Multinational SEO: A minefield or a piece of cake?

Multinational SEO: A minefield or a piece of cake?

For a long time we adhered to the policy of hosting a website in the country that you want to rank for. This indeed seemed to work best, but what happens when your website needs to target several different countries. The old tedious way would have been to host a subdomain in each relevant country. A huge amount of work and maintenance involved, but a necessary evil if you wanted to do well in those individual countries.

I know there must be many of you right now shouting "Webmaster tools allows you to do that!", and indeed it does. It allows you to host a site targeting multiple countries and indicate to Google which sub folder is relevant to which territory (This is presuming you have your information architecture set up with individual folders for countries for example /de/ for the German site and so forth.). There was always the worry though that if I set a folder to target Spain then what about all the traffic from South America? Am I now excluding those visitors because I have directly indicated that my website is for Spain?

The good news is we have run some trials and some sizeable customer implementations (96 sub domains!) where we have proven to ourselves that regionally targeting a site in webmaster tools does not exclude that site from featuring in other countries! A prime example of this is that we have targeted a client site of ours to America, and even though it is hosted in America, a search for "Shoe hangers" in the UK in Google.co.uk brings them up top. This is on strength of SEO alone. What does play a major role in this ranking is the geo location of the linkgraph. This company happens to have a UK base and as such has a lot of UK links to the .com site.

We have won another implementation recently that will be somewhat tricky. The problem here is we have a website that spans 3 countries, The UK, France and Italy and will be listing properties in all countries. Where this gets tricky is that the inventory is most often captured in the local language. So how then do I list a property in Rome, written up in Italian on the English version of the website? The bottom line is that I cannot. If I do I will run the risk of duplicate content and poor SEO. The answer is simple. Google is all about user experience. If you are English speaking and on an English website, even though you are searching for property in Rome, you don't want to be presented with Italian results, and Google's standpoint from a User experience point is the same. They want quality results so your only real option is to translate the listing :)

Have you experienced problems with Multinational SEO? Do you face a dilemma as to site architecture and what will work best in the search engines? We are happy to chat and let you know our thoughts.

Thomas Shonenberger is an expert contributor to Marketing Donut and company director of MediaVision Interactive.

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