International Homepage Advice

[SimpleSearch]

Hello, colleagues!

We have a conundrum.  A client website has a good subdirectory strategy for localized/translated content for its various international markets, but nothing currently "lives" at the root.  In my mind, this presents a challenge to search engines (note that we have had some trouble getting proper visibility overall, which is why I'm asking this question).

I'm looking for any links or just plain old good advice on why it's important to have a global homepage.  Should that global homepage be in English?  Most enterprise sites I've worked with do have a homepage that's in English, with the ability to select a country from a drop down in a nav across the site.

Any advice, best practices, etc. about why a global homepage is important and what language it could/should be in would be really helpful.

Hreflang tags would make sense, I guess, but each country has slightly different offerings so I'm not sure that it makes complete sense.  In other words, one country's homepage may have completely different content than another's.

Thank you!

[DarinPirkey]

Let me first say I have limited experience in the international version but I do have some experience with "regional" versions.

We tend to look at the amount of traffic by language and links by location to see how well we are performing.  You can set your root to the language that gets the best metrics.  Then offer a language specific landing page for other languages.

We do this for law firms that service English French and Spanish.

Homepage is in English first, then we have "lawfirm.com/es" for spanish, "lawfirm.com/fr/ for French etc. Those act as "homepages" for those languages and have all navigation and text in those languages.  Basically another version of the site but in the correct/preferred language.

Also the browser they use can help with this too. You can set a HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE to confirm they language they want to see the content in.

I'm not sure if there is a better way but that's what we do.

[SimpleSearch]

Thanks so much, Darin!