International Seo - Canada

[Morris77]

Our organization is currently only operating in the USA but will soon be entering the Canadian market.

We did a lot of research and decided that for our needs it would be best to use  a subfolder for Canada.

Initially we will be targeting the english speaking community but eventually we will want to expand to the french speaking Canadians as well.

The question is - is there a preferred version in setting up the subfolders:

www.website.org/ca/ -- default will be english

www.website.org/ca/fr/ - french

www.website.org/en-ca/ - english

www.website.org/fr-ca/ - french

www.website.org/ca/en/ -english

www.website.org/ca/fr/ - french

Thanks

[Aleyda]

Hi there!

Ideally if you're going to be targeting another country the best way to go is with a ccTLD, in this case, .ca. In case you're not able then you can go with a directory and at some point switch to the ccTLD (when you're ready) with a migration, when it makes sense for your business.

You can take a look at the different criteria you can take into consideration in this post I wrote some weeks ago, where I also gave my recommendations from a web structure perspective when you target many countries with different languages for each with a generic domain. In this case it would be the following one to maintain a consistency from a country/language perspective and keep the URL structure as simple as possible for a user and crawling perspective:

USA: yourbrand.com

Canada in English: yourbrand.com/en-ca/

Canada in French: yourbrand.com/fr-ca/

In the post I mention you will find also some examples with this different structures and other best practices to follow.

Good luck with the site

Aleyda

[Morris77]

Thanks Tammy for your response! We do plan on adding the hreflang  tag to the different versions.

That being said  - I've seen many seos advise to use  set up # 2

but I’ve seen many brands do it differently

for example:

apple does it like # 1

ikea like # 3

so I wasn't sure whether there is any real difference.

Regarding tld .ca -- we  do own it and plan to redirect it to our subfolder. At the moment we prefer to use that route so we don't split up our link juice among two different sites.  Evnetually we can always separate them if we feel it will be better for use

[TammyWood]

Number one, if you also tie in the language tag within the head code. It would also, be preferential if you make sure your content is unique to each sub directory page ( even if the content is similar it should be 100% unique from the main domain and within the anchor text links coming to the /ca/ version.

Interestingly, if you obtain incoming links from .ca domains, to the /ca/ sub directory it will increase the relevance of the intent of Canada traffic.

Why would you not attempt to obtain the tld from .ca? Instead of sub-directories? Each is fine, but when you have a tld with a country specific extension, it increases your indexation rate within the Canada specific directories, citations as well as attracting incoming links.