Best approach for international SEO

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Mian Shahbaz Ahmad:
  Hi Chris, hope you are well and safe! read this article https://moz.com/learn/seo/international-seo and if you need my assistance I can provide you.
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  Richard Hearne: Depends on a lot of different things, really.
  
  Depending on your CMS, you might be able to set up a single site with subfolders for each locale. So you could have domain.com/au/ with a site targeting Aus, and perhaps /us/ targeting US.
  
  Within some CMS`s this isn`t as difficult to maintain as you`d expect. WooCommerce on WordPress with WPML for multilingual set-up would allow this, and can keep content synced (you wouldn`t be using multiple languages - just EN).
  
  >> We could create the exact same site in the .com.au market and geo-target .com to the US only.
  
  You might keep most content identical, but you might actually get more value by targeting it, even slightly, towards each market. You might have linguistic differences in the content, phone numbers might be local, prices in local currencies (AUD vs. USD). The CMS might handle some of this automatically.
  
  The thing here is that unless you have experience in this area I`d be inclined to invest in an expert to advise you. It`s not trivial at all to get this right, but the upside is that the barriers to entry make this endeavor quite lucrative if you get it right.
  
  Last point to make - getting free advice based on very limited due diligence is more likely to result in you getting bad advice than good.
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  Loren Baker: How does it do now In Australia with the .com?
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  Jef Van Gool: I have a client who have never done SEO and they created two separate sites, one for US and one for AU. They are on Shopify. I would suggest as Richard says, I have clients who have this with custom CMS
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  Ammon Johns: Okay, in this position, the most important thing is how the products and company actually performs in those markets. The main reason for having geo-located sites is for better conversions, to speak the customer`s language. If the site performs well in both markets and can be a leading brand in the particular market/niche your keywords apply to then the site will naturally attract links from sites that are geo-located in those countries. Because without those geo-locational inbound links, it doesn`t matter much whether you have a local domain or not, and splitting what link power you have could be a bad decision.
  
  Focus on an actual marketing campaign in both territories that will get some attention and links and see where that takes you. Something to create some buzz and attention (which manifests as links) among both Aussies and Americans alike.