
productC.brand.com In this way, the sites, content and link profiles are aligned around the more desirable products and we can expect improved organic search performance as a result (or at least ensure relevant traffic finds the relevant content fast). In terms of providing localised content, the plan was to use content mirroring and to then assign each content mirror to a specific geo-location using the webmaster tools console (and other SE equivilents). This is shown I think in one of Rand's videos. ProductA.brand.com/de/de Germany site for product A with unique German content
ProductA.brand.com/fr/fr French site for product A with unique French content This makes economic sense to me as to utilise the ccTLDs would result in hundreds of separate sites with all the licence and server considerations that entails. For example, for product A alone we would have to produce: productA.brand.de
productA.brand.fr
productA.brand.cn
productA.brand.jp
ect ect ect This just would not be sustainable in license/server costs alone across 37 products and 24 countries. However, I saw in a recent presentation at SES London that (auto) geo-targeting is risky, often doesn't work well for SEO and can even be seen as cloaking. I think the above strategy could still work, but perhaps we should avoid the use of auto-geotargetting altogether and hope the search engines alone do their job in getting users to the right content as we optimise the unique content for each country (and if they don't, ensure our desgn, UX and country selectors do the job instead). SEO guru consensus is to use the ccTLD if you own it, but as described above, in the real world that just isn't possible or practical given the company's strategic position. Which leads to the final question- we do own the brand ccTLDs- if they are directed back to the content mirror for the country on the .com, is there any SEO benefit in doing so aside from directing back any link juice associated with the domain)?0