I have a client who wants to achieve good rankings in the UK (his main business area) plus also Spain, France, Germany, Belgium and other EU countries. To do this does he have to get his site translated into the different languages and hosted in the local country or is there a better/cheaper way of doing it. For instance, could he register a local .de or .es domain etc and point it to one or two sub pages on his uk site that have been translated into the local language. Any advice on this would be appreciated.
I think you should just try to get backlinks from other German or Spanish sites, exchange links with them and submit to directories, it should be enough. I have a site that is entirely in english, but it gets good traffic and rankings from google.jp, google.de, google.uk etc... But may be it was because I've submitted the site to all the google local indexes? So you may try to sbumit your client's site to google.de too... Also registering a local domain may help, but it may be better to add some content in these languages. Besides, my view is that if you have a good site in english, expanding it to local markets shouldn't be a problem. Hope it was useful dxeo
why not go for a .eu domain, backed by the european union. Should cover all your countries in one easy step