Many businesses target multiple countries with their websites and need answers to questions such as: do you put the information for your products or services all on the same domain? Do you obtain multiple domains? Where do you host the site(s)? It turns out that there are SEO factors, as well as basic marketing questions, that affect the answers. There are also non-SEO factors, such as the tax implications of what you do; for some TLDs you can get them only by having a local physical presence (e.g., France requires this to get a .fr domain).
Starting with the basics of international targeting, it is important to let the search engines know where your business is based in as many ways as possible. These might include:
A country-specific TLD (ccTLD) for your domain (e.g., .co.uk)
Hosting in the local country
Physical local address in plain text on every page of your site
Google Webmaster Central geotargeting setting
Verified address with Google Maps
Links from in-country websites
Use of the local language on the website
If you are starting from scratch, getting these all lined up will give you the best possible chance of ranking in the local country you are targeting.
You may ask why you cannot leverage your domain weight to target the new territory rather than starting from scratch—in other words, create multiple versions of your site and determine where the user is in the world before either delivering the appropriate content or redirecting him to the appropriate place in the site (or even to a subdomain hosted in the target country).
The problem with this approach is that the search engines spider from the United States, their IP addresses will be in the United States in your lookup, and they will therefore be delivered in U.S. content. This problem is exacerbated if you are going even further and geodelivering different language content, as only your English language content will be spidered unless you cloak for the search engine bots.
This kind of IP delivery is therefore a bad idea. You should make sure you do not blindly geodeliver content based on IP address as you will ignore many of your markets in the search engines’ eyes.
The best practice remains one of two approaches, depending on the size and scale of your operations in the new countries and how powerful and established your .com domain is.
If you have strong local teams and/or (relatively speaking) less power in your main domain, launching independent local websites geotargeted as described earlier (hosted locally, etc.) is a smart move in the long run.
If, on the other hand, you have only centralized marketing and PR and/or a strong main domain, you may want to create localized versions of your content either on subdomains (.uk, .au, etc.) or in subfolders (/uk/, /au/, etc.), with the preference being for the use of subdomains so that you can set up local hosting.
Both the subdomains and the subfolders approaches allow you to set your geotargeting option in Google Webmaster Central, and with either method you have to be equally careful of duplicate content across regions. In the subdomain example, you can host the subdomain locally, while in the subfolder case, more of the power of the domain filters down.
Unfortunately, the Webmaster Tools’ geotargeting option doesn’t work nearly as well as you’d hope to geotarget subfolders. The engines will consider hosting and ccTLDs, along with the geographic location of your external link sources, to be stronger signals than the manual country targeting in the tools. In addition, people in other countries (e.g., France) don’t like to click on “.com” or “.org” TLDs—they prefer “.fr”. This extends to branding and conversion rates too—web users in France like to buy from websites in France that end in “.fr”.
An entire treatise could be written on handling multilanguage content as the search engines themselves are rapidly evolving in this field, and tactics are likely to change dramatically in the near future. Therefore, this section will focus on providing you with the fundamental components of successful multilanguage content management.
Here are best practices for targeting the search engines as of this writing, using Spanish and English content examples:
Content in Spanish and English serving the same country:
Create a single website with language options that change the URL by folder structure; for example, http://www.yourdomain.com versus http://www.yourdomain.com/esp/.
Build links from Spanish and English language sites to the respective content areas on the site.
Host the site in the country being served.
Register the appropriate country domain name (for the United States, .com, .net, and .org are appropriate, whereas in Canada using .ca or in the United Kingdom using .co.uk is preferable).
Content in Spanish and English targeting multiple countries:
Create two separate websites, one in English targeting the United States (or the relevant country) and one in Spanish targeting a relevant Spanish-speaking country.
Host one site in the United States (for English) and the other in the relevant country for the Spanish version.
Register different domains, one using U.S.-targeted domain extensions and one using the Spanish-speaking country’s extension.
Acquire links from the United States to the English site and links from the Spanish-speaking country to that site.
Content in Spanish targeting multiple countries:
Create multiple websites (as mentioned earlier) targeting each specific country.
Register domains using the appropriate country TLD and host in each country separately.
Rewrite the content of each site to be unique, as duplicate content problems will arise despite the separation of targeting.
When possible, have native speakers fluent in the specific region’s dialect write the site content for each specific country.
Obtain in-country links to your domains.
Although some of these seem counterintuitive, the joint issues of search engines preferring to show content hosted in and on a country-specific domain name combined with duplicate content problems make for these seemingly illogical suggestions. Creating multiple websites is never ideal due to the splitting of link equity, but in the case of international targeting, it is often hard or even impossible to rank a U.S.-hosted .com address for foreign language content in another country.