How to make Google consider my international subdomain relevant?

[Todoist]

We have recently started to look deeper into international SEO. We have search engine optimized our international landing pages, title tags and meta descriptions with keywords etc. so each of the international language we support is SEO'ed for the local market.

We support 12 languages, and each of them are located on a subdomain. That means if we say our site is helloworld.com, a person from Germany that lands on this site can switch to German and will then be redirected to de.helloworld.com and all content will be in German.

Our problem is that we develop cloud-based software, we have a significant amount of traffic, but whenever we get media coverage or people link to us from anywhere in the world they always link to the root domain which in this case then would be helloworld.com. That means if I go to google.de and type in the exact meta description or title tag we use in German, the Google search engine can't even find us because "I assume" Google don't consider our de.helloworld.com relevant because nobody has ever linked to this site.

I would appreciate very much if anyone can give me some advice on how I can address this issue.

Thanks a lot!

Allan

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Allan,

They're several options which could provide  you with a possible solution. But of course I can't guarantee that any of these options will actually solve your problem.

1. Rel="alternate" v.s. href lang: these tags will tell Google on which pages the relevant pages in that language can be found.
2. Google Webmaster Tools geotargeting: with the geotargeting you're able to target your sub domain on a specific country.

I would give both a try and hopefully you can drop a comment here in a couple of weeks with hopefully positive progress.

[Todoist]

Hi Martijn,

Thanks a lot for the prompt response to my question. We'll look into these changes, the only thing I don't really understand is her suggestions about when not to use geotargeting in the video. She gives an example when you don't want to use geotargeting on your website and that is when you want to target a particular language versus region. I understand that we might miss out on the French speaking leads that live in Canada if we geotarget our site for France, but if that's the trade-off compared to not reaching anyone who speaks French which is the case with our current international SEO structure I'm fine with that!

However, I assume your first suggestion to look into Rel="alternate" v.s. href lang deals with that situation where you target language and not region.

Thanks again Martijn, I appreciate your help very much, and I promise I'll drop you a line when we "hopefully" can see the impact.

-Allan

[Todoist]

Hi Martijn,

It has now been a few months, unfortunately these actions didn't solve the problem, we're still not being indexed on the international Google sites such as Google.fr, .de, .es etc. Any suggestions to other initiatives we can take to change that?

Thanks for your help.

Best wishes,

Allan

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Can you PM me the site we're talking about in this case? Quite hard otherwise to give you other initiatives for your specific case.

[Todoist]

Hi Martijn,

Did you receive the PM I sent you?

Best wishes,

Allan

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Yes I did, already replied last week. Sent my PM again to make sure you've got it.