Multi National Company that Doesn't Want to Implement International SEO

[JKhoo]

I have got an interesting situation where I have a client who wants to merge two ccTLD's into one. They currently have .fi and .com and they want to merge both sites to .com

.fi is for finland and .com for USA.

They want to merge the sites and the original plan was to use subfolders for each country and pair with hreflang.

However the team now wants to merge both sites with NO subfolders differentiating between finland or the US.

My understanding of International SEO that this is the most opposite from best practices, but is there any specific reasons why they wouldn't want to do this?

I'm struggling to find any specific reasons that I can cite to the client that would argue why we should at least do a subfolder or some sort of international seo strategy.

[NaeemGari]

@webuniversalp1 Yes, hreflang tags need to be created for each page "appropriately" as covered in my previous response to help search engines show the right version page to the right geo/audience.

[Sportnaturae]

El tema es que vas a tener que redireccionar las dos webs, no sé si mantendrás el contenido de la .com pero si no te espera un auditoria grande dependiendo de la web, en cuanto a lo que dicen en los anteriores sobre hreflang pienso lo mismo.

[webuniversalp1]

@naeemgari Hello,

You need to use the hreflang tags for each page, with this Google will not penalize your content and will understand that they are two versions with different languages.

[ITcbzy]

@naeemgari I agree with that.

[desarrolloapps]

Hello,

You need to use the hreflang tags for each page, with this Google will not penalize your content and will understand that they are two versions with different languages.

[NaeemGari]

@jkhoo for international SEO the strongest signal for search engines is ccTLDs. The next best option would be a sub-folder URL structure with the correct hreflang tag declarations.

For your core keywords is there low / no search volume in Finland? From a business standpoint, managing two websites can be tedious. You need to build content & backlinks for two domains.

However, from an SEO standpoint, the preferred option would be to keep the ccTLDs. They are the best indicator of relevance to local SERPs. Think about your audience in Finland are they likely to visit a .com domain from SERPs or a .fi domain? Search engines would also prefer showing more targeted and relevant results to users. Therefore, ccTLDs for target regions and international SEO are the best options.

The next best route would be sub folders with appropriate hreflang tag declarations & xml sitemaps.

Additionally, site mergers/migrations generally result in a loss in organic traffic and visibility which can range from a quarter to over year(s).