Google Search Console International Targeting - Works for Hungary, but not Ireland - Why?

[scottclark]

company.com (root)
USA - lang="en" | GSC target: USA (shows US site in SERPs for "companyname" search)
company.com/hungary
Hungary - lang="hu" | GSC target: Hungary (shows Hungarian site in SERPs for "companyname" search)
AWESOMENESS

company.com/ireland
Ireland - lang="en" | GSC target: Ireland (shows US site (doh!) in SERPs "companyname" search)
NOT RIGHT!

It is our theory [please weigh in!] that because we don't have a company.com/usa folder, the TLD targeting (EN) is overriding other English language sites in some manner.  In other words, the reason it's not overriding Hungary is because it's a different language.

What must we do to get the Irish site ranked for "companyname" searches and to show by default in Ireland?

[seoelevated]

Even though Google does have an international targeting function in GSC, I've had more success with hreflang tags on pages. Technically, hreflang tags can be implemented on each page or in the sitemap, but having experimented with both, I've seen better results from the on-page implementation.

So, I would recommend that you try to implement hreflang tags, in which case you can specify both the country and the language (Ireland would be "en-ie").

Make sure to check the following, when you do:

• include a self-referencing hreflang tag on each page (in other words, a tag for the page's intended locale)
• include an "x-default" tag on each page
• verify that each page referenced by another page's hreflang tags has a reciprocal hreflang tag referencing back in the opposite direction.
• verify that the hreflang tag URLs are also the canonical URL for those pages, and that no redirect occurs when accessing.