Any Idea for International SEO in this complex situation?

[teconsite]

Hi, 
a client of mine has a site with a domain name brand.es. They are a furniture manufacturer. They has a well known brand in its sector.
brand.com is registered by a US company. (Completly different activity)

This client registered its domain name 10 years ago, and its audience was in Spain.
As it is a .es ccTLD it is directly geotargeted to Spain.

5 years ago, they began to export to other countries, and today they have distributors in a lot of countries like Italy, France, England, Portugal, Germany, and many more...

As they are manufacturers and they sell their products to multiple locations worldwide, the language aproach seems to be the more efficient way to reach they users.

The problem is that they are using a ccTLD domain brand.es, beacuse the .com domain was registered.
Actually the international organic traffic is very poor, mostly related to queries with the brand name.

My question:
Is it possible to do international seo with a geotargeted domain .es? 
Should they register a .com that doesn't match exactly their brand name? (it is a little difficult, beacause brandfurniture.com would be good for England, but not for Spain or France. )
Or should they focus their strategy with some ccTLDs for 3 or 4 of the main countries? (Not sure this would be an alternative... too much cost)

I know, that in this situation there is no perfect solution, but I would appreciate your opinions.
Any Ideas ??????

Thank you!!

[teconsite]

Thank you! I completly agree!

[teconsite]

Thank you so much for your insights!

[gfiorelli1]

Having a ccTld like the .es and trying to go international is not the ideal, because:

1. the domain is automatically geotargeted toward Spain by Google;
2. because, for instance, the .es will be easily recognized as Spanish, and if you are trying to to target also Latin American countries, that can be an issue for psychological reasons.

Said that, it is not impossible to rank well with a ccTld also outside of its main country, it is only more difficult.

Not so much if you share the language (i.e.: .es but also targeting Mexico with a subfolder /es-mx/), but surely more difficult if you are targeting UK.

The only way to overcome the automated geotargeting limitation, more than the already classic stuff like hreflang et al, is local link building and brand awareness campaigns.

That means that if you are using a subfolder strategy, and even though the popularity of the "base language version" is passing through internal linking to all the other versions, you will need to push hard for link earning campaign in every targeted countries... and this can be hard because it is not easy to make people link to a www.domain.com/en-gb/ kind of URL.

So, as a TL;DR, it is possible but surely hard.

[wearehappymedia]

Yes you can and I've seen this many times. I'm not that a multitude of TLDs is the right way to go about it however and would suggest sub-domains. Don't forget to use an IP blocker like HMA to test search results from various proxy locations. This has been a life saver many times for us!

[Highland]

The short answer is you can rank any site for any geolocation.

The longer answer is that you have a ccTLD which, as you've noted, is geotargeted to Spain. That's not an insurmountable problem, but it does tend to tilt the table against you slightly. That having been said, this is about SEO and marketing so if you want to keep your single ccTLD there's no reason you can't. When was the last time you took note of the domain name of a link you were clicking in a search result? As long as it's relevant, do you care?

Build other language sections and segment them using subdirectories (i.e. brand.es/en, /fr, /it, etc) and build your localization in. Advertise locally through Adwords and do what you can to reach out to local links so you can build some broader geotargeting for engine bots to grab onto. Remember, make sure you're doing authentic localization and NOT dumping your content into Google Translate.

All this having been said, if I were you I would see if I can get the ccTLDs for these other countries and do your localization that way (i.e brand.co.uk, brand.fr, etc). This will tilt the table in your favor and allow you to focus on localizing and marketing. It will make advertising easier as well.