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
-
What is the best way to manage multiple international URLS
Hi All Our company is looking to expand into Europe (we are a UK based company) and we are planning to copy over our current .co.uk site to a .com one and create 301 redirects to maintain our SEO rankings. With the .com domain we were looking to use this as our main ecommerce site and then create sites for different countries in Europe. What we are unsure about is the best way to execute this in terms of the domain. Would it be best to have it setup as a domain structure such as: UK = www.example.com/gb/
International SEO | | MartinJC
Ireland = www.example.com/ie/
France – www.example.com/fr/ and so on. Or would we be better served creating sub domains for each country, example www.gb.example.com. Our main concerned is what is the best way to do this without hurting our SEO rankings. Thanks for the help.0 -
International SEO : Redirecting spanish visitors to spanish site
Hi There, I have a problem I need an advice for. I run an e-commerce site in French. Things are going well. I also run the Spanish version of this site. We are starting to sell. But nothing like French site. I have traffic coming to the French site from Spain from visitors with Spanish language and they don't buy anything. That is strange as the conversion rate is good. Si I want to redirect them to the Spanish site. We sell phone parts. Our SEO is mainly based on brands, make, and reference numbers. So keywords are almost the same in both languages. Of course, site.es is aiming at google.es, and site.fr at google.fr So I am wondering. If I redirect these visitors to the Spanish site, Will it affect french site's SEO? Thanks
International SEO | | Kepass0 -
Can a Global Website Rely on Browser Settings for Translation?
Our website serves a global market and over a year ago, we launched 8 language variations of the site and implemented hreflang tags. These language variation pages are proving difficult to maintain, and in Search Console they're triggering thousands of errors. I have double checked our implementation and it's not perfect, so I understand the errors. Here's the question though... the 8 language variations of the site are receiving less than 1% of our web traffic despite 40% of our web traffic coming from countries outside of North America every month. I want to know if we can eliminate the headache of these 8 language variations altogether, remove our attempt at hreflang, and simply rely on the browser settings of the user to dictate what language the website appears in for them? If not, is there a simpler solution than hreflang and attempting to maintain a very large website in 8 languages? Thank for your input! Niki
International SEO | | NikelleClark0 -
Best practice for Spanish version of English website?
I'm doing an audit for a site that has all of its English pages under the same roof with Spanish pages in Wordpress. It is intended for Chicago, not Mexico. I suspect this is not a good thing, but I only have instinct to rely on here. What is the best practice for having the same website in two languages? http://www.enhancedform.com/ and http://www.enhancedform.com/spanish/
International SEO | | realpatients0 -
International Site - Language Targetting
Hi Mozzers, I am currently conducting a technical site audit on a large website. Their main content and audience is in the US, but they have started to add translated versions of the content in different languages (about 30 different languages). Also, they are not using cookies or scripts to auto-populate the language on the page, and the pages seem to be getting indexed just fine. Currently, they have their language distinguished by sub-folder (i.e. example.org/blog/by-language/spanish/), which I plan to 301 redirect to example.org/blog/es/ for each language. However, they are not implementing any sitemaps or hreflang header tags. I have not dealt with this in the past as all of my work has been done on smaller US sites, so I wanted to verify the steps I plan to take to ensure this is a solid approach. 301 redirect example.org/language/spanish/blog/ to example.org/es/blog/ Recommend adding hreflang markup into the header for each language. (They have a lot of pages, so they may not implement this if it is too much work.) Highly recommend adding XML sitemaps for each content version of the site using the media flow HREFLANG Siitemap Tool. Setting up multiple Webmaster Tools accounts and geotargetting them by language. I would also add the XML sitemap for each language. Is this a solid approach, given the information above? I want to make sure I am fundamentally sound on this before suggesting so many large changes. Thank you in advance for any thoughts / wisdom you can instill! ---------------------additional information--------------------- If I am hearing you correctly, I would only submit one XML Sitemap for international content. It would look something like the below image. I would only use one GWT account to upload the file, and I would not need to add any additional markup on each page, as it will be located in the hreflang xml sitemap. Finally, would it be a good or bad idea to 301 redirect their naming convention to a new, shorter one? example.org/by-language/spanish/blog/this-is-an-example --> example.org/es/blog/this-is-an-example bpXAYlr.png
International SEO | | J-Banz0 -
Backlinks to URLs with Language Parameters (for Chinese version of website) and SEO?
Hey all, We run a large eCommerce site in Australia and are preparing to launch to the Chinese market. Our site has been fully converted to Chinese and displays the version of the site detected as default in the user's browser unless they manually select otherwise. This is done by appending the parameter "?la=zh" onto the end of the URL, so for example the Chinese version would be: **www.example.com/australia?la=zh ** This then forces the product catalogue to display the relevant language version. My question is, for SEO purposes and back links in particular, since they aren't really a "true URL" (i.e: strictly speaking they aren't different "pages", just the same page being populated with different characters), would getting links from Chinese websites to the URL "www.example.com/australia?la=zh" really be viewed as any different from just "www.example.com/australia"? Do they pass the same amount of juice and is the difference detected by the engines (thinking mainly about Baidu in particular but of course Google as well)? Feedback from anyone with experience in SEO for multi-lingual sites would be much appreciated, thanks.
International SEO | | ExperienceOz0 -
English directories for foreign blogs ?
Hello guys, I'm Brazilian and I'm still learning SEO stuff and Im learning a lot around your tool, blogs and texts. All my websites are from Brazil, they are in PT-BR and I see a BIG market over here around SEO since comparing to EUA, we dont have so many customization services and our market is still growing. I have been looking for a great SEO strategy and I'm seeing that blog comments (real and quality ones, even nofollow links) and great directories submissions are still good for positioning at th big G. Unfortunatelly, my country don't have so many great directories where I can get great indexed high PR links, so I would like to ask you guys if anyone knows if I send my blog to international directories I would penalize my blog. Every time I think on this subject, I think that maybe google can see this submission as a spam or a blast, even if it was sent manually. Since I read everywhere that its good to find niches related to make up great blog comments, a foreing web directory submission maybe can hurt my rank. Sorry for my bad english.
International SEO | | DanielSp1 -
Alternate tag. Anybody had success getting English websites only with localized currency served with alternate tag?
I have an English website with USD prices and US phone.
International SEO | | lcourse
Via currency dropdown visitors in Ireland can choose EUR as currency, visitors from Denmark Danish crown etc and via GEO IP I also serve local contact phone numbers. So I though it made sense to define this with the alternate tags, but now after several months google still does not pickup these pages in local searches. Did anybody have success with getting a website just with currency parameter ranked locally using the alternate tag? Does it help to have also static links (not only dropdown links) to currency versions on the page? Any other thing that could help to have google pick these up? Below my code sample:0