Setting up the right Geo targeting/language targeting settings and not to brake the SEO
-
Hello the great Moz Community!
Gev here from BetConstruct, a leading gaming and betting software provider in the world.
Our company website is performing great on SERP.
We have 20+ different dedicated pages for our 20+ softwares, event section, different landing pages for different purposes. We also run a blog section, Press section, and more...
Our website's default language is EN. 4 months ago we opened the /ru and /es versions of the website!
I have set the correct hreflang tags, redirects, etc.. generated correct sitemaps, so the translated versions started to rank normally!
Now our marketing team is requesting different stuff to be done on the website and I would love to discuss this with you before implementing!
There are different cases!
For example: They have created a landing page under a url betconstruct.com/usa-home and want me to set that page as the default website page(ie homepage), if the user visits our website from a US based IP.
This can be done in 2 different ways:
-
I can set the /usa-home page as default in my CMS, in case the visitor is from US and the address will be just betconstruct.com(without /use-home). In this case the same URL (betconstruct.com) will serve different content for only homepage.
-
I can check the visitor IP, if he is from US, I can redirect him to betconstruct.com/usa-home. In this case user can click on the logo and go to the homepage betconstruct.com and see the original homepage.
Both of the cases seems to be dangerous, because in the 1st case I am not sure what google will think when he sees different homepage from different IPs. And in the 2nd case I am not sure what should be that redirection. Is it 301 or 303, 302, etc... Because Google will think I don't have a homepage and my homepage redirects to a secondary page like /usa-home
After digging a lot I realised that my team is requesting from me a strange case. Because the want both language targeting(/es, /ru) and country targeting (should ideally be like /us), but instead of creating /us, they want it to be instead of /en(only for USA)
Please let me know what will be the best way to implement this? Should we create a separate version of our website for USA under a /us/* URLs? In this case, is it ok to have /en as a language version and /us as a country targeting?
What hreflangs to use?
I know this is a rare case and it will be difficult for you to understand this case, but any help will be much appreciated!
Thank you!
Best,
Gev -
-
Welcome to International Site Expansion! This is the exact situation I worry about when people set up international structure.
The answer lies in what your users need, not what you want or what marketing wants. Do users in the US need to see different content than a user in the UK or Australia? All of those countries have English as the primary language. I am not talking about dialects (UK spellings/words vs US words), but do the users need to see different content due to product set changes, price changes, different marketing tactics, etc.?
There are a whole list of questions you need to go through. http://outspokenmedia.com/international-seo-strategy/ - Let me know what your end result is and we'll talk from there.
Another resource: https://mza.seotoolninja.com/blog/guide-to-international-seo (that will explain a lot)
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
-
SEO benefits/drawbacks of physical address on site.
Simple question - how much of an SEO impact does NOT having a physical address on your site make? I run a photography business based from home. For security reasons I don't really want our home address easily available to the public. I have a Google Maps listing (actually seem to have two at the moment, but that's a different matter) and the full address is logged there but is not viewable publicly - just the surrounding area. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robandsarahgillespie0 -
Recommended SEO Companies
Looking for advice here.... We are a small business looking to secure/increase rankings in the search engines. What are some recommended SEO agencies/companies that are effective with today's search engine optimization standards. _ Thank you_
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wickerparadise0 -
Seo for international sites
Hello, I have a question for the group, our main US site- http://www.datacard.com is utilized to move content to other regional sites like http://www.datacard.co.uk/ and http://www.datacard.fr/ and http://www.datacard.com.br/. Anyhow, we essentially have some regional content on those sites, but for ease of maintaining and updating the content we have a company translate this for us and then undergo an in country review for local people in our company to review the content. That being said the meta descriptions, titles, code, everything gets translated to that language. I know there are issue for SEO for these purposes as we get much better rankings with http://www.datacard.com. The regional sites are newer so this could be part of it. We don't have an agency helping us with SEo and i get a lot of questions on what can be done internally for this for regional sites with our current structure. Any tips you have? It would be greatly appreciated! Laura
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lauramrobinson320 -
Favorite SEO firm you would recommend
Is there a favorite SEO firm that you would recommend. Is there any site that ranks the top firms in the country?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | movieguide0 -
Is there any SEO advantage to sharing links on twitter using google's url shortener goo.gl/
Hi is there any advantage to using <cite class="vurls">goo.gl/</cite> to shorten a URL for Twitter instead of other ones? I had a thought that <cite class="vurls">goo.gl/</cite> might allow google to track click throughs and hence judge popularity.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | S_Curtis0 -
Internal Linking for better seo
On our site http://villasdiani.com we have a blog called Kenya news, which is a category where we regular post articles. I am always creating external links to the category Kenya news so as it would pass juice to the posts in it and the posts have back links to category. There are no internal links among posts in the category. As our main target is to rent beach villas and boutique hotels, each of that posts in the category Kenya news has only a link either to category with beach villas or to category with boutique hotels. My question is, if this is good practice?, is it just not too much links going to categories to beach villas and boutique hotels form the Kenya news?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rebeca1
Thank you very much for any thoughts Iris0 -
Joomla Plugins for SEO
Any input on which Joomla plugins could help us to facilitate the SEO on a client's site? Wordpress has some simple all-in-ones but we're not as familiar with Joomla and it doesn't look like that's the case. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MackenzieFogelson0 -
What are best practices for multi-language seo?
We are looking for best practices for multi-language seo. We are interested in any books, message boards or blogs that you can recommend. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FareCompare0