Do you want to reach more customers? Do you have office in far flung countries? Are you not sure how to go about doing SEO for multiple countries?
Here are my tips for global SEO.
1. Get a separate country specific domain so that you look like a real resident. Make sure in the contact information you list the local office and phone number. You can also reference the US information as well but at the website footer and in the header only the country specific address and phone number should be used.
2. Preferably, for country websites that are not English speakers, the website should be in the country’s native language. However readers will assume that when they call they will be speaking to someone fluent in their own language. If your staffing does not allow for this, then leave the website in English, but use the local address and local phone number.
3. Google will not identify websites in other languages as duplications of your own site penalizing you. Which is good news. However for the English speaking countries, you should use the meta tag for Canonical URL just so Google does assign a penalty.
“You might have avoided setting up a .co.uk counterpart for your .com site for fear of Google deeming this as “duplicate content,” since there’s not much of a language difference. However, Google now supports using the rel=“canonical” link element across different domains. This means you can have similar content on both the .com and .co.uk extensions of your site, and use the canonical link element to indicate the exact URL of the domain preferred for indexing. This will make duplicate content a non-issue. Also, keep in mind that this is not required when using different languages. Google does not consider foreign language translations to be duplicate content. But keep in mind that it is something to consider for multiple locale sites in the same language.” For more great info visit this page.
5. If you decide instead of doing new domains to do subdirectory domains, then make sure a sitemap is done for each subdirectory domain and feed it to the Google Search Console using a different URL in the account. Or for new domains, make sure to implement the Google Search Console, create a site map and select the targeted country in the Google Search Console.
Check back on Wednesday for more tips for Global SEO.