Will German meta data help an English USA-based site get found in Germany?

[Caro-O]

I think I already know the answer to this, but I'd love a second opinion.

If you add German meta data to some web pages will it help those pages turn up in search results in Germany?I'm assuming not. It's an English, USA based site, doing well here for English searches - and I don't want to mess that up.

A German site is being planned, but this client is hoping the English site could be found in the meantime.

~Caro

[Caro-O]

Thank you Erica, that confirms my suspicions.

[EricaMcGillivray]

You'll likely end up confusing Google about which country it should rank the site in, and it could negatively affect your US rankings and still get you no traction in Germany. You really need to build a German site.

[Caro-O]

Thank You Gyorgy,

Our long term plan is to have a complete German Website optimized for german and on a german domain. But my client was hoping that, in the meantime, we could get our english pages found in Germany, and without risking our USA SEO achievements.

[Gyorgy.B]

I assume the US site has a target country specified in its Google Search Console. The answer depends on the competition and the SEO budget, but I suspect that you'd have a hard time making those German language pages ranking in google.de.

If you have an international SEO strategy to use one domain for every country (e.g. /us/ and /de/ folders) then it's a different story.

If you'd have only a few German pages on the US website, then don't bother. Launch the German website on a German domain and start a separate SEO campaign for the German market.