For a UK company is it worth swapping from .com to .co.uk
-
I currently own the domain lionseo.com and I also own the .co.uk variant some of the keywords I am targeting will have UK in them. My thoughts are that a .co.uk may help improve rankings on google.co.uk and click through + have a keyword match in the home page URL.
**Do you guys think it's worth swapping to the .co.uk domain from .com? **
Thanks in advance
Keith
-
Hi Hannah,
"I think" I will just leave the .com in place...
I can see a lot more .co.uk's in the SERP's for my keywords but perhaps that is just because I live in England and everyone has bought .co.uk's
I have already done the geo targeting in web master tools and claimed a places page etc.
Thanks for your help
Keith
-
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
-
Hi Keith,
If I were you I'd stick with the .com - I've not seen any evidence to suggest that using a .co.uk makes any difference to UK rankings. I don't think you'll see any major issues with CTR either.
I'm assuming that you're not having any US v UK issues right now E.G. - you're ranking better in the US than the UK, receiving more US than UK traffic etc. However if this is the case you could implement geo-targeting via webmaster tools, claim a Places listing (if you haven't already) etc to send some more signals about where you're located.
I hope this helps,
Hannah
-
I run a web development business in the UK and we have several domain variations such as .co.uk, .com, .net, .eu, but we are using .co.uk as the main one and do the 301 redirect on all the other ones so if someone types in .com variation in the url they will be redirected straight to .co.uk one.
-
To be honest I think a good strategy could be:
1. Make the .co.uk focused on - UK content, UK host, and uk specific data.
2. Keep the .com for US based clients with a US influence.
I mean if your only market is .co.uk and you only want to gather uk traffic I would look at implementing a 301 redirect from the .com to the .co.uk domain.
-
-
I would 301
-
Who knows, it's possible... But not right now
-
mostly UK
-
Nothing at all
I would love to hear from a person who has actually done this to find out if it's worth while from a ranking prospective.
-
-
-
Do you have much pre-existing link equity built up against pages on the .com?
-
Do you ever anticipate moving out of targeting a pure UK based client list?
-
Where does the majority of traffic come from today? i.e., is it mostly from the UK/where you want it to come from OR is it mostly from outside of the UK?
-
What would stop you from targeting the keywords now and reviewing performance in terms of traffic etc using the .com domain and then potentially utilising the .co.uk as a secondary measure if necessary?
Ben
-
-
I own both domains, when i say swapping I mean go through the effort of 301'ing the .com to the .co.uk
I have read up on this and I know most people will say that swapping domains won't make much difference, however it would be great to hear from some one who has actually done this.
Thanks
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Site Name as displayed in serp is a completely random company in an entirely different industry!
Hello! I am looking at a site that has its site name displayed incorrectly in the SERPS. The site name is showing as a company from the airline industry while the site in question provides hypnotherapy services. This issue is on every page except the homepage. I have checked source code and the structured data. Local business structured data with the correct company name - I can't find anything at all in the source code that refers to this random airline! Thank you for reading this and for any ideas or suggestions! Here is a screenshot that illustrates the issueUntitled.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sean.e0 -
Purchasing an existing domain + redirecting to company's domain
Let's pretend that competitor.com ranks well for certain search terms and generates some traffic from organic search. If a company were to acquire the competitor (or their domain), what's the smartest way to redirect that SEO value to the acquiring company's website? Does a 301 redirect work between different root domains? Even if it does work, is that the smartest approach? Thanks for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Raleigh0 -
Worth Modifying Code to Have Text Appear Near Top
Our site uses Wordpress. The code is somewhat heavy. The text to code ratio for the home page is only 16%. Our developer suggests that we modify the code so that the important text appears at the top of the page (without changing the design) so that Google can index it more easily. My developer feels this would be more beneficial for SEO. He believes that reducing the code would create HTML errors. The home page is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com Is this approach sound? My developer describes it in the following manner: | Let me say that I don’t believe the text to code ratio has a significant impact on SEO per se but of course that reducing code, it will reduce page weight therefore it may help to improve ranking. See Homepage for example, this is the top landing page of your site, therefore it is very relevant to optimize. You can see the first block, from attached it has very little content and too many code. There is almost nothing to do about it, visually that is a very good block, in terms of SEO it isn't. I do not recommend to take it off just for SEO, that will make all pages with lot of text, lack of images and people may go away. On the other hand, most of the cases we want to improve text code ratio, there is an impact on unexpected BUGs because the code is being changed and this may affect functionality. I would suggest to spend time on improve the sort-order of the important content inside the code, so we may have similar text code ratio at the end but the important code we need Google to index will be at the very top in the source code, in terms of a very technical approach Google will find the key content faster and that should help to improve the crawling process as search engines read HTML code linearly. This change do not necessarily will affect the HTML, we can achieve it by using style sheet (CSS code) instead, reducing the chance of major BUGs. Either is our choice, we need to evaluate potential problems, code issues and content impact and also we need to apply changes and wait at least 3-4 weeks to start seeing results. It is a long task. Let me know your thought about this, we will estimate a task to improve code without affect web design |
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Using a US CDN (Cloudflare) for a UK Site. Should I use a UK Based CDN as it says my server is based in USA
Hi All, We are a UK Company with Uk customers only and use CloudFlare CND. Our Site is hosted by a UK company with servers here but from looking online and checking where my site is hosted etc etc , some sites are telling me the name of our UK Hosted company and other sites are telling me my site is hosted in San Fran (USA) , where I presume the Cloudflare is based. I know Cloudflare has a couple of servers in the UK it uses but given all my customers are UK based ,I don't want this is affect rankings etc , as I thought it was a ranking benefit to be hosted in the country you are based. Is there any issue with this and should I change or is google clever enough to know so i shouldn't worry. thanks Pet
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Is un-searched content worth writing?
