I need help with international SEO for two sites?

[Rocket.Fuel]

I'll try to keep this clear...

I am working with an company based in Germany, they own company.com/de and company.com/en, and that's how they are currently structuring their domains. They also own companyusa.com that they really want to show up in USA only.

They want to keep company.com/en for England/english speaking Europe and company.com/de for their German audience in Germany.

They are wanting us to optimize/SEO for companyusa.com, and they want that URL to show up as the top google search in the USA for their "company" keyword. What is showing up now is www.company.com/en 1st in Google because it's been around longer and it has more domain authority.

What is the best practice for us optimize companyusa.com so that it is the top dog in the USA while not messing up the other domains? Should we merge? Subfolders all around?

Thanks for all the input.

[irvingw]

geotarget the sites so that they show up in their respective countries search engines. The german site should show only in germany and the US site should only show up in US.

you can check your GA after geotargeting to check to see that the traffic is coming from the correct places for each site.

[seowoody]

Hey,

Why use a separate domain for US? Presumably you've already built up authority in the root domain so why waste that effort on a completely new domain like companyusa.com?

I would set-up sub-folders all around:

UK - company.com/en-gb/

USA - company.com/en-us/

Germany - company.com/de/

Also gives you scope to optimize for Latin America too if you ever wanted, like so - company.com/es-mx/

To ensure the correct version of the site ranks in the correct Google CC, setup each site as it's own entity in webmaster tools and set geo-location correctly per site.

Also you could implement href-lang meta tag on each page to tell Google which version of the translated content should be indexed in the country specific Google, google.de, google.co.uk etc.

Hope that helps,

Woody