How to set up international SEO for english speaking countries

[CoGri]

Hi, My company have offices around the world. However they also provide different services and products depending on the region. For example our offices in the USA, UK and Australia all provide different services to each other.

My question is, how do I set up my WordPress website up to cater for these different countries and services?

I think the simple answer would be to build a separate website for each, but this would be too costly and we don't have the resources to maintain all three.

Many thanks for your time,

Tom

[gfiorelli1]

The best way of using multilingual/multi-country in WordPress is using the WPML plugin.

[LynnPatchett]

HI Thomas,

The multisite setup is just a way of controlling the content. If you set it up on subfolders then google will see the sub folders as normal and all on the same domain. If you set it up using domain mapping then you are in effect setting up different domains (even though you are hosting the content all in the same place) and google will see the content as separate domains. If you are planning to go the subfolder route you could set up wordpress to get the same behavior without using multisite, it just might be quite dev intensive depending on how different you want the regional variations to be.

Whichever route you choose an important thing will be to make sure your regional hreflang tags are set up correctly - this will likely need a bit of tweaking given your description but is worth it to get it right.

[CoGri]

Hi Ryan,

Even in WordPress Multisite?

I love a good White Board Friday thank you, I will definitely give that a watch.

Tom

[RyanPurkey]

Hi Thomas. Yes, inbound links to subfolders tend to help Domain Authority rise better than those going to subdomains. Rand recently did a White Board Friday on this, found here: http://moz.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical-vs-301-how-to-structure-links-optimally-for-seo-whiteboard-friday.  Cheers!

[CoGri]

Hi Guys,

Thank you for your quick response. If I did use WordPress Multi-Site to build the subfolders for the different countries, would they pass "link juice" between them?

[LynnPatchett]

HI Thomas,

You could use a wordpress multi site installation for this which allows for setting up different wp installs on subdomains or sub directories as Ryan suggests. This will allow you to have separate 'sites' while all still being controlled from one wp admin panel and with a bit of coding/setup work to tweak things if needed. You can also use a domain mapping plugin to run multiple domains (.com, .com.au, .co.uk etc) from the subfolders if that is in the plans.

[RyanPurkey]

Without resources for multiple sites, you'll likely want to create separate folders for the regions, ex. yoursite.com/usa/, yoursite.com/uk/, yoursite.com/au/ and so on. To further guide users you could employ location based redirects to their applicable portion of the site. As far as Wordpress design goes you'll want to clearly label each section and state the the services and products being offered are (US/UK/AU) specific.