Only a fraction of the sitemap get indexed

[Lvet]

I have a large international website. The content is subdivided in 80 countries, with largely the same content all in English.

The URL structure is: https://www.baumewatches.com/XX/page  (where XX is the country code)
Language annotations hreflang seem to be set up properly

In the Google Search Console I registered:

1. https://www.baumewatches.com
2. the 80 instances of https://www.baumewatches.com/XX in order to geo target the directories for each country

I have declared a single global sitemap for https://www.baumewatches.com (https://www.baumewatches.com/sitemap_index.xml structured in a hierarchical way)

The problem is that the site has been online already for more than 8 months and only 15% of the sitemap URLs have been indexed, with no signs of new indexations in the last 3 months.

I cannot think about a solution for this.

[JohnSammon]

Hey Luca,

I'm sorry that you are running into this trouble. Here are a few things to review in order to get the number of pages increased in Google:

1. You'll want to review your internal linking structure in the Google Search Console. Adding a xml sitemap and submitting it to Google and Bing can help but inner links can help Google index new pages and deeper pages

2. Add content to key pages on the site like the homepage, category pages and individual product pages. If your site is thin (have pages that have less than 200 words of content), Google will be less likely to index it deeper

3. Build external links to deep pages on the site such as product category pages

I hope this helps - I would start with content and inner linking