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Even though you don't have any geo-targeted sections, there are other indications on your site that let them know you are targeting Ireland and Google might be optimizing for that.

With that said, how are you checking these rankings? Do these keywords send you large amounts of traffic? Check Search Console. Are you having an issue getting UK traffic (North Ireland)? Are you worried about UK traffic due to North Ireland?

I am worried that what you are seeing is due to your own search history and settings and/or Google seeing the same search a few times and testing out different results. There might also be different competition in the Northern Ireland market. There is a ton that could explain this, but alas, as with most things SEO, it's hard to pinpoint.

This feels like looking for permission to take a short cut and I personally cannot justify that. I would highly recommend to take the time to make the pages correctly and not even worry about duplicate content or Panda. None of use can tell you if it will "work" or if it'll be seen as duplicate content or when it'll be hit by panda, but if it's auto-generated, I can promise it'll be hit at some point.

However, the worst you can do is test it. Take the top 10% of make/model deal pages and create them how you want. Do it like you're talking and see how they perform. I'm not talking a few weeks, I mean a few months. All the while, be developing the content for some of those pages.

This way, if it works and people like the pages, they are relevant produced the way you want to do it now, the short way, then you can produce the other pages that way. At that point however, your top make/model pages will have unique content that you can put up. So a few months later, you'll have 10% of your deals pages with unique content and the rest automated. Then start working on the next top 10%. Keep going until they are all done.

Hi!

It's actually all going to depend on your company/industry/audience. Apple does it the way they do as they need to do it that way as a global retailer that has the resources to market to different country markets.

https://moz.com/blog/guide-to-international-seo

Try that and let me know what questions you have. Inside that article is a link to a tool to help you figure out how best to set up your site structure.

Gianaluca was speaking of multiple "sites" but this is translation. Google does say it in fact:

"By specifying these alternate URLs, our goal is to be able to consolidate signals for these pages, and to serve the appropriate URL to users in search. "

https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html

Hi Dan,

Long Description: Naturally having something written for FB would be best, but I don't think it's going to hurt if it's the same. The Facebook page and Homepage are two very different pages, so there shouldn't be a duplicate content issue. Is there any way to have someone at the client rewrite it for you? An assistant, etc?

As for Mission and General About, leave those alone until you need them. It's best to have everything filled out of course as it gives the room to add different ways to describe the company, but it's not going to make a big difference.

Vanity URL: Always the brand name. Always. If the customers in Turkey called it something different (translated words) use that. If they call it the English name, then you'll want to keep that plus Turkey if the focus market is in Turkey

Hope this helps!

Hi!

With a .co.uk, you cannot geotarget to other countries, but that's not needed in this case. Since you are not actually geo-targeting, you are actually just translating, all you need is to add a few lines of code and you're set.

Visit my guide here and it has instructions on what to do. http://bit.ly/14GdPoh

Kate

They are not great at writing their own explanations for international. What they meant above is if you have geo-targeted correctly, you would not have to use a canonical between two pages that are the same. That they will figure it out on their own.

You aren't geo-targeting, so I still think the canonical would be needed.

Few questions before I can answer this:

Were the links you got going to drive people to your site? Would those people find your site interesting and relevant?

Is the content getting links still going to exist? Meaning will the links still make sense?

Just redesigning your site should not affect link equity, but if your links were acquired just for linking purposes, I don't think they will do much for you over time anyway.

Hi!

This is where I think the misunderstanding of hreflang shows itself. There are others that disagree with me, but the following is my opinion.

You have one page in one general language. hreflang markup is for identifying language changes on multiple pages not for geo-targeting. What you have here is content in two general languages and attempting to mark it up for 5 regional dialects.

If this is all the content you are going to make and you are keeping it on .co.nl, you will be telling the search engines that you are targeting the Netherlands with the content in English and Dutch.

If you want your English and Dutch content without any geo-targeting, you will need to have it on some kind of general TLD like .net, .com or something like that. Then you can use hreflang between the languages for English and Dutch.

If you want to target those countries as well, that gets a little more complicated. You'll need to determine the best structure, how you are targeting the content to those regions (this means changing the content somehow), and then implement something with multiple ccTLDs or on a gTLD with regional subfolders. Then we can talk about translations of that regional content.

