Geo Targeting a Country Domain

[ChrisCronimund]

Hey Mozzers

A customer of mine hosts an international web shop on a country domain (customer.ch) which is automatically targeted to 'Switzerland' by the Google Search Console. So far so good, the shops for Switzerland are all in a subfolders /ch/. However, there are 2 more shops in two more subfolders: /de/ (for Germany) and /row/ (for the rest of the world).

Google thinks both /row/ and /de/ are Swiss shops which results in searchers on Google.ch currently getting /row/ with the wrong currency and language pair.

Question: I can't set the targeting for customer.ch/de/ in the search console to Germany, it's set by the domain country to Switzerand. Also, the customer doesn't own customer.de. How can I still let Google know that customer.ch/de/ is the shop to be displayed only to searchers from Germany, but not to searchers from Switzerland?

Thx!

[LoganRay]

Hi,

It sounds like you might need to implement hreflang tags. Have you done so already? Without being able to specify each country-level shop in Search Console via ccTLD, this is your best bet to ensure the right pages show in the right versions of Google. Here's Moz's guide to using hreflang tags. For each of your country-specific subdirectories, you'll need to add the appropriate tag which will specify the country and language of the page. This helps keep Swiss pages out of Google.de, etc, etc.