Tricky Geotargeting

[Midleton]

Hi there,

I’ve got a question regarding SEO and Geotargeting

The following is my business scenario.

My business is based in Spain and its goal is to sell a product for both foreign students from all around the world that come to study here in Spain and to Spanish students as well.

Considering this scenario and the fact that for the resources I have at the moment I can just maintain two versions of the page I decided that the best option would be to establish two page versions – one in Spanish and one in English both with very different content.

NOTE – The main goal is to rank for different keywords according to the language. Therefore, the content will be different because I’ve conducted two types of keywords semantics strategy using Adwords Keyword Planner - One with Spain as country and Spanish as language, the other with Spain as country and English as language

Ideally the Spanish version would serve results for users searching in Spanish (Spanish, Mexican, Argentinian, Peruvian..) while the English version would serve either users searching in English being English their native tongue (American, British, Australian) or users with a nationality that doesn’t belong to a country where English is the official language but still (I suppose) search in English (Chinese, Brazilian, Swedish, Japanese…)

I thought that the best option would be to create two different and separated domains

www.example.es and www.example.com

Indicating in GWT that for both the domains the country is Spain.

And then I would use the following hreflang attribute to indicate the language.

For www.example.es

And so on….

While For www.example.com

And so on….

My question is, do you think this configuration is correct for my needs and goals. Do you have any suggestion? Can you see any pitfall?

Thanks a lot for your help!!!

[Midleton]

Hi Gianluca,

Sorry for the delay!!!

Thanks for your answer. I just got what I needed

Cheers

[gfiorelli1]

Thanks for the clarification... and sorry for the delay in this answer.

If you're targeting located in Spain only, then you have to geotarget your domain to Spain via search console and then using hreflang for telling google that speaking English users in Spain must see the EN version of it.

So the hreflang annotations should look like this:

<rel="alternate" href="www.domain.com" hreflang="es-ES"></rel="alternate">

<rel="alternate" href="www.domain.com/en/" hreflang="en-ES"></rel="alternate">

<rel="alternate" href="www.domain.com/en/" hreflang="pt-ES"></rel="alternate">

As you can see quite different from how you wrote the code.

"ES" is Spain (target Spain only), and "es" means "target Spanish speaking people" and "en" "target English speaking people"...

if you use this: , you're telling google to target Spanish speaking people in Mexico, and not "target Mexican Spanish people".

[Midleton]

Hola Gianluca,

Thanks for your prompt answer

Just one note - Spain is the market for both my Spanish and foreign users. That's why I need to geotarget users searching from Spanish IPs even though their language is Brazilian, Chinese, Swedish and so on. I don't need to target English speaking people in other countries

In a nutshell, the Spanish version of the site would target all the users in SPAIN who speak Spanish (Spanish, Mexican, Chilean, Argentinian....)

While the English version would target the "rest-of-the-world-users" in SPAIN either who speaks English (American, British..) or who speaks another language but search (i suppose) in English (Brazilian, Japanese, Chinese).

What you think ?

Cheers

[gfiorelli1]

Hola,

from your description yours is a case of multilingual SEO, not multi country.

that means that all your planned strategy is wrong :-).

if you geotarget both domains to Spain, you are telling google to geotarget them only to users searching from Spanish IPs, so you'll struggle targeting English speaking people in other countries.

Moreover, if you target languages only, then you don't have to indicate the country ISO code in the hreflang, but only the language one... and that means you are avoiding to fill your code with 100+ hreflang annotations.

also your idea of having two domains names seems wrong to me in your case. It is better having just a .com domain with English as main language and Spanish in a /ES/ subfolder. This way you can take advantage of content marketing and link earning campaigns for the English version also for providing authority to the Spanish one via internal linking (and vice versa).

if, then, you want the Spanish version to explicitly and only target users residing in Spain, you can create a search console profile for the ES subfolder en geotarget it to Spain (of you decide to do do, the hreflang related to Spanish URLs must have es-ES)

[AdamThompson]

If you want to target users from US, Japan, Mexico, etc. do not set your country as Spain in GWT. Instead, don't set a country at all.