Using a page to target a country

[IamnotMattCutts]

Hello

We're looking to start targeting a country (outside of the UK) for our services. Would the best approach be adding a page within the website or creating a website version for that country www.example.com/country with the relevant hreflang tags added? Also would the same approach be recommended for targeting a region ie Europe, Middle East etc

Thanks

[RedBar]

Apologies if I seem to be repeating myself here today!

Google's localisation has completely changed the SERPs for many countries' results, for me and many others I personally know, they have made an absolute horlicks of it by assuming that a .co.uk is only interested in the UK. My sites are global and around for 24 years however this last few months my "foreign" traffic has been decimated to my .com/uk sites.

Fortunately my example.com.br/de/fr/in/it/ru/tr/etc are all doing ok since they are hosted in those specific countries with local trading addresses, these have been like this for 15-18 years.

Unless you are a favoured US Google website you will probably have a very, very difficult time however there may be a solution but, of course, it will cost and will favour Google!

Create your example.co.uk/country-page.html in the language your are targeting and use AdWords to drive traffic to that specific page from the language-specific Google.tld SERPs.

Doing this you should probably soon see the reaction to your ads, be able to contain your advertising costs PLUS you won't have to sit and wait to find out IF your site ranks ANYWHERE, which, in my experience, they most probably will not.

One last thing, bear in mind any new pages now take weeks/months to rank and expecting them to rank in another Google.tld may simply be a total waste of time.

[rainborick]

Google's handling of geotargeting/geolocation hasn't changed significantly in the last 15 years I've been dealing with the issue. If you have a Country Code Top Level Domain (ie. 'ccTLD' as in ".uk"), the site will rarely appear in the SERPs for users in any other country and there's really nothing you can do about it. If you have a Generic Top Level Domain ('gTLD'), you have much more control and flexibility over the situation. I suggest that you begin by reading Google's advice on Multi-Regional Websites [webmasters.googleblog.com].

[keyplyr]

I agree with rainborick about using a generic TLD if you want to target other countries.

I agree with RedBar about having local addresses & contact info for these locations.

[RedBar]

Google's handling of geotargeting/geolocation hasn't changed significantly in the last 15 years I've been dealing with the issue.

But it has changed in the last few months to more localisation:

https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4874425.htm

Even my own local SERPs has changed with G.uk regularly inserting local results when I'm searching nationally, that's one of the reasons G is my last go to search engine these days, the results are simply awful.

The last few months I have lost a huge amount of US traffic simply because of this, my sites appear in G.com generic national results yet in local they are rarely seen YET I see US companies in generic and local UK results ... no manipulation of favouritism there then?

[IamnotMattCutts]

Thanks everyone, appreciate the input.