I need help with international SEO for two sites?
-
I'll try to keep this clear...
I am working with an company based in Germany, they own company.com/de and company.com/en, and that's how they are currently structuring their domains. They also own companyusa.com that they really want to show up in USA only.
They want to keep company.com/en for England/english speaking Europe and company.com/de for their German audience in Germany.
They are wanting us to optimize/SEO for companyusa.com, and they want that URL to show up as the top google search in the USA for their "company" keyword. What is showing up now is www.company.com/en 1st in Google because it's been around longer and it has more domain authority.
What is the best practice for us optimize companyusa.com so that it is the top dog in the USA while not messing up the other domains? Should we merge? Subfolders all around?
Thanks for all the input.
-
Hey,
Why use a separate domain for US? Presumably you've already built up authority in the root domain so why waste that effort on a completely new domain like companyusa.com?
I would set-up sub-folders all around:
UK - company.com/en-gb/
USA - company.com/en-us/
Germany - company.com/de/
Also gives you scope to optimize for Latin America too if you ever wanted, like so - company.com/es-mx/
To ensure the correct version of the site ranks in the correct Google CC, setup each site as it's own entity in webmaster tools and set geo-location correctly per site.
Also you could implement href-lang meta tag on each page to tell Google which version of the translated content should be indexed in the country specific Google, google.de, google.co.uk etc.
Hope that helps,
Woody
-
geotarget the sites so that they show up in their respective countries search engines. The german site should show only in germany and the US site should only show up in US.
you can check your GA after geotargeting to check to see that the traffic is coming from the correct places for each site.
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
-
Mega Menus and SEO
Hi Everyone, I know this has been brought up before, but wanted your opinion for 2020. I have a new client that is hesitant to do a mega menu for their huge site due to the amount of links and "dilution". I have quite a few clients with mega menus with no problems at all from an SEO standpoint. But I can understand his perspective. I am suggesting that we have the main links (looking at GA) as the the navigation, then clicking them takes you to subcategory page listing all the subcats within. Problem is that the developer/designer has made this mega menu already and it is pretty slick. Now they already are killing it search-wise on Google, but don't have a mega menu or a secondary category page. Just a a category with too many products, so we are trying to go one way or the other. Any opinions on which route to best take from a user and SEO perspective?
Web Design | | vetofunk0 -
How much copy do you need on the homepage?
The general rule used to be around 300 words of copy on the homepage, but so many new websites now have very little copy, if any, on the homepage. Has the best practice changed here? If you include keywords in the title and header tags, is that enough to support strong SEO on the homepage...or do you need a few hundred words of copy still? Would love to hear what others think.
Web Design | | KevinBloom1 -
Site Rebuild -Larger to smaller
Hi All, We are rebuilding an existing site which has around 230 Pages (lots of content not required) down to around 20. Whats the best way to 301 redirect the pages that are going to be removed- (we wont be able to use .htaccess because we are moving to Adobe Business Catalyst) Thoughts? We are trying to preserve as much SEO value as possible.....
Web Design | | OnlineAssetPartners0 -
How does a Responsive Site kill SEO?
How does a Responsive Site poentially kill SEO? I've seen a few feeds on twitter how a website took a rankings dive after implementing a Responsive theme; yet, it's not clear to me what is actually going on within a Responsive site that would cause the SEO rank to tank? I can only speculate that it introduces a bunch of 404 errors, or that it changes all of the URLs into gibberish, so you loose all of the links coming into your website if not 301'ed? Can someone clarify, what are the actual mechanical issues on a Responsive website that becomes a concern to SEO? Thanks.
Web Design | | ExploreConsulting1 -
Should the parent directory of the main site-navigation be clickable or not?!?
Highly discussed in our team is the question: Should all parent navigation items be clickable, or only the ones that have no child menu appearing on mouse over? At Starwood Germany, we would like to adjust the main navigation for all our websites in order to improve consistency and user friendliness. At the moment, most of our websites feature both clickable non-clickable parent items, depending on whether the items have a corresponding child menu (appearing on mouse over) or not. See example here: http://www.imperialvienna.com/en Some of our team members believe it might be irritating and/or confusing for the user if some items are clickable while others are not. What do you think? Any thoughts and insights would be truly appreciated!
Web Design | | DFM_GSA0 -
SEO For Lead Generation
From an SEO point of view, is it okay to have a sites focus to be Lead Generation? We will do a small amount of blogging and we'll also have longer form sales pages on the site... but the main focus would be lead generation pages that we'd target for the SERPs. TO ME... this seems fairly spammy. If we had 50-60 landing pages with only 100-300 words of copy on them. If this is "okay" then how much should we altar up these landing pages in terms of content? None of them will be direct copies... but I just want to make sure that we stay above a ratio that would be good for SEO. Then lastly... How many main terms can we expect to target with a landing page? Should we focus each landing page to a keyword, or can we target a few and still rank effectively?
Web Design | | lifeseo0 -
Does page speed worth for SEO?
I always broken my head to try to follow all pagespeed guidelines. I increase my pagespeed significantly, but i didnt saw any effect in my SEO performance. In my keywords, my concorrents are crap on it (I have score of 90 and they are at 60-70).Does google gives importance to it?
Web Design | | Naghirniac0 -
How long does Google take to re-cache a site?
Specifically, I just redesigned my site. I'm reading Danny Dovers book, and learned about checking the cache version of the site to see what google is REALLY seeing . . . . . . which evidently is my old site. Obviously, my sites not going to make any real progress with SEO as long as the site is out of date. It says it last checked the site on 5/5 and I launched the site on 5/9. Obviously, it does not do these things immediately, but anyone have any ideas on how long it should take before google starts to show me some love?
Web Design | | damon12120