I'm assuming that your best route is going to be transitioning to a more general TLD and offering the two translated content sites as you have that right now, but I can't promise that is what is best for your audience. Take a look at this tool and see what works best for your business and go from there: http://outspokenmedia.com/international-seo-strategy/

Brand Name - do you have a turkish ccTLD or subdomain or subfolder you can look at Search Console for? This is to check that the top brand name search is what you mentioned. You can confirm that in the search queries area of search console. Once you've confirmed that is what people use, use that. Don't add Turkey if the name is different enough.

I would hyphenate a name like that. People don't type in FB urls and the hyphenation makes it more understandable.

No apologies needed, happy to help!

I would not recommend IP based redirects. You can detect and do an initial redirect (with a javascript overlay telling people that you think they are in a specific area), but you'd have to give all users (including Googlebot) the ability to go to the other URLs as well.

HREFLANG is not meant for geo-targeting and IP addresses only tell you location. You only need HREFLANG if there are language changes within a country targeted site or universal (not geotargeted) site.

Even ignoring that, the HREFLANG would not help if people were always redirected based on IP, so I don't suggest that.

Hope this helps, let me know if you have any more questions.

I can't say that I know for sure, but I know how to tell you to make sure.

If they are both listed there, you should have them both as profiles in Search Console. Which one do you use the most and what has the most information on indexation and sitemaps? Use that one.

But I don't think you can go wrong here. It should be the same site. If I were to make an educated guess, go with http://yourdomain.com.

You shouldn't need to duplicate the content to get into Google News across countries. In fact, you should only have to submit once. Google News uses their algorithm to present articles on a topic based on a number of factors. For example, you can see BBC articles in the US if that's the most reputable resource for that topic. But if there are US based publishers writing on the same topic and the user is closer or prefers that publication, that one will show.

The location in your submission is your physical location of your publishing company, not that of who you are targeting. This is what I've seen in checking the forums and with clients. News is more specific to the language of the article, not the location. Relevance, popularity, and language are the strongest factors.

Other similar questions on Google News Forum: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topicsearchin/news/category$3Agoogle-news-publishers$20country

Many sites end up pruning content when a site refresh is hit. If a post has no organic traffic, no traffic at all, didn't link to anything, didn't get linked to and has no social shares, there should be no reason to keep it around. If it has any of that in the last 12 months, I'd keep it up.

This is one of those topics that you have to be careful with though. Don't go overboard and don't do it expecting a major rise in organic traffic. This is more of a housekeeping item. And as with most housekeeping items like fixing internal redirects, external redirects, etc, it can all combine to help with search performance.

As Mike alluded to and I've done with clients in the past, I'd take the candidates for removal, pull a list of their titles and review to see if they can be updated. Use the topic again. It's a good way to supplement your content calendar.

Whether a subdomain carries all the weight of the main domain has yet to be proven, but I think in this case it does. But link equity flows from the page not the domain.

A better test is: does the site look spammy? Do I want my brand on there? If yes, awesome. Then: Did I pay for this placement? (If yes, please rethink that unless it's advertising and nofollowed)

If it's natural and good for your brand, no matter what site, just keep it there.

Let me get this right before I start answering.

You have one article having an issue (just one) that is AU and UK, has hreflang implemented, is indexed for keyword searches but not showing for site: searches in Google. Few questions.

1. Have you geo-targeted the subfolders for AU and UK?
2. What version of Google are you using to check indexation?
3. When you say you checked internal links for both, how did you do that?
4. Your own site search (searching on your own site) does not return the UK article? Or do you mean that the site: search is not bringing up the UK article?

With canonicals, I would not worry about the incoming pages. If the new content is useful and relevant, plus linked to internally, they should do fine in terms of indexation. Use the canonical for now, and once you launch the new pages, well a month after launch, if there are key pages not getting indexed, then you can reassess. The canonical is the right thing to do in this case.

As for link equity, you are right, that is a simplistic view of it. It is actually much more intricate than that, but that's a good basic understanding. However, the canonical is not going to hurt your internal link equity. Those links to the different sorting are navigational in nature and the structure will be repeated throughout the site. Google's algo is good at determining internal, editorial links versus those that are navigational in nature. The navigational links don't impact the strength nearly as much as an editorial link.

My personal belief is that you are worrying about something that isn't going to make an impact on your organic traffic. Ensure the correct canonicals are in place and launch the new content. If that new content has the same issue with sorting, use canonicals there as well and let Google figure it out. "They" have gotten pretty good at identifying what to keep and what not.

