International SEO - Hreflang tags and URL Structure

[SEOCT]

Hello, I wonder if any SEO internationalisation experts can help.

We are a UK centric business with a .com domain which all our traffic currently goes to. We have been growing in the US and are therefore looking to internationalise our website by building out some US pages using the subfolder .com/us.

Since the keywords we wish to target in the US are different to the keywords we are targeting elsewhere, when implementing hreflang tags is it possible to use a different URL for the US page?

So let’s say we are targeting ‘estate car’ generally but want to target ’station wagon’ as the keyword for the equivalent US page, can the URLs be different?

Example:

• General page: www.example.com/estate-car
• US: www.example.com/us/station-wagon

Hreflang tags:

Would that be the correct implementation?

Any help or guidance would be much appreciated!

[seoelevated]

Yes, that looks correct. However, I would suggest adding two more hreflang tags to each page. One for "en-gb" (pointing to your UK desired version) and one for "x-default" (pointing to whichever version you would prefer for any other nonspecified locales. You will want all 4 of these on each of the two pages (so each page would include a self-referencing tag. These 2 additional ones are optional, but I think would provide a bit more clear direction to the search engines about which page to present for which locales.

[SEOCT]

Thanks for your quick reply seoelevated! We don't actually have any specific UK pages at the moment. The main site (written in British English) is www.example.com and is where all our traffic currently goes. We have decided to build specific US pages at subfolder www.example.com/us.

I presume in this scenario it would be good practice to add x-default markup on the .com while adding hreflang en-us to the US pages?

[seoelevated]

You would want the exact same hreflang tags on both versions of each page. So, that means each has a self-referencing tag, plus an alternate tag pointing to the sister page in another locale, plus an x-default tag.  The hreflang tags basically tell the search engines whcih version of the page is appropriate for which locales, and when they are on a page in one locale, it tells the search engine where it can find the equivalent pages for other locales, as well as which one is the "x-default" for any locales you haven't specified.

[SEOCT]

Great - thanks for your response.

So we should include x-default markup on the relevant pages (in addition to en-us hreflang tags) to signal to the search engines to show the .com urls to those who do not have the browser language setting set to US-English and the .com/us urls to those who do?

If we don't have specific UK pages do we need to add href lang en-gb markup since x-default covers it?

[seoelevated]

In your original post, you wrote that you are a "UK-centric business". I would think you would want to be as specific as possible to make sure the search engines know to serve the most relevant pages to the UK audience. So, yes, I would definitely include a self-referencing hreflang tag. It also simplifies your process because you can just copy-and-paste the hreflang tags between the versions of the page, with no editing (you put the same exact set of tags on the British page as you do on the American).

However, I'm really only responding to your "how" question. There is also an implicit question of whether you should be doing this. I have to say that from recent experience, no matter how thorough we are with hreflang tags, the search engines inevitably serve up pages across the desired locales. For my brand, I have Australian links showing up in US searches, and US links showing up in British searches, etc. This is even with correct hreflang implementation. In our case, it is a necessity to have multiple localized sites, because we carry different inventory, at different prices, and with different policies in each region. But if that wasn't the case, I would not localize my site between US, British, and Australian English just for language variances. That is a subjective decision, but I have so many problems coming from the wrong pages being served in the wrong geographies, despite thorough hreflang tagging, that I would be very hesitant to create more localizations than absolutely necessary. This wasn't your question, I realize, and also this is purely subjective, but passing along for consideration.

[SEOCT]

Thanks for your thoughtful reply.

Great - that makes sense. I will add en-gb hreflang markup too.

You raise some really good points about organisations having to think clearly about the need to undertake multi-regional / multi-lingual SEO and the potential implications of this. In our situation we've come to the conclusion that there is a business case to undertake this venture. When I joined there was already a US office and a few pages written for the US already published on our website in a different design language. Fortunately these pages were recently created and set not to allow crawling. If they were to be indexed at best they may not rank and at worst they may actually interfere with our other page rankings - as well as causing confusion for users (duplicate product / contact / client pages, different navigation structures, designs etc). In the end we decided the best approach would to be to internationalise our website and target these pages to the region / language they were designed for. But yes definitely has been a challenge!