Localising our business to the correct country
-
Hi
I work for children's furniture business called Tidy Books. We are based in the UK. We have UK site www.tidy-books.co.uk. We also have a US site www.tidy-books.com which is registered in the US.
We have fully dedicated and translated French, German and Italian site (www.tidy-books.fr, www.tidy-books.de, www.tidy-books.it) . These all fall under our UK registered address. What I would like, is to have a French, German and Italian business address for these website. We just need an address only. This would mainly be used to for Google business listing and other business listings sites to help rank are sites correctly in their country domains. T
Do you know of or recommend any companies that can do this?
Is there any implications I need to be aware of, such as tax?
Thanks
-
Hi Geraldine
A client of ours used http://www.regus.fr/ to set up an address in Paris for this purpose and later opened a real office - and a real French company - when sales increased. Regus have offices worldwide see http://www.regus.fr/country-selector.aspx so I imagine that they can help for all countries.
I'll add to Gianluca's comments that Google won't be "fooled" by this address into recognising you as a French company. Google checks this through access to company registration databases rather than its own My Business listings.
But there are plenty of other advantages in having a My Business listing and Paris would be a good base in France for your site (audience reach). For an e-commerce site, potential clients will be reassured by a local telephone number too.
Looking at the French site, I noticed that the HREFLANG is incorrectly implemented. This is more important than the postal address. I strongly suggest you correct that
- Neil
-
Hi Gianluca thanks for getting back to me.
I see your point there's not fooling Google!
-
Hi Geraldine,
unfortunately, even though it is possible to obtain something like local P.O. Boxes and phone numbers, the issue is that Google deprecates their use for MyBusiness (Local Search). In other words, Google wants real offices with real phone numbers et al.
So, I see it hard for you to use Local Search in Google for earning more visibility if you do not have a real office in those countries.
However, you can still consider to buy local phone numbers, which then redirect to your UK customer care/commercial office and show them in your .de, .it and .fr websites, so users can call to those numbers. That would be users friendly and may improve the contacts conversions (something that you'd need to track with analytics).
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
-
Same site serving multiple countries and duplicated content
Hello! Though I browse MoZ resources every day, I've decided to directly ask you a question despite the numerous questions (and answers!) about this topic as there are few specific variants each time: I've a site serving content (and products) to different countries built using subfolders (1 subfolder per country). Basically, it looks like this:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GhillC
site.com/us/
site.com/gb/
site.com/fr/
site.com/it/
etc. The first problem was fairly easy to solve:
Avoid duplicated content issues across the board considering that both the ecommerce part of the site and the blog bit are being replicated for each subfolders in their own language. Correct me if I'm wrong but using our copywriters to translate the content and adding the right hreflang tags should do. But then comes the second problem: how to deal with duplicated content when it's written in the same language? E.g. /us/, /gb/, /au/ and so on.
Given the following requirements/constraints, I can't see any positive resolution to this issue:
1. Need for such structure to be maintained (it's not possible to consolidate same language within one single subfolders for example),
2. Articles from one subfolder to another can't be canonicalized as it would mess up with our internal tracking tools,
3. The amount of content being published prevents us to get bespoke content for each region of the world with the same spoken language. Given those constraints, I can't see a way to solve that out and it seems that I'm cursed to live with those duplicated content red flags right up my nose.
Am I right or can you think about anything to sort that out? Many thanks,
Ghill0 -
How to Target Country Specific Website Traffic?
I have a website with .com domain but I need to generate traffic from UK? I have already set my GEO Targeting location as UK in Google Webmasters & set country location as UK in Google Analytics as well but still, i get traffic only from India. I have also set Geo-targeting code at the backend of the website. But nothing seems works. Can anyone help me how can is do this? I am unable to understand what else can be done.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoninj0 -
The correct hreflang for the GB
Hi does anyone know the correct hreflang for the UK Google webmaster error: International Targeting | Language > 'en-GB' - no return tags (sitemaps)Sitemap provided URLs and alternate URLs in 'en-GB' that do not have return tags.Thanks you all
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Taiger0 -
Incorrect cached page indexing in Google while correct page indexes intermittently
Hi, we are a South African insurance company. We have a page http://www.miway.co.za/midrivestyle which has a 301 redirect to http://www.miway.co.za/car-insurance. Problem is that the former page is ranking in the index rather than the latter. The latter page does index occasionally in the same position, but rarely. This is primarily for search phrases like "car insurance" and "car insurance quotes". The ranking was knocked down the index with Penquin 2.0. It was not ranking at all but we have managed to recover to 12/13. This abnormally has only been occurring since the recovery. The correct page does index for other search terms like "insurance for car". Your help would be appreciated, thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | miway0 -
How can a small business compete with a larger business?
I work for a web and graphic design company. We're not a huge shop but we do fairly well. We're starting to dig into SEO, especially for ourselves. Our biggest problem is our backlinks and competition. We need to be able to rank for keywords like "web design boston" and "graphic design boston". Yet our competition has those locked down and only because of their backlinks. Normally I would say well okay lets look at what they're doing and do it better. The problem is most of their backlinks come from their clients websites that they themselves have designed and put a link on the footer of each page. We do that too but because we're smaller we don't have anywhere near as many clients as they do. I know I can try and rank for more "niche" keywords. But I want to know in all honesty what my options are for these same keywords. What realistic methods can I use to achieve the same kind of rankings they are?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iconadvertising0 -
How Does SEO Help Local Businesses
Hello, I recently took a position as a digital marketing manger with a advertising agency. Its my job to grow the digital marketing department. One of the issues I am running into is 90% of our clients are local businesses. When doing keyword research it is very difficult to find keywords with lots of search. For example, if I am optimizing for a Ford dealership in Hackensack,NJ there are not a lot of searches for this term. How can I justify a larger SEO budget when there is just not a lot of search volume for these keywords? This is nothing like Dog Training Videos or something similar. Am I missing something? Where can I pull traffic from for local businesses to justify larger SEO budgets? Thanks, Bill
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wparlaman0 -
Duplicate content issue for franchising business
Hi All We are in the process of adding a franchise model to our exisitng stand alone business and as part of the package given to the franchisee will be a website with conent identical to our existing website apart from some minor details such as contact and address details. This creates a huge duplicate content issue and even if we implement a cannonical approach to this will still be unfair to the franchisee in terms of their markeitng and own SEO efforts. The url for each franchise will be unique but the content will be the same to a large extend. The nature of the service we offer (professional qualificaitons) is such that the "products" can only be described in a certain way and it will be near on in impossible to have a unique set of "product" pages for each franchisee. I hope that some of you have come across a similar problem or that some of you have suggestions or ideas for us to get round this. Kind regards Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | masterpete0 -
Anybody know good SEO success stories in the field of small business directories?
We are helping a small business directory in their SEO. They address 20 service categories(300 subcategories) with 60000 profiles. We are focusing on following elements: 1. Cutting the flab (they have 3.4 million pages indexed), but they get only 30000 visitors on the website. This will be done by removing long list of cities & by using "Nofollow". 2. Improve internal navigation & use Anchor texts 3. Focus SEO (Backlinks) at business category pages 4. Clean URLs, Titles 5. Implementation of Rich Snippets (Schema.org) 6. Cleaning data If we can not take traffic volume to 300000 in a month, this project will be considered a failure. Does any directory has achieved this recently? We are in first 2 weeks of the project and It will help us our "To do" list 😉
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | UnyscapeInfocom0