Optimizing one site for multiple countries

[petersen]

I am working on a project, where we have one website, with a country specific domain, which is currently ranking well in local search.

The client now wants to expand his business into two new countries (all english speaking) and would like to rank for the same keywords in these two new countries. The customer do not want to create new websites for the new countries.

Because its a local domain and the website is setup for local search in GWT with locally hosted server, i expect challenges in optimizing for new countries without impacting the current local ranking.

Question 1: What would be the recommended approach for maintaining their existing ranking on local search, while optimizing for the new countries.

[JamesNorquay]

If they do not want to set up a new domain you can try and make new "sub folders" on the website to target the new country then what you can do is GEO target this sub folder in Google web master tools too. example: website.com/au/

If the client does not like that idea you can set up a sub domain and then target this via web master tools. example: au.website.com

[Alex-Harford]

This video should be a great help: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

Depending on the type of site/competition it might even be possible to rank well in other countries with the current setup, by building links from these countries for a start. Assuming otherwise though...from what I've read (I'm not speaking from experience) I'd recommend sub folders, as James mentions. As well as adding them to Webmaster Tools make sure you specify the language in the Doctypes and meta language (e.g. I think Australian English is au) and adjust localised spellings. You might want to get a native of each country to check over everything - even the search terms the client wants to rank for elsewhere might not mean much or get much traffic in another English speaking country. Get some links from each country too.

[petersen]

Thanks James, appreciate your advice.

I think we will go with the subfolder option, even though it might create a rather odd looking url because of the existing country specific domain name. So will end up with something like domain.com.au/sg.

[petersen]

Thanks for your input.

Together with subfolders, we will take your advice and work on getting local links.I guess since we are using subfolders, the local links will benefits the entire domain.

Thanks for sharing the link to the whiteboard friday.