Hi, Is every post you write on your site is SERPs worthy? I'll give an example -
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
We often cover industry related news items. It is written very well with personal opinions, comments and detailed explanations. Our readers find it interesting, "like" and "plus" it. However, these items will never appear in the SERPs simply because they won't be searched. Needless to say that these are not ever green pieces. If by chance it lands a subject that may be searched in the future, usually it won't appear because it means that the item was also covered by major sites like CNN, Forbes, Bloomberg etc. Is it worth out time to keep "investing" in these types of articles? Thanks0 -
I run an (unusual) clothing company. And I'm about to set up a version of our existing site for kids. Should I use a different domain? Or keep the current root domain?
Hello. I have a burning question which I have been trying to answer for a while. I keep getting conflicting answers and I could really do with your help. I currently run an animal fancy dress (onesie) company in the UK called Kigu through the domain www.kigu.co.uk. We're the exclusive distributor for a supplier of Japanese animal costumes and we've been selling directly through this domain for about 3 years. We rank well across most of our key words and get about 2000 hits each day. We're about to start selling a Kids range - miniature versions of the same costumes. We're planning on doing this through a different domain which is currently live - www.kigu-kids.co.uk. It' been live for about 3-4 weeks. The idea behind keeping them on separate domains is that it is a different target market and we could promote the Kids site separately without having to bring people through the adult site. We want to keep the adult site (or at least the homepage) relatively free from anything kiddy as we promote fancy dress events in nightclubs and at festivals for over 18s (don't worry, nothing kinky) and we wouldn't want to confuse that message. I've since been advised by an expert in the field that that we should set up a redirect from www.kigu-kids.co.uk and house the kids website under www.kigu.co.uk/kids as this will be better from an SEO perspective and if we don't we'll only be competing with ourselves. Are we making a big mistake by not using the same root domain for both thus getting the most of the link juice for the kids site? And if we do decide to switch to have the domain as www.kigu.co.uk/kids, is it a mistake to still promote the www.kigu-kids.co.uk (redirecting) as our domain online? Would these be wasted links? Or would we still see the benefit? Is it better to combine or is two websites better than one? Any help and advice would be much appreciated. Tom.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KIGUCREW0 -
One platform, multiple niche sites: Worth $60/mo so each site has different class C?
Howdy all, The short of it is that I currently run a very niche business directory/review website and am in the process of expanding the system to support running multiple sites out of the same database/codebase. In a normal setup I'd just run all the sites off of the same server with all of them sharing a single IP address, but thanks to the wonders of the cloud, it would be fairly simple for me to run each site on it's own server at a cost of about $60/mo/site giving each site a unique IP on a unique c-block (in many cases a unique a-block even.) The ultimate goal here is to leverage the authority I've built up for the one site I currently run to help grow the next site I launch, and repeat the process. The question is: Is the SEO-value that the sites can pass to each other worth the extra cost and management overhead? I've gotten conflicting answers on this topic from multiple people I consider pretty smart so I'd love to know what other people say.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | qurve0 -
301 or 302 - www.yoursite.com/uk/content
If your website CMS forces you to redirect from the homepage should it be a 301 or 302 Example includes www.direct.gov.uk which 302's it My view is that it should be a 302 in this instance and almost all others should be a 301 - the reason for this is that you want the www.direct.gov.uk to be the "primary" and one that is displayed in Google, whereas for anything else you want the URL of the location. Yes I know that ideally you don't have any redirection at all...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AxonnMedia0