If you don't want the sorting pages in there at all, you'll need to do one of the following:

• Noindex, disallow in robots.txt - Rhea Drysdale showed me a few years back that you can do a disallow and noindex in robots. If you do both, Google gets the command to not only noindex the URLs, but also cannot crawl the content.
• Noindex, nofollow using meta robots - This would stop all link equity flow from these pages. If you want to attempt to stop flow to these pages, you'll need to nofollow any links to them. The pages can still be crawled however.
• Noindex, follow - Same as above but internal link equity would still flow. Again, if you want to attempt to cut off link equity to these sorting pages, any links to them would need to be nofollowed.
• Disallow in robots - This would stop them from crawling the content, but the URLs could technically still be indexed.

Personally, I believe trying to manage link equity using nofollow is a waste of time. You more than likely have other things that could be making larger impacts. The choice is yours however and I always recommend testing anything to see if it makes an impact.

My guess is no. It might correlate someday, the number of messages and how generally popular you become, but messages are not public data. Google and Bing can't crawl that data, so they can't use it. Social signals like likes, replies, reviews, etc are available metrics, so they can at least be taken into account. However, it was and still remains not a direct signal, more of a correlation.

These are geo-targeted sections and not translations right?

If so, the HREFLANG tags are not needed. Those are for translations. If you have the subfolders marked in Google WMT as geo-targeted to those countries, you should be okay.

How long have you had this setup?

I don't blame you, this could be a large undertaking. Things i would recommend:

1. Make sure you know what the top pages are all on all current sites in regards to external links. You need a list of all pages that have external links and where those are from. You need to get as many external links changed as possible.
2. Redirects are paramount of course. 301 redirects across the board. The content should match or be very similar.
3. In a week or two after launch, check to see how many internal links are linking to old URLs. Do this by crawling your site and fixing any internal 301 redirects.
4. Once you've confirmed the redirects are in place, submit the old sitemaps and the one new sitemap. It forces the SEs to visit the old URLs to find the redirects and also find the new URLs. In a week, remove the old sitemaps.

Those are the first things that come to mind. This is a good resource as well https://www.branded3.com/blog/website-migration-guide-building-an-seo-checklist-for-moving-your-site/

Hi Sarah,

I can only see three pages in the index now.

Google tries to find any and all content people might want to find using their index. They have a number of ways to identify anything that might be of use.

Now you said that you put a noindex in the sitemap. That is new to me, sitemaps are used to index files, not to command a noindex. Typically, a noindex is placed within the page's code.

Can you clarify what you have already attempted? A noindex is best (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en), teh page will still be crawled but cannot be put into the index.

I agree with Janet. Testing and PPC will help, but more than that your intuition helps most.

Bucket those keywords based on intent.

Essay editing, booked editing, and resume editing are slightly different so I'd make a page for each (include examples, be specific to that type of project). But when it comes to broad variations, go by the intent.

Essay correction and Essay editing should be the same page, and I'd mainly target editing as it sound more like what your product is, but use essay correction in the text. And try to vary the anchor text to the page when you link internally and externally.

When it comes to small slice of a big pie or big slice of a smaller pie, that's a call for you to make. Check out the competition on essay editing ... can you compete? Are you better than them for the searcher? How? Make that apparent and push for it with marketing. If you are the same ... but can own "essay correction" (the SERPs are not as competitive) ... go after that first.

Hope this helps!

With HREFLANG tags, you are sending weird signals. I would recommend ensuring that /ie/ is claimed in Google WMT and targeted to Ireland. The content in the subfolder needs to be specific to your Ireland market, meaning it needs to have different content. It doesn't have to be completely different, but different. Otherwise, it looks like duplicate content and the SEs are going to pick the stronger of the two.

Right now, you are telling them that the only difference in the content is that /ie/ is in Irish English, and /gb/ is in British English. It's not different enough to warrant showing the other content over your main homepage as that is stronger.

Does that all make sense? I would remove the HRELFANGs, ensure the right targeting is in place and that the content is different per country to target those countries.

Yes. Simply put, all else being equal, if you are targeting an multiple country international audience in which your offerings do not change, you should have a general TLD rather than a ccTLD. I can't say that you will start ranking better for sure, but it'll help in the long run.

It sounds like you intend on using this scheme for link development purposes, but I'd warn not to rely on any links created this way. They would not be editorial in nature and therefore you can't count on them in the long term.

