It is always important to let search engines know where the business is based in as many ways as possible, especially for sites which target multiple countries with a single website. This might include things like hosting in the local country, geo-targeting with Google Search Console or implementing the appropriate HREFLANG tags.
Getting these all lined up will give a site the best possible chance of ranking in the local country you are targeting so it is important to make sure these are correctly set up.
There are several approaches to international SEO and, if correctly implemented, all of them can be in line with SEO best practices.
Best Practices
- Have dedicated subfolders for your target region and language
- Host your regional subdirectories on matching IP address of the same nationality or State
- Set your HTML language tags
- Set your HREFLANG tags along with x-default and self canonicals (supported by Google but not Bing)