How to set up international SEO for english speaking countries
-
Hi, My company have offices around the world. However they also provide different services and products depending on the region. For example our offices in the USA, UK and Australia all provide different services to each other.
My question is, how do I set up my WordPress website up to cater for these different countries and services?
I think the simple answer would be to build a separate website for each, but this would be too costly and we don't have the resources to maintain all three.
Many thanks for your time,
Tom
-
The best way of using multilingual/multi-country in WordPress is using the WPML plugin.
-
HI Thomas,
The multisite setup is just a way of controlling the content. If you set it up on subfolders then google will see the sub folders as normal and all on the same domain. If you set it up using domain mapping then you are in effect setting up different domains (even though you are hosting the content all in the same place) and google will see the content as separate domains. If you are planning to go the subfolder route you could set up wordpress to get the same behavior without using multisite, it just might be quite dev intensive depending on how different you want the regional variations to be.
Whichever route you choose an important thing will be to make sure your regional hreflang tags are set up correctly - this will likely need a bit of tweaking given your description but is worth it to get it right.
-
Hi Ryan,
Even in WordPress Multisite?
I love a good White Board Friday thank you, I will definitely give that a watch.
Tom
-
Hi Thomas. Yes, inbound links to subfolders tend to help Domain Authority rise better than those going to subdomains. Rand recently did a White Board Friday on this, found here: http://moz.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical-vs-301-how-to-structure-links-optimally-for-seo-whiteboard-friday. Cheers!
-
Hi Guys,
Thank you for your quick response. If I did use WordPress Multi-Site to build the subfolders for the different countries, would they pass "link juice" between them?
-
HI Thomas,
You could use a wordpress multi site installation for this which allows for setting up different wp installs on subdomains or sub directories as Ryan suggests. This will allow you to have separate 'sites' while all still being controlled from one wp admin panel and with a bit of coding/setup work to tweak things if needed. You can also use a domain mapping plugin to run multiple domains (.com, .com.au, .co.uk etc) from the subfolders if that is in the plans.
-
Without resources for multiple sites, you'll likely want to create separate folders for the regions, ex. yoursite.com/usa/, yoursite.com/uk/, yoursite.com/au/ and so on. To further guide users you could employ location based redirects to their applicable portion of the site. As far as Wordpress design goes you'll want to clearly label each section and state the the services and products being offered are (US/UK/AU) specific.
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
-
Multi National Company that Doesn't Want to Implement International SEO
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.
International SEO | | JKhoo1 -
How to deal with disproportional content investment for a ccTLD for a multi-language country,
We have a website for the Belgium market, serving content and products on be/nl (Dutch/Flemmish Belgium) and .be/fr (French Belgium). However, as a Dutch-based company you can see our primary focus and objective is to serve content to Dutch Belgium rather than French Belgium. I wonder if, and so, what are the downsides are of only investing in half of the site?
International SEO | | Marketing-Omoda
Does it hurt my general .be Google rankings if we put a lot of effort in .be/nl but far less in .be/fr ? (we used to have a ccTLD .fr as well, but pulled the plug because it wasn't profitable.
our belgium website is profitable for Dutch speaking part of Belgium but now we would like to expand, and enhance rankings. We're investing heavily in (local) brand awareness and partnerships, and content marketing for the Dutch part.0 -
International TLD Differentiation Concerns
Currently working on a project where the TLD of the parent company site is a .COM and the U.S. subsidiary is a .US. This is a first for me. What I do know. Both sites must be live Parent (.COM) targets essentially the entire international market US Subsidiary (.US) targets United States only Concerns are even with non-duplicate content will there be confusion there with the closely related domain, just a TLD change? Any suggestions are greatly, greatly appreciated!
