Optimizing one site for multiple countries
-
I am working on a project, where we have one website, with a country specific domain, which is currently ranking well in local search.
The client now wants to expand his business into two new countries (all english speaking) and would like to rank for the same keywords in these two new countries. The customer do not want to create new websites for the new countries.
Because its a local domain and the website is setup for local search in GWT with locally hosted server, i expect challenges in optimizing for new countries without impacting the current local ranking.
Question 1: What would be the recommended approach for maintaining their existing ranking on local search, while optimizing for the new countries.
-
Thanks for your input.
Together with subfolders, we will take your advice and work on getting local links.I guess since we are using subfolders, the local links will benefits the entire domain.
Thanks for sharing the link to the whiteboard friday.
-
Thanks James, appreciate your advice.
I think we will go with the subfolder option, even though it might create a rather odd looking url because of the existing country specific domain name. So will end up with something like domain.com.au/sg.
-
This video should be a great help: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday
Depending on the type of site/competition it might even be possible to rank well in other countries with the current setup, by building links from these countries for a start. Assuming otherwise though...from what I've read (I'm not speaking from experience) I'd recommend sub folders, as James mentions. As well as adding them to Webmaster Tools make sure you specify the language in the Doctypes and meta language (e.g. I think Australian English is au) and adjust localised spellings. You might want to get a native of each country to check over everything - even the search terms the client wants to rank for elsewhere might not mean much or get much traffic in another English speaking country. Get some links from each country too.
-
If they do not want to set up a new domain you can try and make new "sub folders" on the website to target the new country then what you can do is GEO target this sub folder in Google web master tools too. example: website.com/au/
If the client does not like that idea you can set up a sub domain and then target this via web master tools. example: au.website.com
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
-
Unsolved URL dynamic structure issue for new global site where I will redirect multiple well-working sites.
Dear all, We are working on a new platform called [https://www.piktalent.com](link url), were basically we aim to redirect many smaller sites we have with quite a lot of SEO traffic related to internships. Our previous sites are some like www.spain-internship.com, www.europe-internship.com and other similars we have (around 9). Our idea is to smoothly redirect a bit by a bit many of the sites to this new platform which is a custom made site in python and node, much more scalable and willing to develop app, etc etc etc...to become a bigger platform. For the new site, we decided to create 3 areas for the main content: piktalent.com/opportunities (all the vacancies) , piktalent.com/internships and piktalent.com/jobs so we can categorize the different types of pages and things we have and under opportunities we have all the vacancies. The problem comes with the site when we generate the diferent static landings and dynamic searches. We have static landing pages generated like www.piktalent.com/internships/madrid but dynamically it also generates www.piktalent.com/opportunities?search=madrid. Also, most of the searches will generate that type of urls, not following the structure of Domain name / type of vacancy/ city / name of the vacancy following the dynamic search structure. I have been thinking 2 potential solutions for this, either applying canonicals, or adding the suffix in webmasters as non index.... but... What do you think is the right approach for this? I am worried about potential duplicate content and conflicts between static content dynamic one. My CTO insists that the dynamic has to be like that but.... I am not 100% sure. Someone can provide input on this? Is there a way to block the dynamic urls generated? Someone with a similar experience? Regards,
Technical SEO | | Jose_jimenez0 -
Optimizing internal links or over-optimizing?
For a while I hated the look of the internal links page of Google Web Master Tools account for a certain site. With a total of 120+K pages, the top internal link was the one pointing to "FAQ". With around 1M links. That was due to the fact, on every single page, both the header and the footer where presenting 5 links to the most popular questions. The traffic of those FAQ pages is non-existent, the anchor text is not SEO interesting, and theoretically 1M useless internal links is detrimental for page juice flow. So I removed them. Replacing the anchor with javascript to keep the functionality. I actually left only 1 “pure” link to the FAQ page in the footer (site wide). And overnight, the internal links page of that GWT account disappeared. Blank, no links. Now... Mhhh... I feel like... Ops! Yes I am getting paranoid at the idea the sudden disappearance of 1M internal links was not appreciated by google bot. Anyone had similar experience? Could this be seen by google bot as over-optimizing and be penalized? Did I possibly triggered a manual review of the website removing 1M internal links? I remember Matt Cutts saying adding or removing 1M pages (pages) would trigger a flag at google spam team and lead to a manual review, but 1M internal links? Any idea?
Technical SEO | | max.favilli0 -
Bing is not Indexing my site.
Hi, My website is four months old and has more than 8000 pages. Bing has indexed only 8 pages till date and Google also keeps playing hide and seek with it. There was a time when google indexed almost all the pages of my site but now there are only 5000 pages indexed. Moreover when I check my site on google (by typing site:socktail.com), it shows only 26 pages. Please let me know what should I do. If somebody wants to take a look, my website is http://socktail.com Thanks
Technical SEO | | saurabh19050 -
Micro-sites for Landing Pages?
We are working with a site that is difficult at best to update. The client intends to re-do the site in 18 months or so but needs to start generating more traffic (and sales) now. What are thoughts on creating landing pages as micro-sites that point to the current site conversion page as a stop gap? Beyond not sharing authority is there any known penalty? By the way they don't have tremendous ranking right now - often bottom of page two - and the micro-site won't duplicate any content.
Technical SEO | | InformaticsInc0 -
More than one web domain
Hi What is best when considering using more than one domain on a website, what the best policy ? it's a question I get asked a lot, usually because prior to any seo efforts the main domain name purchased is not keyword rich or an abbreviated company name etc. what impact do new domains have on SEO compared to older existing domains- is it worth changing a generic company named domain for a keyword rich domain? if having multiple domains pointing to the site is beneficial how best is it to configure? How do i inform Google? How do both domains get index when there is only one physical site? How should i monitor it, Analytic s, SEO moz? Will the domain compete against each other and effect SEO rank? Are they best used for marketing purposes on external sites, adverts driving traffic to the main site. I'm aware there are lots of questions above, any answers/ opinions , links to further info would be greatly appreciated. cheers
Technical SEO | | Bristolweb0 -
See your sites Architecture
Does anybody know a problem where you can see how your internal linkings look to the search engines?
Technical SEO | | ScottBaxterWW0 -
Can I noindex most of my site?
A large number of the pages on my site are pages that contain things like photos and maps that are useful to my visitors, but would make poor landing pages and have very little written content. My site is huge. Would it be benificial to noindex all of these?
Technical SEO | | mascotmike0