International SEO - How to rank similar keys for differents countries

[NachoRetta]

Hello MOZ friends.
I work in an digital marketing agency in Argentina and since we have a lot of traffic from other Spanish-speaking countries like Mexico and Spain, we want to rank specific keywords for these countries.
We were thinking of putting new versions of the homepage in subfolders, for example /es/ for Spain, /mx/ to Mexico, etc. In these new subfolders we would place a very similar version of the homepage with a few minor modifications to work specific keywords in each country. For example, in Spain it is more searched "marketing online", and "marketing digital" is more used in Mexico and Argentina.
I have understood that to implement this we would be to place a label hrflang on the homepage directing visitors and crawlers to the correct version of each country. Is it ok?
Another concern is, whether they are very similar pages, Google does not take it as duplicate content ..
I read this:
https://moz.com/blog/the-international-seo-checklist
And i am not completely sure about using subfolders for each country, but i dont know how to position diferents keywords for diferent countries.
Regards,
Juan Ignacio Retta

[Sbm2008]

Hello Juan Ignacio ;  if you use a CMS like WordPress , I recommend using the plugin wpml payment for multilingual sites.

I do not worry too much about the issue of duplicate content in different languages.

Simply optimizes the pages for each language with their language tags , etc ..

Wpml perefectamente also synchronizes with gorgeous Yoast SEO plugin

Saludos.

[NachoRetta]

Hi Jaume,

unfortunately we dont use Wordpress, we use a php template developed by ourselves..

[Jubaer96]

First of all, though they are duplicate content but it won't harm your site. According to Matt Cutt, there are 25-30% Duplicate content on the whole web and it's natural. So it won't be a problem. Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQZY7EmjbMA

Secondly, to rank with different keywords, focus on your anchor text. Try to get Inbound links from spanish site with "marketing online" and "marketing digital" from mexico. It'll not only increase your rank on SERP. But also increase your site Authority.

Thanks

[katemorris]

It sounds like you want to put up different regional translations of the homepage up. This is not really geo-targeting, but translation since nothing else is changing about your content to target it to countries like Mexico and Spain.

You are right in placing them in subfolders and using hreflang between the different homepage versions. As long as you tag all of them and point out the different translations, you will be fine.

[NachoRetta]

Thank you for your answer!

This article in point 4 aleyda solis says we should not redirect traffic as do most do, but suggest to visitors that there is a version of another country / language.
What do you think about this ?

http://www.aleydasolis.com/seo/posicionamiento-buscadores-internacional/

[katemorris]

I agree. Never automatically redirect, but rather ask users what language they prefer and set a cookie.