International SEO: best practices for local variants of the same language?

[nicole.healthline]

We are translating our site into 17 different languages, including local variants of the same language (i.e. Mexican Spanish and Spain Spanish, Canadian English and British English, etc). Should we add all of these local variants to our site?

We don't have the marketing / link building budget (or business need) to put these all on separate ccTLDs, so we are using country-specific subfolders instead (example.com/es/).

The translations will be of exceptional quality. Our main goal is to pull in some additional traffic from these translations. If we add these local variants, do you think we can expect to see traffic from these different countries (additional traffic from Canada, England, etc)?

Any advice / input would be appreciated.

[mememax]

I'll advice to use the hreflang tag on each page to be sure that google know ehich language are you targetin for especially for english and spanish having those languages different variations from one country to another.

maybe you'll see a swap for local search engines for your base language which I suppose is english and gain some additional trafic from other languages. You'll start ranking in languages you disn't have before so extra traffic is highly possible.

[gfiorelli1]

What mememax said is substantially correct:

use hreflang in order to specify to Google what URLs it must shows depending on the language and country of the users. You can find the Google specifications here.

Another thing I strongly suggest you, and not said by mememax, is to geo-target every subfolder to its corresponding countries in GWT > Settings

Finally, even though you don't have the budget for local link building, and even though the link equity will pass throughout every country subfolder (hence from the one you yes have the budget for link building), I suggest you to do a minimum of link building, in order to give at least some original link equity strength to every subfolder.

Ah... in the case of Bing, the rel="alternate" hreflang="x-X" doesn't work. Instead you must follow this procedure described by Duane Forrester.

[mememax]

Hi Gianluca that's really interesting, I didn't know about the possibility of differently configure folders inside the same domain in GWT. I always thought it was possible to set up only the main level, how can you achieve that? do you create different profiles for each folder?

[WrightIMC]

This may be late, but yes you would need to add each sub-directory to GWT to set their location.

If you've already claimed the main site, it should automatically verify the sub-directories for you.

More info (check out the video):

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en