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
-
Help with international targeting
Hi all! Okay, so we've got a site, let's say example.com - we sell training courses worldwide with a particular focus in just 8 countries.
International SEO | | JamieM1611
Historically, we've never targeted users in different countries effectively, we've just got the example.com that floats about ranking in different countries, but our content is dynamic (obviously a big SEO no-no - we pick up the IP of the user and show the content relevant for that country without the URL's changing)
This obviously presents an SEO flaw in that we can effectively target people in our key countries effectively. So, we're introducing the targeting as subfolders (/uk/, /ie/ etc) my questions are: 1. Would this be the correct implementation of hreflang AND canonical tags for the URL: https://www.example.com/es/ 2. The second thing I was wondering is the 'international targeting' in search console. We haven't (because of our current set up) set a target country for www.example.com (because of the lack of regional targeting and dynamic catch all) - would we be better leaving that untargeted and only specifying the regional targets for the new subfolder URLs (www.example.com/us/ /uk/ etc) or should we set the .com as the USA as default? We'd be a bit weary of doing this because most of our traffic comes from the UK and South Africa, so I'm assuming it would be best to leave this alone unless someone else has a different opinion? I know Googlebot almost always crawls .coms from US, which is why we were thinking of leaving the .com as the 'catch all' and specifying the US version. 3. Finally, we do have a lot pages which don't really change at all (like the about us page) would we give these any special directives to avoid duplicate content (as the content on these won't be changing at all?) or do we just keep the structure as shown above? I.E would the about us page (even though not changing) still be (with the canonical): URL: https://www.example.com/about-us/ (x-default) ? Thanks in advance!0 -
Multilingual webshop SEO
Hi, I have a question concerning multilingual SEO for webshops. This is the case: the root domain is example.be, which has several subdomains. One of these subdomains is shop.example.be which is used for two webshops (Dutch and French), being shop.example.be/nl and shop.example.be/fr .
International SEO | | Mat_C
The other root domain is example.lu (for Luxemburg) which is only used for the subdomain for the Luxemburg webshop in French, being shop.example.lu/fr.
The content on the .lu/fr webshop is a small part of the content on the .be/fr webshop, and the product descriptions are the same and are both of course in French. The webshops will be redesigned and restructured, and the question is what to do with the .lu/fr webshop. There are two possibilities: Integrate this webshop for Luxemburg in the existing .be webshop, since most of the products are the same and the .lu webshop doesn't get a lot of visitors because of Luxemburg being a small country. The only thing to do then would be setting up a 301 from the .lu webshop to the .be/fr version to transfer link value.
People in Luxemburg already sometimes get pages from the .be/fr webshop in the SERP anyway because these already have a bigger authority than the .lu/fr pages. Keep the .lu/fr webshop and use hreflang tags so the correct pages with similar content are shown in the correct country. I know that when using different TLD's this normally isn't an issue anyway, so implementing hreflang tags even isn't really necessary. Please feel free to share your thoughts about what would be the best approach. Thanks!1 -
Is it advisable to show additionally also English ciity names of American cities in website versions of non-western languages such as Chinese, Japanese etc?
To my understanding in many Asian languages city names are transcribed as they sound and this can cause confusion especially in the case of lesser known American city names. So I was planning to put in our international website versions (Chinese, Japanese, Korean etc. ) the English name in brackets after the translated city name in meta title and H1.
International SEO | | lcourse
However when I checked Tripadvisor and Booking.com I noticed that they do not show the English city name anywhere on their Asian language versions. Any thoughts?
