Have you ever felt hungry and thought food would just magically appear in front of you if you waited long enough? Of course not. Same goes for SEO traffic. If you want love from Google SEO you need to make it happen. Google wants to rank popular sites so make your site popular by attracting traffic generating backlinks. Look at possible social opportunities which can generate traffic and/or backlinks. I'd also make sure you have great content. Yes, weak content can rank in Google but great content makes it so much easier to attract backlinks, users & other quality signals Google likes to see.

Be a little more patient ... 2 weeks is not nearly long enough for the site to be out there. 20 weeks would be more like it.

Do folks in the target country know about the site... and I don't mean via g ... one way for g to notice is if you actually HAVE traffic coming from that country.

If you haven't done so already, be sure to read Google's advice on multi-regional sites [webmasters.googleblog.com]. Make sure you've set the Geographic Target on the subdomain in the Google Search Console, and that you've posted a couple of links from your primary domain to the subdomain.

Polish your on-page and on-site SEO factors so they're in the best shape you know how, then promote, promote, promote.

Then promote some more.

What is the company doing to promote the new subdomain? What audience are they targeting?

It's not clear to me if the new subdomain you're launching does contain pages which are translations of existing pages. In such a case, implementing the HREFLANG tag could be quite useful in my opinion.

Thank you all for the replies! It sounds like we're not missing any tricks, so that's a relief.

We do get traffic from the country to the main site, so we use a pop-up to ask if they want to go to their own, specific subdomain. The challenge is that both languages are English, and the content is v similar, but has been re-written and localised. It's being promoted through all the usual channels.

We've audited the site and believe it's technically sound, and have followed google's own guidelines too. We'll keep going with the strategy, and I'll have to learn to be more patient :)

Thanks again!

SEO is like farming. You cultivate the land, seed, care and foster all the time while waiting for harvesting time.

Once the time between seeding and harvesting had been around 3 month (10+ years ago), than it became 6 month (5 years ago), now it is more likely to be 18 month between cultivating the land and harvesting.
If and only if: you have the signals to be or become an authority for your topic and if you do everything right on the technical side of the story (and hreflang etc. can get complicated if you really dig into it).

Do you already have other subs targeting different countries or languages? Why do you use subs instead of ccTLDs or dirs?

From my own experience, this can take a long long time.

Especially today, since Google is the only search engine used worldwide, Google can do whatever they want.

Good luck!

What SEO advice would you give for a new website launch?

AdWords ... Google's useless with new websites these days, it takes months for anything to rank and no matter how good it may be absolutely no one can guarantee any decent SERPs position whatsoever ... And don't forget the SERPs come AFTER all those ads above the fold.

G is not a search engine, it's an advertising platform, it's pay to play.

I'd say be a little more patience. Since it's a new site/subdomain, I'd say focus on making sure the on-page / on-site factors are good to go and start securing quality backlinks.

Well, my Advice for new website launch is that focus on your content, and avoid plagiarism and duplication it really effects your website to rank. Now if we see most of the Google algorithms are based on the content. Best & unique content has more possibilities to rank your website more quickly.

Thanks everyone - totally agree with what you're saying. Luckily we have decent budget and so we're driving traffic via PPC that is really engaged, and we're building a content calendar so that we can publish blogs every few days on the domain. We're reviewing the content we have on-site too, and thinking of ways to build links.

The subdomain decision pre-dates me, so I'm not sure what the conversation was. The content is a re-write of what we have on the main domain, as the offering is the same in both countries (but it's been localised where possible). We're seeing our main site rank instead of the subdomain, which isn't a surprise when the main domain has more authority, more content and more users...

These things take time...a long time in some cases. If you haven't set up geotargeting in search console and created hreflang tags, then go and do that. Keep creating great content, but also look for ways to get backlinks to the subdomain - it will need its own set of links. Good luck!