International SEO | | dodgejd0 -
Queston about subdomains for SEO Gurus
What is the best way to deal with a blog acting as subdomain (blog.domain.com) when you have 3 regional website versions (uk.domain.com, us.domain.com, and fr.domain.com)? I am facing a big problem for proper distribution of link juice to the three main websites. The point is that I have one blog, in which I have general content not targeting any specific market, but the link juice cannot be distributed properly across three websites, because I have a script to determine visitor’s region and serve him the right regional website. It uses a geoip script for Apache to redirect a visitor to their proper subdomain by determining which continent they are connecting from based off their IP address. Apache can use any type of redirect for this purpose, but we're using 302 to maintain user experience without using a 301 which might permanently redirect a crawler to only one version of the website. That cannot be done without 302 redirect, which means sending no link juice from the blog subdomain to the main websites. So, when you click on the logo from blog.domian.com, the script determines visitor region, and then 302 to the proper website. I don’t have main domain like www.domain.com. Instead the script is acting on this domain so that it 302 redirects to regional website according user location. The situation is complicated because you can’t send equal link juice to 3 regional website, having only one general blog. Even worse, none of the regional websites receives link juice from neither individual posts, nor blog.domain.com because of the 302 redirect. Any help is appreciated. Thanks.
International SEO | | darmar0 -
Moving webserver to another country and downtime
Hi all, We are going to move our server location to another country, and our webpage will be down for about 24 hours. Is there anything that I should be aware of with SEO while doing this?
International SEO | | helgeolaussen
Any way to tell SE that our site will be down, without having alot of errors in Webmaster tools etc? Best regards, Ceran0 -
Looking for content writers for multi-language SEO
Hi All, I'm currently doing a lot of work for a UK client who has multiple sites outside the UK (all part of the same business). We're currently discussing the option of us handling all of his SEO for his German, French, Spanish and Italian sites too, but we only have access to one person in the office who can speak French and Spanish. They're currently booked up on other jobs that we can't really move them off, so I'm looking for options of outsourcing some of the content writing. My question is, does anyone know of any high quality content writing services that have writers available to write for the countries languages above? We're going to focus initially on their on-site strategy and building up their high quality content. At the moment, they don't have much relevant content on their website, so we're going to initially look at this. Moving forward, we'll be looking at their off-site strategy and trying to find areas to submit high quality articles, look at guest blogging and PR opportunities. Any tips anyone has on this side (in terms of outsourcing to native speakers) would be quite useful too! Many thanks,
International SEO | | PinpointDesigns
Lewis0 -
Use country-specific domains or stick to already strong .com domain?
We run an online store with the majority of our customers coming from 4 different European countries. The site is accessible through TLD's of all of these countries. However our .com domain currently has the most links pointing to it and the highest domain authority. Unfortunately, we are unable to tell through which TLD visitors reach our site. The niche is rather competetive, and therefore I am unsure whether it would be worth it to solely use our .com domain for the English language, and try to rank for each of the seperate languages with its own country-specific domain. **Question/discussion: **Will it be worth the costs and time to spent to build links for the country specific domains in these countries, or should we focus on making our .com domain stronger and use it for all countries? I'm aware of the benefits of ranking with a domain in the country the user is in. Note: We have major duplicate content issues at this moment, due the content being available in different languages, on a handful of domains. On each domain, users can view the site in different languages. In addition, the language indication in the url is not very clear (?lang=x) so I believe this should be improved to make it easier for search engines to tell which language is presented. If I choose to use a different language for each TLD, then the language flag in the navigation on the site will point to a different domain, so each language is hosted on 1 domain and there is no more duplicate content. However, I'm afraid this will lead to lower rankings, as the (strong) .com domain will no longer host the content in different languages.
International SEO | | 1200wd0 -
Same language many countries
Hello, I live in Belgium and in this country you've 3 languages : french, dutch and german. I've customers from many countries : France, Nederlands,... and for my website in ".be" (we'll say www.mysite.be for example) I've choosen the french language. My question is can I've the same content on my site : www.mysite.be and www.mysite.fr without duplicate content or should I forgot using www.mysite.fr to avoid the D.C. problem? And with my site : www.mysite.be should I've more difficult to rank in France for example? Thank you for your answer, Jonathan
International SEO | | JonathanLeplang0