Internationalise all or just part of website?

[AbsolutelyN]

Hi

We are a UK company looking to expand our sales into the US market. We will be setting up a US office.

Our (.com) site has a number of main sections relating to different products and services - but only two of these sections will be selling products to the US.

/service1 - UK only
/products1 - UK and US - different product names/descriptions for different markets
/service3 - UK and US - not much difference for uk/us pages

So the query is do we fully internationalise the site with sub folders /us & /gb and make all content on the site have a different language version. Or do we only give an alternate language version for the two areas that need it? Perhaps /products1/us & /products1/uk

We also have top rankings and are concerned about changing the urls. Is one option to keep the existing urls as the 'default' language? The default perhaps being US as it is a .com domain. If not then how do you redirect a url that going forward splits into US or GB sub directories?

Another option is to have the current .com become US only and create a .co.uk site. We are in a position to easily do this but research suggests subdirectories is the better way forwards due to aggregated link authority.

Many thanks for any thoughts,
Tristan

[the_timallen]

Hi Tristan,

I'm sure you will get a range of different opinions on this, so I will throw my hat in the ring first.

First of all I don't think you should look to create two separate sites. I'm assuming the current site lives on the .com. Any site migration to a .co.uk structure could put you rankings at risk and you will see some flux in organic traffic. Building a .com/us would also allow you to leverage any authority from the existing site to help new pages rank quickly.

So.... should you build a .com/us and a .com/uk

This really depends on what the business plan is going forward. If the site is going to continue to scale, particularly in the number of products, it may be worth taking this hit now and rather than further down the line. If the number of pages are limited and you don't see this as much of a problem, you may look to continue using the .com for the UK and generate a .com/us for the US audience.

I'm inclined to recommend just building out the product pages, however you should also consider how this would be incorporated within navigation. How would a user return to a US page for example if they visited a UK page?

Hopefully this give you a few answers and a few more points to consider moving forward.

Tim

[katemorris]

Good Answer Tim, but I am going to add a bit.

Since there are varying services, Tim's recommendation of domain.com/us and domain.com/uk is spot on. If you don't want to change URLs, I understand. You can keep the current URLs, you can geo-target the root to the UK and /us to the US. This route is easier to scale and if you grow each country as it launches, the domain gets stronger which helps each expansion in the years to come.

Now, if you are geo-targeting, there won't be much need for hreflang. If there are some product pages that are IDENTICAL across the two countries other than a few changed words, you can add HREFLANG. Technically speaking you wouldn't need it if the content were written and the pages crafted to each country, but until you get to that point, you can use HREFLANG for the pages that are duplicated. Mind you, this isn't best for your audience, but I get that for starters, that's easier. Do test the pages in each market to see if any modifications can be made for each market.

I don't recommend launching a .co.uk unless your customers/market demand it. That's a lot of marketing work to build up each one.

It sounds like your best bet is / geotarget to GB using Search Console, create a /us for the US, claim that in Search Console and geotarget to the US. Then use hreflang for any duplicated content.

Hope that helps!