How to set up international SEO for english speaking countries
-
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
-
The best way of using multilingual/multi-country in WordPress is using the WPML plugin.
-
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.
-
Hi Ryan,
Even in WordPress Multisite?
I love a good White Board Friday thank you, I will definitely give that a watch.
Tom
-
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!
-
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?
-
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.
-
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.
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
-
Advise on the right way to block country specific users but not block Googlebot - and not be seen to be cloaking. Help please!
Hi, I am working on the SEO of an online gaming platform - a platform that can only be accessed by people in certain countries, where the games and content are legally allowed.
International SEO | | MarkCanning
Example: The games are not allowed in the USA, but they are allowed in Canada. Present Situation:
Presently when a user from the USA visits the site they get directed to a restricted location page with the following message: RESTRICTED LOCATION
Due to licensing restrictions, we can't currently offer our services in your location. We're working hard to expand our reach, so stay tuned for updates! Because USA visitors are blocked Google which primarily (but not always) crawls from the USA is also blocked, so the company webpages are not being crawled and indexed. Objective / What we want to achieve: The website will have multiple region and language locations. Some of these will exist as standalone websites and others will exist as folders on the domain. Examples below:
domain.com/en-ca [English Canada]
domain.com/fr-ca [french Canada]
domain.com/es-mx [spanish mexico]
domain.com/pt-br [portugese brazil]
domain.co.in/hi [hindi India] If a user from USA or another restricted location tries to access our site they should not have access but should get a restricted access message.
However we still want google to be able to access, crawl and index our pages. Can i suggest how do we do this without getting done for cloaking etc? Would this approach be ok? (please see below) We continue to work as the present situation is presently doing, showing visitors from the USA a restricted message.
However rather than redirecting these visitors to a restricted location page, we just black out the page and show them a floating message as if it were a model window.
While Googlebot would be allowed to visit and crawl the website. I have also read that it would be good to put paywall schema on each webpage to let Google know that we are not cloaking and its a restricted paid page. All public pages are accessible but only if the visitor is from a location that is not restricted Any feedback and direction that can be given would be greatly appreciated as i am new to this angle of SEO. Sincere thanks,0 -
International SEO & redirects - do these solutions make sense?
I’m currently working on SEO for an international website with subdirectories set up for each international version. The site is has never had any SEO previously and is having a lot of indexing and visibility issues. Also geotargeting seems very off in search results. I’ve diagnosed various issues and want to check my assumptions and solutions below make sense... The root domain uses a 302 redirect to display content from the /en-GB page. (302 redirects seem to be a default language fallback setting configured in the CMS) and they’re used for most key pages. I’m concerned these redirects are contributing to a lot of the issues with incorrect indexing. The en-GB is the default language version of the site. So far, the en-GB has been set as the canonical version too. Both the root domain and this subdirectory URL display the same content. (en-US is also a near duplicate page). All other international homepages appear only on their subfolder URL. Various SEO tools have been showing redirect loops (caused by language changing parameter versions of URLs being crawled that don’t have redirects on them) and issues with hreflang and canonicals. I believe the hreflang tags and canonicals have been ignored due to relative URLs being used for each, as search results don’t always contain the desired versions of the URLs (in terms of regional version and preferred canonical versions). My questions are: Could these 302 redirects be conflicting with hreflang tags? If so, I’m thinking they should be removed (if not made 301s). GSC doesn’t like the fact these are on key pages, as redirected pages are listed in the sitemap. Will changing hreflang tags and canonical tags to absolute URLs possibly be enough to fix these issues from what you can tell? (Or will redirects need to go too?) Is the en-GB correctly set as the canonical when the root domain is also accessible, indexed and using this page’s content within the CMS too? (I feel like the root domain should be the canonical version, but not sure that works together with other language version subfolders or with a redirect in place from root to subfolder). As an extra point to the last question, GSC has recently chosen the root domain as the canonical (despite en-GB being set as user preference) and is now choosing to deindex some international versions of the homepage as a result. Hoping that getting the hreflang tags fixed and possibly redirects removed should correct this ASAP. But perhaps this also confirms en-GB should be the canonical and marked X-default too. I hope that all makes sense and sorry it’s a small collection of related questions. Really appreciate any replies.