Would you recommend to put the English city name in brackets after the translated city name or may it rather hurt our ranking and traffic?0 -
International SEO Sub folder Structure
Hi Could anyone offer some advice on the best way to structure sub folders on a website that we are launching worldwide. We are a UK based business and currently run a UK site on www.website.com and we are planning on launching into Europe using a sub folder structure. We will use /de, /fr, /es for the new countries that are coming on board but the question is should the UK site url be: www.website.com or www.website.com/uk As have an established web presence in the UK I'm thinking it should remain as www.wewbsite.com but are there any advantages / disadvantages to changing it to .com/uk Many Thanks
International SEO | | SmiffysUK0 -
International Sites - Sitemaps, Robots & Geolocating in WMT
Hi Guys, I have a site that has now been launched in the US having originally just been UK. In order to accommodate this, the website has been set-up using directories for each country. Example: domain.com/en-gb domain.com/en-us As the site was originally set-up for UK, the sitemap, robots file & Webmaster Tools account were added to the main domain. Example: domain.com/sitemap.xml domain.com/robots.txt The question is does this now need changing to make it specific for each country. Example: The sitemap and robots.txt for the UK would move to: domain.com/en-gb/sitemap.xml domain.com/en-gb/robots.txt and the US would have its own separate sitemap and robots.txt. Example : domain.com/en-us/sitemap.xml domain.com/en-us/robots.txt Also in order to Geolocate this in WMT would this need to be done for each directory version instead of the main domain? Currently the WMT account for the UK site is verified at www.domain.com, would this need reverifying at domain.com/en-gb? Any help would be appreciated! Thanks!
International SEO | | CarlWint0 -
Google Analytics - whats best way to set up to track users on geotargeted sub folders & tlds ?
Hi ive got a client site just about to launch into 2 new territories (German Germany & Turkish Turkey) The existing/main site is in English & targets English keyword usage globally via domain.com and is not geotargeted in anyway. Analytics is set up for this on domain.com and tracking accurately and GWT is set up too. Now we have added a Turkish language site via a subfolder (domain.com/tr/) & the German site (domsain.com/de/) BUT this German subfolder will be domain mapped to a TLD (domain.de) eventually.. So what's best way to configure/set up Google Analytics to track users so can view the international sub-sites as individual sites etc ? (& GWT for that matter) ? Also after doing this i will be setting up in Moz Anlytics as separate campaigns so how do you set up so only draws in the Analytics data specific to these sub-folders ? All Best Dan
International SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
International SEO | URL Structure
I'm looking for advice/point of view for setting up international domains. I.e. sub-domains, ccTLD, etc. At the 10,000 ft. view - the client (international retail company) is trying to decide which type of URL structure to use in their new platform: Option 1: Root Domain ccTLD - www.brand.ca, www.brand.fr, etc. Option 2: Subdomains - fr.brand.com, ca.brand.com, au.brand.com Option 3: Subfolders - ]www.brand.com/ca/, ]www.brand.com/au/ Consider these scenarios/questions and use to help decide which URL structure makes sense: 1) I'm an Aussie in Australia and I do a Google search on Hank Myer Aron, which is a huge seller in the U.S. and also included at the Australia locale site. If we go with subfolders, am I likely to see the U.S. Aron page higher in my search results than the Australia Aron page? Or is the U.S. site not a factor in a search done outside the U.S.? If we use subfolders AND geo-detection, does this bump the ranking of the locale page? Do sites using ccTLDs always get ranked above those that don't? For example, if an Australian dealer selling Aron has URLs dealer.com.au/..., would their pages rank ahead of hankmyer.com/au/...? If we went the ccTLD route, would the Aron page at hankmyer.com.au take precedence over the U.S. page? (Again, assuming U.S. site is relevant in this scenario.) 2) I'm a Frenchman in France searching on Hank Myer Aron. If we use subfolders AND an alias URL that's translated to French (brand.com/fr/produits/sieges/sieges-aron), would we expect the page rank to be comparable to using the ccTLD and/or expect greater trust than just using subfolders without translated URLs? Do translated URLs have any mitigating affect on duplicate page content? Which URL strategy is best choice from a SEO standpont?
International SEO | | CrownPartners0 -
Improving Search Rankings in other Countries for an existing site
Hello SEOmoz, I have a very well respected international client who ranks high in the US and for English language Google search results worldwide. However, the client's foreign language pages for specific countries do not show up on the first page of SERPs in those specific countries. The foreign nation/language pages are served on the same root domain as the main English language site it this fashion: www.client.com/france www.client.com/brazil Here are my questions: What can we do from an SEO standpoint to improve SERPs in Google.fr or other countries What is the best way to prevent duplicate content errors or prevent the wrong page from being indexed abroad. What are some best practices when using Google Webmaster tools in this regard? Thanks
International SEO | | BPIAnalytics0