Multiregional SEO: same language, different countries

alvaroj

Newbie
Joined
Feb 12, 2015
Messages
47
Reaction score
1
Hi!

I'm building a lead generation international site. As the site will be targeting different countries, some with the same language (Spanish) I wonder what's the best way to do it.

As far as I can see, my options are:
1. Use TLDs for each country, and generate different content and forms: I guess this is the less effective way.
2. Use country subdomains (uk.mydomain.com, us.mydomain.com, aus.mydomain.com...) with different content and forms.
3. Use language level subdomains (en.mydomain.com, es.mydomain.com...) with the same content just loading a different form and heading depending on IP location data.
4. Use language level subdomains (en.mydomain.com, es.mydomain.com...) with the same content just loading a different form and heading depending on IP location data and attach a query to teh address (en.mydomain.com/?country=uk, en.mydomain.com/?country=us...)
5. Any other option I haven't thought about.

Any advice on the best way to perform this? I would choose #3 or #4, but I have no idea how Google will play with seeing a different heading text and form depending on the country visit.

Thank you very much for helping!
 
Do not do #4...

If you are targeting regional traffic (for example people specifically from Canada) then using a ccTLD like .ca is the way to go. You still have English, French, and Spanish speakers in Canada so separate alternate languages in this case by directory and use hreflang annotations to point to alternate language versions from each of your versions and canonical all of them to your primary language version.

If you are only targeting languages then keep it global and just offer alternate language versions. Do not specify regions or you will be limited to those regions. If you say hreflang="fr-ca" then you are limiting to only French speakers in Canada. If use say hreflang="fr" then you are targeting French speakers everywhere.

The main benefit to using #2 is to reduce the number of HTTPS certificates you have to get if you did #1. But you get the same benefit by simply having language and country folders i.e. /fr-ca/ /fr-fr/ ...

I would probably opt for:

mydomain . com/ <--- linked to primary language folder

mydomain . com/es/
mydomain . com/fr/
mydomain . com/en/

then hreflang the content in each directory to language speakers anywhere they might be.

The exception is if you are focusing on local search then you probably want to break it out by language and region.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top