I have another dumb question. Sorry in advance guys! If I have a national domain (.ch in my case) and I setup hreflang to 3 languages and don’t indicate the country… do I have the chance of being discovered by searchers from other counties or even rank for some keywords outside Switzerland? Thanks.

Roman Baldwin: 1. Do you WANT to intentionally be discovered by people in those countries? 2. Are the competitive landscape results in those countries strong in their overall ranking visibility? 3. If the answer to #1 is yes and if the answer to #2 is probably, then why would you not do what needs to be done to ensure you have the best chance of showing up in those countries? Note that you MAY show up in those countries without the footwork, and hreflang is just ONE aspect of the footwork. Yet Its a crap-shoot roll of the dice at that point.

Ryan Gill: 1. yes 2. Week on long tail KWs since it’s a new emerging industry and not so many strong players. Short KWs taken by whales 🐋 3. Dumb question – what needs to be done exactly? 🙂 4. English is not my first language so I can only guess what that phrase means ))

Matthew Mendoza: Its possible Ive interpreted your question wrong but wouldnt it be impossible to set up herflang without specifying a country.

Bryson Roberson: sure you can – ie English/Spanish speaking countries are not always UK/Spain etc….

Karla Norris: You can specify languages and/or language regions in your HREFLANG targets. Hreflang is a language-targeting tool rather than a country-targeting tool. For country-targeting, you use geolocation.

Joy Bailey: Karla Norris: hreflang is both. Only Geo location via GSC is not always enough.

Roman Baldwin: Aleydasolis.com

International SEO Guide & Tools by @Aleyda
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Joy Bailey: @denys I am from Germany and often have clients from Austria or Switzerland. I think I know what you mean: your priority target is ranking with all countrys languages in your country (de, fr, it). But you want to know if these languages might rank by chance in their originating countries as well. The answer is: yes, they may. Long answer: they might eventually not outrank same topic websites targeting specifically these countries. The reason is your .ch Domain which gives Google the signal you are targeting CH and the users themselves who might not click on the search result even if it showed up in their SERPs, because the might think a CH website might not fit as well as a DE domain for Germany (and so on).

Joy Bailey: BTW no dumb question at all

Ryan Gill: Thanks Marcus!

Brooklynn Taylor: Well described marcus.👍