Geotarget subfolders with the same language or get rid of duplicates but lose option to geotarget?

[eset]

Hi,

we have a domain that is aimed to cover LatAm region. Currently, the homepage contains country selector for ~20 countries. 95% of them hold content in Spanish. We have only homepages for each regions as separate subfolders, i.e.
www.maindomain.com/co
www.maindomain.com/cl
www.maindomain.com/br
etc.

but once the user clicks on menu item he is taken back to main domain subpages, i.e. www.maindomain.com/comprar

My struggle is to decide whether it is better to:

A) copy all content for each subfolder, which will create huge amount of duplicates (there are no resources to create unique content and it is even impossible taking into account nature of the product - mostly tech.specs, etc.) and implement hreflang sitemaps and configure GWT to target each country with its own Spanish content (the same for each country)

OR

B) remove all local subfolders and keep only main domain in Spanish that will serve all countries within the region. With this option, we will get rid of duplicates but also lose option to geotarget.

So, my questions is which option will do less harm, or if there is any other approach that comes to your minds.

I consulted with two agencies but still haven't got clear answer.

Thanks a lot for your help!

[gfiorelli1]

Not knowing the site, the answer here will be quite generic.

Said that, let's start from the misguided concept of Latin-America. Latin America actually really doesn't exist. If you tell to a mexican and argentinian they have practically the same culture or speak the same language, they will laugh at you.

Seriously, the biggest error when targeting those countries, which include a not spanish speaking country as it Brasil, is considering them as they were a consistent set of nations.

Said that, in your case, if you have the resources or the time to localize every single page of your site for all the countries, then you should have a site targeting all the spanish speaking language of Northern, Central and South America. In fact, doing some pages as common and some other localized in a subfolder, can lead to a bad user experience, because they should always shifting from a generic not targeted page to the targeted one.

But on the long term, and basing the choice on from where the highest organic traffic is coming, I would start preparing and publishing the localized versions for each country.

In order to avoid potential duplicated or substantially duplicated content you can use the rel="alternate" hreflang="x-X" markup, so to tell Google to show - for instance - the /mx/... URLs just to the users searching from Mexico and the /ar/... URLs only to the Argentinians searching in Google.com.ar.

Obviously, you will have also to geotarget the folder in GWT and earn local links in order to reinforce the geotargeting of your subfolder.s