Localising our business to the correct country

[tidybooks]

Hi

I work for children's furniture business called Tidy Books. We are based in the UK. We have UK site www.tidy-books.co.uk. We also have a US site www.tidy-books.com which is registered in the US.

We have fully dedicated and translated French, German and Italian site  (www.tidy-books.fr, www.tidy-books.de, www.tidy-books.it)  . These all fall under our UK registered address. What I would like, is to have a French, German and Italian  business address for these website. We just need an address only. This would mainly be used to for Google business listing and other business listings sites to help rank are sites correctly in their country domains. T

Do you know of or recommend any companies that can do this?

Is there any implications I need to be aware of, such as tax?

Thanks

[gfiorelli1]

Hi Geraldine,

unfortunately, even though it is possible to obtain something like local P.O. Boxes and phone numbers, the issue is that Google deprecates their use for MyBusiness (Local Search). In other words, Google wants real offices with real phone numbers et al.

So, I see it hard for you to use Local Search in Google for earning more visibility if you do not have a real office in those countries.

However, you can still consider to buy local phone numbers, which then redirect to your UK customer care/commercial office and show them in your .de, .it and .fr websites, so users can call to those numbers. That would be users friendly and may improve the contacts conversions (something that you'd need to track with analytics).

[tidybooks]

Hi Gianluca thanks for getting back to me.

I see your point there's not fooling Google!

[NeilInFrance]

Hi Geraldine

A client of ours used http://www.regus.fr/ to set up an address in Paris for this purpose and later opened a real office - and a real French company - when sales increased. Regus have offices worldwide see http://www.regus.fr/country-selector.aspx so I imagine that they can help for all countries.

I'll add to Gianluca's comments that Google won't be "fooled" by this address into recognising you as a French company. Google checks this through access to company registration databases rather than its own My Business listings.

But there are plenty of other advantages in having a My Business listing and Paris would be a good base in France for your site (audience reach). For an e-commerce site, potential clients will be reassured by a local telephone number too.

Looking at the French site, I noticed that the HREFLANG is incorrectly implemented. This is more important than the postal address. I strongly suggest you correct that

• Neil