Best way to enter Canada, SEO-wise?

[eugeneku]

We are thinking of splitting our e-Commerce site into a Canadian site w/ localized content, a potential French version and for additional relevance w/ localized currency.

What would be the best way to go about this if we were wanting to gain traction as soon as possible on the organic side?

1. Split the domain into domain.com and domain.com/ca/ (subfolders)

2. Split the domain into ca.domain.com and domain.com

3. Or split the domain into domain.com & wirelessemporium.ca

Also, what are some key best practices we need to keep in mind to avoid duplicate content issues, etc?

[malecce]

ciao

if i understand well now you have admin.com, right?

if it's so

it is preferable to add the management of another language type french
and have:
domain.com / fr
and try to index the site in French in the Google.ca

Maurizio

[9thCO]

It's great you haven't jumped in yet as there are pros and cons to each of the three options you have listed. I highly recommend this free webinar here: http://bit.ly/130NsJV  - Ezra (from 9th sphere) goes over the potential pros and cons when entering the Canadian market and gives a great example very similar to yours. You could then judge from there.

Best practices obviously depends on which way you go in terms of a subfolder or new domain etc. While some products will inevitably have the same descriptions, you could keep these slightly different by rewriting the descriptions (with Canadian spelling) and have Canadian customers review on the Canadian page (much like how Amazon does it with Amazon.ca).

[Aleyda]

Hi there,

The best way to enable a new country version --in this case for Canada-- is:

• Enabling an international Web structure, ideally with a ccTLD for the country, in this case: yourbrand.ca and if this is not possible due to technical or resources restrictions, then do it through a sub-directory under your current generic domain: yourbrand.com/ca/

• If at some point you need to enable additional language versions for a country, you can extend your structure like this:

• With ccTLDs:

• For English: yourbrand.ca

• For French: yourbrand.ca/fr/

• With sub-directories:

• For English: yourbrand.com/ca-en/

• For French: yourbrand.com/ca-fr/

• When you use sub-directories you can register them independently in Google Webmaster Tools and geotarget them.

• You can always (whether ccTLDs or sub-directories) use the hreflang annotations to inform Google about your different pages language and country targeting.

• Make sure to translate and localize all the information of your pages: From URLs in the appropriate languages, to titles, meta descriptions, headings, text, currency, addresses, etc.

• Always link between the different country versions through a crawlable menu.

• Avoid automatic redirects, is far better to suggest the appropriate version as Amazon does here with their Spanish version.

• Build your new countries versions popularity, targeting locally relevant and authority Websites in your sector there.

Take a look at this International SEO checklist I published some days ago at Moz with the most important steps you need to take for an International SEO process.

I hope this helps!