International SEO - Targeting US and UK markets
-
Hi folks,
i have a client who is based in italy and they set up a site that sells travel experiences in the sout of Italy (the site currently sit on a server in Italy).
The site has been set up as gTLDs: www.example.com
They only want to target the US and the UK market to promote their travel experiences and the site has only the english version (the site does not currently offer an italian version).
If they decide to go for the gTLDs and not actually change to a ccTLDs (which would be ideal from my point of view) how are the steps to be taken to set this up correctly on GSC?
They currently only have one property registered on GSC: www.exapmple.com therefore i guess the next steps are:
-
Add new property - www.example.com/uk and and set up geo targeting for UK
-
Existing property - www.example.com/ set up geo targeting for US
-
In case the client does not have the budget to optimise the content for american and british languages, would still make sense to have 2 separate property in GSC (example.com for US market and example.com/uk for UK market)?
Few considerations:
- Add canonical tag to avoid duplicate content across the two versions of the site (in the event there is no budget to optimise the content for US and UK market)?
Thank you all in advance for looking into this
David
-
-
Is there some reason they only want to target the US and UK and not Australia or Canada for instance?
If it is alright with them, I would just have one site. Targeted at western-type English speaking travelers. If you can't produce a different site for the US AND the UK separately, then just create one.
Unless there is another reason it is just the US and UK. Please share if so!
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
-
How should I handle hreflang tags if it's the same language in all targeting countries?
My company is creating an international version of our site at international.example.com. We are located in the US with our main site at www.example.com targeting US & Canada but offering slightly different products elsewhere internationally. Ideally, we would have hreflang tags for different versions in different languages, however, it's going to be an almost duplicate site besides a few different SKUs. All language and content on the site is going to be in English. Again, the only content changing is slightly different SKUs, they are almost identical sites. The subdomain is our only option right now. Should we implement hreflang tags even if both languages are English and only some of the content is different? Or will having just canonicals be fine? How should we handle this? Would it make sense to use hreflang this way and include it on both versions? I believe this would be signaling for US & Canda visitors to visit our main site and all other users go to the international site. Am I thinking this correctly or should we be doing this a different way?
International SEO | | tcope250 -
Geo Targeting & Geo Keywords
Kindly clarify the below scenario. I have set Geo Targeting for my Website to 'India' in Webmaster tools. So Google should give preference for the searches happening from India. Is there any preference given for the Geo keywords? Like 'SEO Services in India' or Web Design Companies India' while searching from USA. Thanks
International SEO | | FlavoursMedia0 -
Are Subdomains better or SubDirectories better for an international website ?
Can anyone explain why the structure of your website: yourbrand.com/es/category is better than es.yourbrand.com for multi language and multi country website.
International SEO | | Tushar_P0 -
If I redirect based on IP will Google still crawl my international sites if I implement Hreflang
We are setting up several international sites. Ideally, we wouldn't set up any redirects, but if we have to (for merchandising reasons etc) I'd like to assess what the next best option would be. A secondary option could be that we implement the redirects based on IP. However, Google then wouldn't be able to access the content for all the international sites (we're setting up 6 in total) and would only index the .com site. I'm wondering whether the Hreflang annotations would still allow Google to find the International sites? If not, that's a lot of content we are not fully benefiting from. Another option could be that we treat the Googlebot user agent differently, but this would probably be considered as cloaking by the G-Man. If there are any other options, please let me know.
International SEO | | Ben.JD0 -
SEO international - ccTLD or Subdirectories / Hosting on 1 server (IP) in Netherlands
Hi All, I do mingle me in discussion if it's better to have an Ecommerce site of a Brand X on seperate ccTLD's (Brand.nl / Brand.de / Brand.com or use subdirectories (brand.com/nl, brand.com/de, brand.com/fr etc. I see a lot of comments on this, but i am missing one (maybe) essential part. We are using Magento with multi ccTLD support. BUT the environment is hosted in the Netherlands. Will we be "penalized" on hosting in NL when using www.brand.DE or other countries? Or is it MUCH better to host those ccTLD in country of Origin? Because if it is, maybe we can better use subdirs because then we can use our builded authority of the root domain. Hope someone have an answer on this one! Thanks! Jeroen
International SEO | | RetailClicks0 -
Google UK picking up USA Site
I have a site with two subfolders one is .../uk and one is .../us Part of the content on the two sites is the same and part is unique. The US site's language is set to en and the UK site's language is set to en_gb. I have setup geo-targeting in webmaster tools. The problem is that the home page is a GEO-IP redirect and it seems to be picking up information from the US site even on google uk. I'm not concerned too much about getting the uk site crawled as we submit a sitemap for that anyway. But my concern is that if I setup the geo-ip redirect as a 301 will my UK site loose all of it's ranking? Also am I likely to be penalised for duplicate content?
International SEO | | matthewdolman0 -
Does hosting content for one country in another country negatively affect its SEO ranking?
Hi, my content is primarily for Australian audiences, however due to a general lack of competitive hosting infrastructure, I tend to host a lot of content in the US. A 2007 article I read implied that it's not a good idea - does anyone have a definitive 2011 answer? Cheers, Jez
International SEO | | jez0000