Rank English Terms in Swiss Google Google.ch

[SolveWebMedia]

Happy New Year!

I have a .com site that does well on Google.co.uk. But we would like to rank on Google.ch (switzerland) for English terms.

There is a large expat community, living in Switzerland that would benefit from our services.

Any ideas how I can improve organic SEO on the Google.ch SE?

Many thanks!

PM me for website. Otherwise I'll get lots of spam to my client

[dohertyjf]

Hi there! Does your site have subfolders or subdirectories targeted at your specific countries and their languages? Because the best and right way to do it is with a subfolder like site.com/ch/en/ targeted with HREFLANG for ch-en.

Some links I found that might help - https://www.brightedge.com/blog/seo-for-multiregional-websites/ and http://www.amazeemetrics.com/en/blog/seo-tutorial-geo-targeting-with-hreflang-tag

Hope that helps!

[SolveWebMedia]

Hi,

Thanks for your response. Currently it does't have 'subfolders or subdirectories targeted at specific countries and their languages'.

It's something that I will look in to now.

[SolveWebMedia]

Will that effect UK searches tho? As it currently ranks well for those people looking from the UK too. It needs to cover both country's and international quires.

I'd assume we make a sub directory:

site.com/ch/en/ targeted with HREFLANG for ch-en.

and

site.com/ targeted with HREFLANG for gb-en.

[dohertyjf]

With the right setup (which you put), yes indeed. What the HREFLANG does is specify the country that different parts of the site should rank for.

So you'll have site.com/ with hreflang for gb-en and site.com/ch/en/ with hreflang to ch-en. Do note that you'll have to have hreflang for every page. So if you have site.com/blue-widgets and target that to gb-en with hreflang, you'll have site.com/ch/en/blue-widgets targeted with hreflang to ch-en.

Make sense?

It's been a bit since I've done hreflang with canonical tags as well, so definitely look into what is required there.

[SolveWebMedia]

Amazing, thanks you. Then do I need to add canonical tags as well to the gb-en?

[ThomasHarvey]

Here's a great post for hreflang and canonicals:

https://hreflang.org/use-hreflang-canonical-together/

With this image explaning it well:

https://hreflang.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/mobile-hreflang-canonical.png

[dohertyjf]

Thanks Thomas! So canonicals should be self-referencing, if I'm reading that image correctly.