Need advice - International SEO strategy

[AymanH]

Hello Moz !

I've been working for some months on a very interesting SEO project. I even opened some discussions on it (Multi Regional website - Folder strategy, Multi Company websites) with amazing feedbacks from the community.

INITIAL PROJECT

Set up an international website with different subsidiaries name, 1 person to manage the whole web, different locations / regions / languages and same products.

INITIAL IDEAS

For the beginning of the project we opened a main website in .com with subfolders for the other subsidiaries .com/es ...

However our business is mainly in English so we decided to focus harder (closing the .com/uk, using a unic com/blog, opening more pages etc.) on the main domain in .com

CURRENT ISSUE

How to rank locally our services with:

• Main domain in .com
• Last Google updates against link building
• Most of customers searching in English in different countries
• Company working in more than 80 countries, through 13 subsidiaries

**IDEA **

I was thinking about using our blog to focus 3 months on a thematic around one service (blog post with link to the services article on our website, guest blogging with link to a blog post, discussions on Linkedin around the thematics, etc.)

QUESTION

What could be the best strategy to rank locally our products in this case ?

Hope you can share  your best advise. I guess I'm not the unique one to face this issue. So it'll be good to make a good strategy for all our community

Tks a lot !

Florian

[Chris.Menke]

Maybe find country-specific blogs that will let you contribute travel stories about how English speakers learned and used the local language to make their travels more unique/fun/memorable in that country. What could be more relevant that that, other than links to those directories from language education sites within those same countries? A link or authorship credit from those blogs will go a long way towards helping those subdirectories rank locally and internationally.

[AymanH]

Hello,

Thanks you for your answer but the company deals with IT Services not with travel

It makes it more difficult to find some local blogs to exchange posts.

[Chris.Menke]

That's funny. I was just looking at a language site and in my brain, your question was all about language.  Yeah,  IT services are a bit different bit different.

[AymanH]

Yes so the issue is how to increase the notoriety of the service / product pages.

I guess speaking on blog about the thematics around is the less worst. ..

What do u thinK ?

[Chris.Menke]

You know, content touching on IT schools in each of those countries isn't a bad idea.  It's  thematic and common to all locations and there are lots of ways to tie it directly to your company.

[AymanH]

The issue is working in so many countries

[Chris.Menke]

But I bet the business owners aren't saying "I wish we didn't have offices in so many countries"

[AymanH]

Yes this is my issue more

So what would you do in this case ?