Using geolocation for dynamic content - what's the best practice for SEO?

[LauraFalls]

Hello

We sell a product globally but I want to use different keywords to describe the product based on location.

For this example let’s say in USA the product is a "bathrobe" and in Canada it’s a "housecoat" (same product, just different name).

What this means… I want to show "bathrobe" content in USA (lots of global searches) and "housecoat" in Canada (less searches).

I know I can show the content using a geolocation plugin (also found a caching plugin which will get around the issue of people seeing cached versions), using JavaScript or html5.

I want a solution which enables someone in Canada searching for "bathrobe" to be able to find our site through Google search though too. I want to rank for "bathrobe" in BOTH USA and Canada.

I have read articles which say Google can read the dynamic content in JavaScript, as well as the geolocation plugin. However the plugins suggest Google crawls the content based on location too. I don’t know about JavaScript.

Another option is having two separate pages (one for “bathrobe” and one for “housecoat”) and using geolocation for the main menu (if they find the other page i.e. bathrobe page through a Canadian search, they will still see it though). This may have an SEO impact splitting the traffic though.

Any suggestions or recommendations on what to do?? What do other websites do? I’m a bit stuck.

Thank you so much!

Laura

Ps. I don’t think we have enough traffic to add subdomains or subdirectories.

[Everett]

Hello Benjamin,

This is an interesting problem. I'm going to provide my opinion, but I highly recommend studying up on International SEO, which you can do at the links below:
https://moz.com/learn/seo/international-seo
http://www.aleydasolis.com/en/

I don't know what the plugin does, but if it generates a new URL (e.g. adds ?loc=ca or something like that) for the location change you'll want to use rel="alternate" hreflang="*" tags, which would look something like this:

Google recommends putting one language per page, so that would be a different URL for each version, as highlighted in red here.

**However, it sounds to me like all of this is done client-side using JavaScript, and that the URL doesn't change, only the content.** If this is the case - as long as you are serving the same content to Googlebot crawling in Canada as you are to a visitor in Canada you probably won't have any issues, as described here: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2008/06/how-google-defines-ip-delivery.html .

For the situation you described, it seems like you could put both keyword variations in the content and that would be good enough. But then you don't want to spell specialising with an S in one line and specializing with a z in the next.

Another thing to look into is whether both versions of the content appear in the code, or just one or the other. You definitely don't want to have multiple versions of the content in the source code. But you also don't want to hide both versions via JavaScript, only to load one or the other client-side. That creates even more problems.

One would think there would be a Vary: Location response header, similar to how responses are provided when content varies by user-agent or cookie: https://www.fastly.com/blog/best-practices-for-using-the-vary-header . Alas, I can't find any use cases of this and it's not a "thing". I'm not sure why this is, but maybe an International SEO Expert like Alayda Solis would know. I'll ping her into the thread if she has time.

[LauraFalls]

Thank you. That link was helpful.

[BlueCorona]

This is a great opportunity to test some of your ideas. It may be a good idea to create unique landing pages based on the most highly search keyword per region and target them on the corresponding geo-page. Read more about great ways to rank geo-targeted pages--and make them convert: https://moz.com/blog/scaling-geo-targeted-local-landing-pages-that-really-rank-and-convert-whiteboard-friday

However, it may be agood idea to optimize the homepage, about page, and service description pages for the products rather than the locations.And, since you're a national brand, it may be smart to try so PPC ads to geo-target your advertising and use those keywords accordingly.