That being said, there are two ways to look at this: from your perspective and your client's perspective. The best route in each case in my opinion is:

Yours: #3 by far

Theirs: #1 to keep things on their domain. If I were them, I'd want people staying on my domain.

If you are looking at this from just an SEO perspective, do #3, but if it were me, I'd ask your first set of clients what they prefer and work with them from there.

First, don't worry so much about how much content is on the page. You should format your pages based on what works best for what the searcher is looking for. If there is demand for information on Biomass Industry types and there is enough content for a page, then create a separate page. If there isn't enough content for one of these pages, and it makes sense for the user to land on the more general page, do that.

Hmmm, I am thinking there are two possible solutions.

1. Create a "site" per country (subfolders like you have now), but use canonical for the pages that are duplicated, the pages that are the same across all countries.
Also use javascript to detect a new user's location (don't auto redirect though, ask) to get them to the "right" version of the page, if they come into the non-country focused general page.

2. Create a "site" per country (subfolders like you have now), and spend the resources to change the content on each page just enough to target that country. It doesn't have to be much, just enough to target that group.

Option 2 is the most time and resource intensive. Option 1 can be messed up quickly if the technical implementation isn't done right.

I know that's not a clean answer but international never is. There are always so many moving parts.

Actually, if the page is the most relevant to the users query, any TLD can rank well in Google.com, Google.co.uk, etc.

This is not a matter of user preference. It is a matter of indicating the the search engines what your target market is. A ccTLD indicates that you want to only target one country. That is not the case here. But they can rank with a .no to users in the other countries, it is just harder.

Hi Sam,

I can see how this might be concerning. Without knowing your site, I can't confirm anything but answers to your questions:

1. Bots have been known to "fill out forms" before and at least Googlebot has been known to find pages through the use of Chrome (a user using Chrome). There are many ways, but if you are sure that there is no link to it anywhere, I wouldn't worry about it.
2. No. That is what header codes are there for, to let the bots know what is there, what is forbidden, etc.
3. Other than robots.txt, there isn't any way to stop them from sending in requests. If it gets out of hand, you can try talking to AdWords directly, but more than likely, this is not causing an issue.

Overall, I'd just let it happen. Let them get the 403 error and they'll figure it out. As long as this isn't showing in the organic index, you should be fine.

I would err on the side of using the right name. Google and Bing will figure it out. And the grammar police won't arrest you. Trust me, they are annoying. Go for right, please.

Nope, not needed, unless you are changing the language.

Now, if you wanted to do one big site and then offer certain pages that are the same except for "translation" - and it's a local dialect translation, then yes, HREFLANG would be used in that situation.

So you could use HREFLANG rather than a canonical between the kinda duplicated pages if they are changed only in dialect translation. But since there is different content per country, you would still need that geo-targeted section for the content that is different.

domain.com/congo/about-congo-office (I don't know the country code for Congo) - No hreflang, will be geo-targeted with the subfolder.

domain.com/congo/similar-product-page - If just translated to the local Congo English dialect, use HREFLANG with all similarly "translated" pages. If not changed at all, use canonical to the original page. If changed overall to target the Congo market, no canonical or HREFLANG needed.

In theory, all else being equal in terms of relevance, page quality, and ranking page strength (which it never is), yes. Your page would be from a site that is not targeting a specific country, so it should be marginally more relevant. However, as stated above, it won't MAKE you rank better for sure. There are a host of other factors.

And yes, it is lack of knowledge and geo-centricity. You all see .no more often, so that is the go to in the other business owners heads. Lack of knowledge is the primary problem though.

Changing the duplicated content will take care of it by itself. It will have to be rewritten for each market though. It is up to you to decide if that is the best course of action for you. If you translate the content using regional dialects (have someone in that region write the page fresh), then hreflang is useful. That's when the en-us and en-ca, etc. come into play. Would something like that be possible?

You shouldn't be focusing blog posts on specific keywords at all. Blog posts are best for long tail terms, so it doesn't matter how many you write. If you start writing multiple on one topic that is a head term you are shooting for, then you should have a category page for all of those, and that is the page that should rank for the head term.

Good Answer Tim, but I am going to add a bit.

Since there are varying services, Tim's recommendation of domain.com/us and domain.com/uk is spot on. If you don't want to change URLs, I understand. You can keep the current URLs, you can geo-target the root to the UK and /us to the US. This route is easier to scale and if you grow each country as it launches, the domain gets stronger which helps each expansion in the years to come.

