International SEO

[CreativeCow]

We have a client who is looking to expand to other countries, particularly South America. What is my best route forward for SEO on a multi national site?

[JaneCopland]

Hi Dave,

There is a wealth of information out there about internationalisation but I'll cover some of the main points here.

The first thing to think about is the TLD of the site, e.g. .com, etc. If they are currently running on a TLD that belongs to a designated country, they will need to move to a generic TLD. In other words, you can't use site.ca to target Mexico. You will need to move to site.com, .org, .net, or similar.

You can use subdomains or subfolders on the parent site to target different countries. A good URL to target Mexico would be site.com/mx. If you have English language content from Mexico as well as Spanish, you could use site.com/mx-es/ and site.com/mx-en/. No matter how many versions of the site you create for different markets, you will need to use the rel="alternative" tag (also sometimes referred to has the "href lang tag"). This will allow you to create site.com/co for Colombia, site.com/nc for Nicaragua, site.com/mx for Mexico and site.com/ar for Argentina without being penalised for having duplicate Spanish content on different parts of the same website. If you also have the exact same content on the site in other languages, this tag allows you to show which versions are in English and are meant for the US, which versions are in English and are meant for Canada, which versions are in English and meant for the UK, etc. as well.

They can go down the route of registering domains in the countries they want to target, like site.com.mx, site.com.ar and site.com.br, but this usually requires a higher level of link development to push authority at all of these sites. For truly local content, the local domains could be best, but for many queries, .com sites rank just fine in South America.

Check out these three Moz resources for international SEO as well:

http://moz.com/blog/5-dos-and-donts-of-international-seo

http://moz.com/blog/the-international-seo-checklist

http://moz.com/blog/international-seo-dropping-the-information-dust