In this way, for my internationalization I will be almost forced to use a large number of ccTLDs, depending on the countries in which I want to sell my products/services.
Which is fine, as long as all of these marketplaces are actually important and you can manage as many domains as you want.
One of the disadvantages of an international SEO strategy that opts for ccTLDs is that it requires more resources and efforts since it almost forces you to differentiate the brand positioning strategy and any effort to gain authority will be diluted among several domains.
The question a startup has to ask itself is: will I be able to carry out several different marketing strategies in the short term for, for example, Spain, Mexico, Italy, Portugal and France, executed with professionals who know each of these markets?
main and offer different versions by language and/or country with a system of folders by language and a good hreflang structure and leave the ccTLD for later.
A possible process of evolution of the international SEO strategy of a startup, as it grows, could be this:
Buy ccTLD domains to avoid competition and redirect the .com domain.
Create microsites by language through folders by language and/or country.
Transfer the contents of language and/or country folders to ccTLD domains.
International SEO and hreflang tagging
Correct use of hreflang tagging is certainly important, but we cannot reduce international SEO to its correct implementation: as we are seeing, the strategy should first be well defined, since hreflang tagging only certifies what we have decided (for example, a strategy focused on countries, languages or even a hybrid one).
It should also be remembered that it is only taken into account by Google.
Bing has its own international branding system and is also not suitable for other major browsers such as Yandex, Baidu and Naver, which may have a very significant market share or even be leaders in the countries targeted by the startup Yandex.
Despite the wide dissemination and the number of Google webmaster guides and help tools such as the popular hreflang markup generator by Aleyda Solís, their implementation is a very common source of errors.
This SEMrush hreflang error study indicated a high percentage (15%) of hreflang implementation errors.
Hreflang markup can be used when the content is nearly identical across different languages or has different country targets.
It should be thought of almost as a canonical relation so it cannot be used if, instead of a translation, completely different content is displayed between languages.