Targeting/Optimising for US English in addition to British English (hreflang tags)

[IronBeetle]

Hi,

I wonder if anyone can help?

We have an e-commerce website based in the UK. We sell to customers worldwide. After the UK, the US is our second biggest market. We are English language only (written in British English), we do not have any geo-targeted language versions of our website. However, we are successful in selling to customers around the world on a regular basis.

We have developers working on a new site due to launch in Winter 2021. This will include a properly managed site migration from our .net to a .com domain and associated redirects etc.

Management are keen to increase sales / conversions to the US before the new site launches. They have requested that we create a US optimised version of the site. Maintaining broadly the same content, but dynamically replacing keywords:

Example (clothing is not really what we sell):

Replacing references to “trainers” with “sneakers”
Replacing references ‘jumpers with “sweaters”
Replacing UK phone number with a US phone number

It seems the wrong time to implement a major overhaul of URL structure, considering the planned migration from .net to .com in the not too distant future. For example I’m not keen to move British English content on to https://www.example.com/en-gb

Would this be a viable solution:

1. hreflang non-us visitors directed to the existing URL structure (including en-gb customers): https://www.example.com/
2. hreflang US Language version of the site: https://www.example.com/en-us/

As the UK is our biggest market It is really important that we don’t negatively affect sales. We have extremely good visibility in SERPS for a wide range of high value/well converting keywords.

In terms of hreflang tags would something like this work? Do we need need to make reference to en-gb being on https://www.example.com/ ?

This seems a bit of a ‘half-way-house’. I recognise that there are also issues around the URL structure, which is optimised for British English/international English keywords rather than US English e.g.  https://www.example.com/clothing/trainers  Vs.  https://example.com/clothing/sneakers

Any advice / insight / guidance would be welcome.

Thanks.