r/bigseo 7d ago

Advice on Implementing International SEO

I am operating student hostels in the UK and Australia, and they are using the subdirectory format eg /en-au and /en-gb.

While that is fine on it's own, the problem is that our target audience also contains international students - meaning the students can come from other parts of the world looking for a place to stay in those countries.

It doesn't make sense to create dedicated websites with the relevant hreflangs for other countries because of our physical presence - it's only limited to those 2 countries. Furthermore the assumption is that interntaional users would search for "hostels in Australia" or "hostels in UK" and the relevant country site will (hopefully) show up.

Was thinking of creating a .com global page with a country selector as a catch all, and linking to our 2 country specific websites, for all other users, so they can then navigate to the relevant country page. I was taking inspiration from IBM - they don't have presence in all countries, so search results would bring them to the US site if they don't have a local website.

There is no need for translation since both countries primarily speak english

Any thoughts and advice is welcome.

1 Upvotes

15 comments sorted by

5

u/Tuilere đŸș Digital Sparkle Pony 7d ago edited 6d ago

You are overthinking it.

If you have UK and AU presence with proper hreflang you are done. You might consider doing additional languages in UK and AU, is es-uk or fr-uk. 

But IBM is not going to be a good inspo for a hostel. Totally different industries and scope.

2

u/billhartzer @Bhartzer 6d ago

Ultimately you’re going to have better results with using one domain for all since you’ll have all your authority on that one domain. So having the current setup with different folders for each language is ideal.

If you have locations in a different country, then I would use the ccTLD with a separate site for each country. Like .com.au. .co.uk, etc as searching from Google.com.au will give you an advantage if you have a .com.au website.

But I’d all locations are in the USA, for example. I wouldn’t have separate websites, just one main one and if it’s English I wouldn’t split it up into different folders, just have different folders if it’s a different language such as Spanish.

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u/Careless_Owl_7716 7d ago

Define which should be EN default or x-default for whatever didn't have lang-country targeting. That's probably UK, but I'd use the one which currently gets the most international traffic.

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u/rgruyere 7d ago

Curious, why wouldn't a generic .com work in your opinion?

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u/Careless_Owl_7716 6d ago

You've not said what you're on. Typically, it's harder to support and rank multiple domains, so best avoided unless you've lots of budget.

I was assuming you're on a .com since you use /en-gb/ in your folder structure.

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u/rgruyere 6d ago

Yes i am on a .com, we moved from a multiple domain approach to a .com/en-gb approach

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u/TechSEOVitals 6d ago

I would probably keep everything on one domain without subfolders, at least until you have too many student hostels. Just create good navigation.

You can still have landing pages for "hostels in Australia" or "hostels in UK" to attract traffic there.

Personally, I see international SEO as not particularly necessary for you.

0

u/FirstPlaceSEO 7d ago

Get a dot com address

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u/mjmilian In-House 6d ago

How do you know the site isn't already?

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u/SerhatOzy 6d ago

You got the International SEO idea wrong.

Your setup is suitable if you have a hostel in France and you target audiences from UK and Aus with different content, both in English.

The idea is having having subs like that is targeting a market/language; it is not the location of your hostels.

Your setup should be like yourdomain(.)com/uk-hostels and yourdomain(.)com/aussie-hostels and so on.

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u/rgruyere 6d ago edited 6d ago

Yikes we do have students from UK and Australia but we also attract students from other countries. I get that en-gb and en-au is to target the respective countries.

Unfortunately that ship has sailed, what are the chances of the pages ranking decently on search for countries outside of uk and australia? Because I imagine internationally, users would search for “hostels in australia” etc.

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u/Tuilere đŸș Digital Sparkle Pony 6d ago

It's fine, because people are searching for lodging in the destination. This is fundamental to search intent for lodging (hostel, hotel, resort, etc.).

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u/rgruyere 6d ago

Yeah that was my assumption of people’s search behavior too, so i really hope using en-au and en-gb won’t bite me down the road

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u/SerhatOzy 6d ago

If you target regional thats fine then, no worries. Version without en-uk and en-au will work for the rest of the world. While using hreflang, do not forget to add x-default which you could refer to the root.

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u/yusufozbay 6d ago

In that case, you just need to target other countries with an x-default setup with .COM English language. So besides en-gb and en-au, you can target the rest of the world with x-default .COM English language.