Using hreflang="en" instead of hreflang="en-gb"

[SilverStar1]

Hello,

I have a question in regard to international SEO and the hreflang meta tag. We are currently a B2B business in the UK. Our major market is England with some exceptions of sales internationally.

We are wanting to increase our ranking into other english speaking countries and regions such as Ireland and the Channel Islands.

My research has found regional google search engines for Ireland (google.ie), Jersey (google.je) and Guernsey (google.gg).

Now, all the regions have English as one their main language and here is my questions.

Because I use hreflang=“en-gb” as my site language, am I regional excluding these countries and islands? If I used hreflang=“en” would it include these english speaking regions and possible increase the ranking on these the regional search engines?

Thank you,

[LoganRay]

Hi,

According to this article by Moz on hreflang, yes, having an hreflang tag with the language only will help you cast your net out to English speaking searchers from other regions.

[MickEdwards]

From my understanding if you have hreflang=“en-gb” then that/those pages are targeted at the UK.  If you wish to target any  English speaking countries then you add hreflang=“en”.  But if you wish to target specific English speaking countries then you'd use hreflang="en-ie", hreflang="en-gg" etc.

What you are doing is giving Google information, not a directive, as to what pages are targeted for where.  Google could ignore and it's not a ranking solution.  You are just giving Google the heads up of your intentions.

[myTribeinsurance]

This post is deleted!

[armanmaulana0202]

I am going to use https://www.ukassignment.co.uk"> for my website I hope it is help to work in UK.

[MickEdwards]

The .co.uk domain is already geo-targeted to the UK, so unless you are targeting other countries/languages