Internationalization: 2 Websites in English for different location?

[PierreLechelle]

Hi guys,

My customer is already well established in France. They have a good Domain Authority and a lot of Inbound Links. They're doing very well in France.

They're now looking at entering the US market, however, their trademark is already registered within the US. They therefore decided to go with a new name.

Basically:

• They open an english-only website for the US presence
• They add English as a language on their French website for their European presence

They'll therefore have two domains:

• aaa.com: US Presence
• bbb.com: European Presence; 2 languages: French & English

My main reaction was that: since the content on aaa.com and bbb.com/english/ will be the same, they'll necessarily have Duplicate Content issue.

How would you look at this? What would be the best alternative for them?

Thank you

[katemorris]

Hahaha. I think you might have one of the few instances that I recommend something I generally don't recommend, which is a hreflang across domains. Now this is going to get complicated, so let me know if I miss something in my explanation.

First, I normally would recommend that the client just use the English translation of the main site if the content won't change at all. But you can't due to the trademarked name.

Second, it sounds like your client never intends on changing the content on the new site for the US audience and doesn't need to. I assume this means that there is no change in products/services and no reason for people to see different content between the France specific English version and this other English version. If there is any change in content, like imagery, messaging, adding, modifying or removing products or services, please let me know. That changes the answer.

If there is no actual changes in content, none at all, and no reason for them, you'll want to use a cross domain hreflang.

France-French bbb.com
France-English bbb.com/en 
English (separate brand) aaa.com

I would use hreflang to show that bbb.com is translated to en-fr at bbb.com/en and en-us at aaa.com.

That's how to deal with that situation, but if their site is a .com and there is some way to just offer their content in English, that will get results faster and be easier to maintain.

With the setup you are considering, you would still need to work on promoting the new domain and that will take time.

I hope this all made sense.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

I would look into the following resources:
International SEO (Moz)
International SEO Checklist (Moz)
Hreflang attributes (Google)
Language tags (Bing)

You can also tell Google and Bing through Webmaster Tools where variations of your site are supposed to target:
Country Targeting (Google)
Geo-Targeting Your Pages for Specific Audiences (Bing)

I would read through the above resources and discuss with your development team on next steps.

Hope this helps! Good luck!