Help with international targeting

[JamieM1611]

Hi all!

Okay, so we've got a site, let's say example.com - we sell training courses worldwide with a particular focus in just 8 countries.
Historically, we've never targeted users in different countries effectively, we've just got the example.com that floats about ranking in different countries, but our content is dynamic (obviously a big SEO no-no - we pick up the IP of the user and show the content relevant for that country without the URL's changing)
This obviously presents an SEO flaw in that we can effectively target people in our key countries effectively.

So, we're introducing the targeting as subfolders (/uk/, /ie/ etc) my questions are:

1. Would this be the correct implementation of hreflang AND canonical tags for the URL: https://www.example.com/es/

2. The second thing I was wondering is the 'international targeting' in search console.

We haven't (because of our current set up) set a target country for www.example.com (because of the lack of regional targeting and dynamic catch all) - would we be better leaving that untargeted and only specifying the regional targets for the new subfolder URLs (www.example.com/us/ /uk/ etc) or should we set the .com as the USA as default?

We'd be a bit weary of doing this because most of our traffic comes from the UK and South Africa, so I'm assuming it would be best to leave this alone unless someone else has a different opinion?

I know Googlebot almost always crawls .coms from US, which is why we were thinking of leaving the .com as the 'catch all' and specifying the US version.

3. Finally, we do have a lot pages which don't really change at all (like the about us page) would we give these any special directives to avoid duplicate content (as the content on these won't be changing at all?) or do we just keep the structure as shown above? I.E would the about us page (even though not changing) still be (with the canonical):

URL: https://www.example.com/about-us/ (x-default)

?

Thanks in advance!

[victor.celer]

The language codes you are using in the above examples are not correct. The correct languages should be "en", "fr", "it", "es". If you want to specify the country code it must appear after the language code, more info here.

Keep in mind that the hreflang tags are not used by the web browsers to load the preferred language automatically, they are intended for search engines.

[seoelevated]

If I understand the OP's intent, it is to target countries, not languages. Hreflang can specify alternates for a language, or a language-country combination, but unfortunately not just for a country. So, as the OP has proposed, yes you do need to specify the language and the country. And that does bring up a dilema faced by many of us in terms of what language to use. If your content is in all English, then yes you should use like "en-FR". BUT, you might also want to include an "fr-FR" as well, pointing to the same alternate URL. Because there are going to be a lot more France-based visitors on Google whose browser settings are for French language than English. For sure, both do exist (there are native English speakers in France too), but you don't have to choose one. You can include both. Google may not completely respect your directives since the content is in English (assuming that's the case), but it's what I would recommend. So, for each country (assuming the content is in English), include both an English and a language-specific hreflang tag (pointing to the same destination) for that country.

Since your last example uses "es-ES", I assume maybe that you're planning to also publish some content in Spanish language. But if not, again, realize you can include multiple hreflang tags for a single country, and pointing to the same page.

I also don't know where you are based. But if the business is US-based, I wouldn't duplicate US also as a localization. Rather, I would make that the default. Or, if you are based somewhere else, same thing, but with that country.

On question 2, you can set up a GSC property for folder paths (www.example.com/fr/), and target those. I would not target the root level (www.example.com) in your case, because that would also apply to all the subfolders. That's one of the advantages of using subdomains instead of subfolders, is that you can target each independently. But with subfolders, you can target all except the root (because it would cascade downward).

On question 3, you should do the same as you do in number 1, as long as you are duplicating those pages in each subfolder. Otherwise, if you don't give a directive of which page to index, since they are duplicates, Google is going to choose for you. And might not choose the one you prefer.