'Mini' versions of our website for overseas markets. Does it matter?

[isaac663]

Hi Guys.

I work for an e-commerce site called TOAD Diaries, we make bespoke diaries and journals.  In essence we allow people to design their own diary online, then we make it and send it.

We have already sold some products to poeple in many European countries, (Malta, France, Germany) but we want to have a better online presence for those overseas markets.

So…..

We're want to do an overseas ‘test case’, to see if we can sell more products in Europe.

Out thinking is this: We’ll buy a subdomain for a specific country.  Then we’ll then build a ‘mini’ version of our site in the appropriate language.  This be a country specific landing page with links to our ‘design your own diary’ pages, basket and checkout.  All in the language we’re targeting.

Question: Will having such a small number of pages in the targeted countries language effect out ability to rank well?  It will be maybe 10 – 15 pages in size.

Or is it much more to do with on page optimization and quality backlinks?  i.e) the site's size has no impact.

What other factors should we consider when trying to rank well in other European countries?

Many thanks in advance.

[MichaelC-15022]

Backlinks are going to matter much, much more than number of pages.

Don't use subdomains; they share almost no domain authority with the parent domain.  AND, you aren't as likely to get a country-specific boost as if you used a country-specific TLD,  Possibly you're just unclear on the difference: if so, here you go: the subdomains are qualifiers to the left of the domain (e.g. www., blog., etc.) and TLDs are the right side of the domain (e.g. .com, .org, .co.uk, etc.).

E.g. use www.toaddiaries.ca instead of ca.toaddiaries.com.

If the content is really similar across the various countries, i.e. it's just translated, you should use rel=canonical (pointing to the country-specific page) and hreflang alternate (in ALL pages, pointing to all of the other versions of the page).  See Maile's talk on this here.

Pay close attention to the distinctions between LANGUAGE and COUNTRY, e.g. spanish versions might exist for dozens of countries, and those differences matter.