Global SEO - How quickly/aggressively should one expand into multiple countries?

[ByteLaunch]

SITUATION: Our client is a global company lacking the global presence, so naturally the idea is performing international/global SEO in each country.

For benchmarking purposes, our plan is to focus on a select number of keywords (ie 8-15) for each country and begin link building within each respective country. All SEO effort (ie. link building) will be for sub-folders (ie. www.client.com/subfolder/) on the same top level domain.

Note, each country may have multiple languages, so each language will be broken out as it's own unique SEO campaign with it's very own strategy and link building efforts.

For example: Mexico has 2 languages (English & Spanish) and will be considered 2 separate campaigns.

PROBLEM: The client wants to be extremely aggressive and perform SEO on 3 new countries every month. This amounts to 36 new countries/SEO campaigns per year. Assuming each country has 2 languages each, we are looking at 6 SEO campaigns per month, or 72 per year.

Our concern is that since all SEO effort will be performed on the same top level domain, we may be growing too fast and the search engines may consider the addition of these new pages and links to be too 'spammy'.

We'd love to hear some feedback or personal experience on what might be considered a "safe" or "healthy" expansion into different countries.

Thanks!

[JamesNorquay]

Well the first question is:

Are they looking to buy 36 different domains and run GEO specific sites in 36 countries or are they looking to use one main site and build GEO layers off one main site.

I have developed numerous strategy's in the past around 20 Geo levels but in the end of the day you really need to answer the above question first as their is really two ways this project can do based on the clients request.

[ByteLaunch]

By different domains I'm assuming you're referring to the top level domains (ex: .ca, .co.uk., .gr, etc.) If this is the case, we are NOT doing SEO on multiple domains. The entire global strategy will be on the same ".COM" domain.

In other words, each country will have its own sub folder.

For example:

• Canada = http://www.client.com/ca/
• United Kingdom = http://www.client.com/ca/
• etc.

They want to do SEO for 36 countries in one year, but since each country has at least 2 different languages, we're essentially doubling that number to 72 campaigns. Is this safe or are we going to get busted for looking spammy at this level of growth?