Now, if you are geo-targeting, there won't be much need for hreflang. If there are some product pages that are IDENTICAL across the two countries other than a few changed words, you can add HREFLANG. Technically speaking you wouldn't need it if the content were written and the pages crafted to each country, but until you get to that point, you can use HREFLANG for the pages that are duplicated. Mind you, this isn't best for your audience, but I get that for starters, that's easier. Do test the pages in each market to see if any modifications can be made for each market.

I don't recommend launching a .co.uk unless your customers/market demand it. That's a lot of marketing work to build up each one.

It sounds like your best bet is / geotarget to GB using Search Console, create a /us for the US, claim that in Search Console and geotarget to the US. Then use hreflang for any duplicated content.

Hope that helps!

The structure is really going to be up to you. The differences in terms of what helps ranking are so very small today that it is better to choose based on user preference and your own.

For consistency, it would be best to get a .co.uk that is on brand, but that route takes a ton of work over time. My favorite route is a subfolder (/uk) off of a gTLD in most instances.

If your .com.au is already ranking well, expect that to keep happening until the UK subsite has had a chance to strengthen. And make sure your content is different!

If the content is the same, but translated, without the hreflang tag, it is duplicate content. The hreflang tag is there to serve as a signal that you know the content is the same but translated and you want Google to know that as well. This situation is exactly what hreflang is made for.

If you have an online store dedicated to selling shoes in France, I would focus less on how to optimize and more on getting someone that is fluent in French and native to France. You are going to have to give that person the time to really translate your site from a French person's (someone that lives in France) perspective. All the site content.

Once you have accomplished that and used the correct implementation of HREFLANG and the meta language content tag (for Bing), let it sit for the time being. See how much traffic it garners. Get user input, check internal search patterns. If you aren't already tracking internal site search, please do that. If you don't allow internal site search, add that and track it in analytics.

Only then do you optimize for specific text.

The one issue I see is that at least for the homepage, these two sites are identical. You have so many different geo-target sites, but between two sites of the same language regardless of location, does anything change? I'm seeing no differences on the homepage so I need to ask.

This might be part of why .be is cached for .nl, you're not giving them something new to index. They are hreflang'd as well, which is telling them even more that the content is the same.

I am going to assume that .be launched before .nl, or has gotten more play in the search results. Something is making it the go to for Dutch.

You can geo-target the AU and US subdomain to the respective countries, but you can't target the EU as it isn't a country. HREFLANG can help as well, it depends on the differences in the content. You can do both, but in terms of what you should do:

HREFLANG = regional language changes (US English vs AU English)

Geo-Targeting = content changed to target that specific country (ex. products sold in the US but not AU, or extra regulatory content due to a country's laws OR (and a better example) the content needs to be different because selling your product in AU vs US is different like Christmas cards in each country, one has Christmas in summer and the other in winter).

That is a long URL, but I don't think shortening it will help in terms of SEO. Google is generally good at understanding the structure of your site without the structure of URLs. They are also good at determining the topic without the use of the URL. In my experience, the work from changing the URL is more than it would help.

If you find a reason to change the URL structure in the future that is very necessary (new CMS as an example), update the structure then. Until then, unless you are getting feedback from your users that it is annoying them, I'd leave them as is.

Lots going on here. First, let me clarify, your client's desktop content is only translated? They don't change the content and the offerings don't change by country? There is a very important distinction here. Language and country are two different things.

Regardless, if the mobile site is only in English, because of mobilegeddon, if they think they are penalized, it's because they lost mobile traffic or are seeing declines. This is only because there is not good mobile content in the users language. Once that is available, I expect the traffic will rise. It's not a penalty like duplicate content isn't a penalty, it is just not optimal.

For anyone doing brand searches, I think the answer is it depends. If Google thinks the user is okay with the English mobile site, they will show that. If the user has only ever searched in their particular language, and that's not available on mobile, they might show the desktop local site (better but not perfect) or they might test showing the English mobile site. I think you'll see both over time until the mobile issue is fixed.

I know we are way too late for this, but why did your company decide to internationalize the site structure if you can't get localization resources. I would have suggested using cookies and JS to set the currency, etc.

Anyway to your questions:

Or am I chasing ghost and this rule won't change much in the eyes of Google and my ranking? You can implement the title rule above, but I don't think it is going to help much.