International SEO | | MMcCalden0 -
An International SEO Conundrum
Hello all, I'm looking for opinions on this. Imagine there is a website example.com in English and the company 'Example' wanted to translate some of the pages (not not all) in to Russian. So they set up example.com/ru and translate the key pages into Russian. But half of the pages on.com/ru are left in English and there are no plans to translate them. How would you handle the pages in Engish on .com/ru? My thoughts are that they should: Canonicalise to the same versions on .com, and... Remove RU hreflang tags from the pages on .com/ru which are in English Otherwise, users searching in English with Russian browser settings could land on a page in English but then navigate to a translated page in Russian (+the menu navigation items will be in Russian) = bad UX. Not to mention they would be telling Google a page is in Russain but Google would be crawling English. So IMO, the best option is to use canonicals for this so that the .com version of the page is indexed. Then when a user lands after searching in English they will always be served English pages within that session. If English speakers/searchers land on the .com/ru page that would lead to a website half in one lang and half in another. I'm aware that Google recommends not using rel="canonical" across country or language versions of your site, but I believe they are making that recommendation based on an assumption that all pages are going to be translated to another language. In this case, there is no intention to do that, ever. Thanks for your thoughts and opinions. Cheers, Gill.
International SEO | | Cannetastic0 -
Country and Language Specific URL Paths
Wanted to ask everyone a questions: So our company is going to be doing a website that is going to be full of videos. The url path will be country.domain.com/language/slug/content-id. We redirect the user when they go to the different country. So if you're in spain on a train to france your URL will change from es.domain.com/es/slug/content-id to fr.domain.com/es/slug/content-id. Each country can listen to each video in all languages. My question is with hreflang tags and canonicals. Aside from targeting users in a certain country via Google Search Console, how do I eliminate duplication and tell Google which I'd like to show up via which country. In spain I would like es.domain.com/es/slug/content-id to show in Google and would have hreflang tags on each of the es.domain pages but what about fr.domain.com/es/slug/content-id since it would show the same content? I can't canonical to one of them since I need them to show in their respective country. How do I show the difference in language and country without showing duplication?
International SEO | | mattdinbrooklyn0 -
Subdomains vs ccTLD in International SEO
I'm interested to see if anyone has any additional thoughts or recent experience on subdomains vs ccTLD for International SEO. An article I found on this site is from March 2011, so just wanted to check if this is still relevant? http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/folders-vs-subdomains-vs-cctld-in-international-seo-an-overview
International SEO | | edwardlewis0 -
International Hub site: .uk vs domain vs subdomain
Financial company with 2 sites: 1- Mybrand.com for the US market.
International SEO | | FXDD
2- global.mybrand.com is the hub for international with selection for 10 languages: drop-down allows selecting between mybrand.jp, mybrand.fr, etc Now we have the opportunity to redesign the site from zero and I am exploring to get rid of the subdomain for the global site What would be your preference to use as the international hub? a) mybrand.co.uk: I have to use lawyers to get the URL from squatter b) mybrandGlobal.com : URL easy to get, and can be geo targeted using google webmaster tools. Cons: It might not rank as well as .co.uk in the UK, which is our biggest market c) global.mybrand.com-- pros: keep using it because it is aged and has some authority. Google might now see subdomains as part of TLD, thus making it a valid way to separate international from US .. Cons: SEO best practices advice to avoid subdomains because it might not pass full link value across domains. There is not really different content the subdomain, it is just the hub for international Thanks in advance for the help0 -
Use country-specific domains or stick to already strong .com domain?
We run an online store with the majority of our customers coming from 4 different European countries. The site is accessible through TLD's of all of these countries. However our .com domain currently has the most links pointing to it and the highest domain authority. Unfortunately, we are unable to tell through which TLD visitors reach our site. The niche is rather competetive, and therefore I am unsure whether it would be worth it to solely use our .com domain for the English language, and try to rank for each of the seperate languages with its own country-specific domain. **Question/discussion: **Will it be worth the costs and time to spent to build links for the country specific domains in these countries, or should we focus on making our .com domain stronger and use it for all countries? I'm aware of the benefits of ranking with a domain in the country the user is in. Note: We have major duplicate content issues at this moment, due the content being available in different languages, on a handful of domains. On each domain, users can view the site in different languages. In addition, the language indication in the url is not very clear (?lang=x) so I believe this should be improved to make it easier for search engines to tell which language is presented. If I choose to use a different language for each TLD, then the language flag in the navigation on the site will point to a different domain, so each language is hosted on 1 domain and there is no more duplicate content. However, I'm afraid this will lead to lower rankings, as the (strong) .com domain will no longer host the content in different languages.
International SEO | | 1200wd0 -
Tips for optimizing sites for arabian countries?
I'm going to assist a customer with SEO and we will also have to optimize the project for arabian countries. I'm looking for any helpful tips (links, blog-posts, experiences) like relevant search engines, best practices with keyword translation/localization, impact of mobile search/usage, recommendation for partners/companies... Thank you!
International SEO | | kqkq0
