Setting up the right Geo targeting/language targeting settings and not to brake the SEO

[betconstruct]

Hello the great Moz Community!

Gev here from BetConstruct, a leading gaming and betting software provider in the world.

Our company website is performing great on SERP.

We have 20+ different dedicated pages for our 20+ softwares, event section, different landing pages for different purposes. We also run a blog section, Press section, and more...

Our website's default language is EN. 4 months ago we opened the /ru and /es versions of the website!

I have set the correct hreflang tags, redirects, etc.. generated correct sitemaps, so the translated versions started to rank normally!

Now our marketing team is requesting different stuff to be done on the website and I would love to discuss this with you before implementing!

There are different cases!

For example: They have created a landing page under a url betconstruct.com/usa-home and want me to set that page as the default website page(ie homepage), if the user visits our website from a US based IP.

This can be done in 2 different ways:

1. I can set the /usa-home page as default in my CMS, in case the visitor is from US and the address will be just betconstruct.com(without /use-home). In this case the same URL (betconstruct.com) will serve different content for only homepage.

2. I can check the visitor IP, if he is from US, I can redirect him to betconstruct.com/usa-home. In this case user can click on the logo and go to the homepage betconstruct.com and see the original homepage.

Both of the cases seems to be dangerous, because in the 1st case I am not sure what google will think when he sees different homepage from different IPs. And in the 2nd case I am not sure what should be that redirection. Is it 301 or 303, 302, etc... Because Google will think I don't have a homepage and my homepage redirects to a secondary page like /usa-home

---

After digging a lot I realised that my team is requesting from me a strange case. Because the want both language targeting(/es, /ru) and country targeting (should ideally be like /us), but instead of creating /us, they want it to be instead of /en(only for USA)

Please let me know what will be the best way to implement this? Should we create a separate version of our website for USA under a /us/* URLs? In this case, is it ok to have /en as a language version and /us as a country targeting?

What hreflangs to use?

---

I know this is a rare case and it will be difficult for you to understand this case, but any help will be much appreciated!

Thank you!

Best,
Gev

[katemorris]

Welcome to International Site Expansion! This is the exact situation I worry about when people set up international structure.

The answer lies in what your users need, not what you want or what marketing wants. Do users in the US need to see different content than a user in the UK or Australia? All of those countries have English as the primary language. I am not talking about dialects (UK spellings/words vs US words), but do the users need to see different content due to product set changes, price changes, different marketing tactics, etc.?

There are a whole list of questions you need to go through. http://outspokenmedia.com/international-seo-strategy/ - Let me know what your end result is and we'll talk from there.

Another resource: https://moz.com/blog/guide-to-international-seo (that will explain a lot)