**I don't care so much if US content shows up in the UK in term of content though are eCommerce experts would be quite pissed off as it would biased reporting. **

I recommend setting up IP location detection. If the user SEEMS to be in a different country, ask them if they are from the other country and if they say yes, then redirect them there. Don't assume they are in a specific country though.

Focus on getting those resources, you won't make a big impact without them in a high competition area.

If you are targeting the .com at English speaking countries, then why start targeting other sites at specific countries rather than languages? If you targeted the French language (in which you should not use .fr), you'd target more people than targeting France.

Based on your situation, I would have one site with translated content, rather than country-specific content. This would allow you to use the strength of one domain while giving your users the right content in their language.

Using hreflang tags between translated content is how you alert the search engines that the content is the same, just translated.

The one overall suggestion is to test your new layout for conversion. Content is good, but is not 100% needed in the amount you have on what seems to be ecommerce category pages. Focus on the conversion and having some content.

1. The new pages are only 180-300 words of text, simply because that is all that is needed to describe that category and provide some supporting information. the pages previously contained 600 words. Should I be looking to get more content on these pages?

No, I've seen categories with less content rank very well. Remember, names of products and other supporting text on the page is content as well. Don't worry about the length.

2. If i do need more content, It wont fit "above the fold" without pushing the products and sub categories below the fold, which isn't ideal. Should I be putting it there anyway or should I insert additional text below the products and below the fold or would this just be a waste.

Nope. Not unless the user needs it.

3. Keyword Structure. I have designed each page to target a selection of keywords, for example.
**a) The main widget pages targets all general "widget" terms and provides supporting **information
b) The sub-category blue widget page targets anything related and terms such as "Navy Widgets" because navy widgets are a type of blue widget etc"
Is this keyword structure over-optimised or exactly what I should be doing. I don't want to spread content to thin by being over selective in my categories

What you are doing sounds reasonable in theory. Stick with that and keep in mind that you only need to worry about specific terms like navy widgets if there is more than one navy widget and there is a high volume of demand for that. There is a lot that goes into this, but try to keep the category page focused to 1-2 terms.

No, it doesn't change my answer, but it's a good distinction to make. It sounds like the international expansion is in process. If the client needs geo-targeted content (sounds like they might), the countries need to be treated differently. Each subfolder as it's own site really. But it sounds like the translation is a good place to start for the time being.

For the mobile, my answer remains the same. There isn't anything other than making the translated content mobile or responsive that will help the traffic.

1. Can I create a rule for page titles to be "Product A - country - company name" or similar? Would that be enough to make the page titles unique? Is there any value doing so?
I think this depends on a few things.

**First, what is the competition like in the SERPs? if you are in a super competitive space in any of those countries, this is probably not going to be enough. But it is possible it would be in some but not others. Competitive markets are game changers. **

**Second, how much do you care if the US content shows up in the UK? I worry about the similarities of the content in your examples. A title tag can get stupid "duplicate title" warnings to disappear, but I can't promise it'll make a difference in the SERPs. **

There is no harm in trying, however.

2. Can I "localize" duplicate MD by simply naming the country? I assume it is not enough in this case as all the rest would be copy/pasted.

**Duplicate MDs are less of a worry from my perspective. What I'd worry about more is the duplication of the actual pages. The content on the page is infinitely more important than what is in the MD. **

Actually, the x-default is meant to be for a page that allows users to select a country/language combination.

Alexis, in theory, what you are proposing should work. However, it is not always perfect. There is so much that goes into how Google serves content to each user. You might not see it working perfectly every time, but you can use the non-country with two country-specific hreflang tags together.

In fact, the country coded hreflang tags were meant to be dialect-specific. So a site could have US English content and UK English content, but also more general English content for the rest of the English speaking people.

In fact, it sounds like if the only thing changing is the currency, you might try geo-targeting subfolders. You can do hreflang in addition to that, but geotargeting is what is meant to be used here.

1. Content for CA: https://www.domain.com/ca/content
2. Content for GB: https://www.domain.com/gb/content
3. General Content: https://www.domain.com/content

Claim the subfolders in Google Search Console as different properties and then target each one to those countries in the International Targeting area.

Then add hreflang the way you mentioned with those URLs. However, this setup won't work if you are doing things with another language mixed in. If you are planning on that, let me know.