Does a country specific TLD implicitly influence the full country name for keyword matching?
-
[Hypothetical situation - domain, country and industry changed]
Let's say I have registered http://mybrandname.hk (i.e. Hong Kong) and my goal is to reach people in all global locations searching for Hong Kong hotels. The target audience will almost always put "Hong Kong" into their query, e.g. they might search for "Marriott Hotel Hong Kong". Does the .hk TLD implicitly give me a match for "Hong Kong" or would I structure my URLs such that all hotel info pages fall under a top level subdirectory "hong-kong".
i.e. is it enough to have a structure like:
Or should I have it like:
It is safe to assume that other on- and off-page best practices will be followed, e.g. links from other Hong Kong sites, some backlinks anchor text including "hong kong", etc.
Of course Marriott is just one example, there would be hundreds of hotels in this example.
-
I'm going to leave this as status "Unanswered", as I don't think we are much closer to any substantial conclusions on to what extent a non-generic ccTLD influences keyword matching for the country name itself.
Based on my own non-scientific searches for various countries and terms like "hotels", "conference venues", "events" and so on, I've found > 50% of first page results from the relevant ccTLD without those sites keyword stuffing the country name into their URLs, so I am going to omit the country name from the website structure itself and stick with a structure of http://mybrandname.ccTLD/service/
-
And here's a Matt Cutt's video on ccTLDs from July of last year http://youtu.be/yJqZIH_0Ars
He also references how they handle those "cool" ones like .ly, .io, .it and so on.
-
Thanks, good point. I'm sure Google are struggling with this a little but begrudgingly treating the .co's, .io's, .ly's as global where applicable. In my particular case though it's a ccTLD which is essentially never appropriated for "cool" domain names and the only purpose for having the extension is to do business in or about the country itself.
-
Thanks, Mike. I've searched extensively on this before now and have been unable to find any definitive answer. I agree that a ccTLD increases visibility for searchers from within that country, as it should. It seems it's still unknown how much the ccTLD increases visibility for people outside the country but who include the full country name in their keyword query. There's no reason why having a ccTLD shouldn't achieve both ends, and I would expect that in a perfect world it should do so too, as that would most benefit searchers.
The challenge I have with my target and niche is that it's a relatively mature one but with little SEO optimization from the big players, so the results I see are fairly well correlated with the size and quality of the websites, regardless of .com or ccTLD. I suppose I should try to think up some more countries and niches to study to try to draw a conclusion.
FYI currently for a query of <country niche="">from an overseas location and not logged in, I see 6 of the 10 first page results use the country ccTLD. Out of those 6, only 1 has the country name embedded in the URL (all are branded, none have the country name in the domain itself).</country>
Right now I still feel the best is brandname.ccTLD instead of country-brand.com, as word of mouth will be as important as organic search, and the more brand-able the better.
-
Agree with Mike.
However, I'd like to add that in the last few years, as .com are almost impossible to get, people started to use ccTLDs for sites not targeted to a specific Country, and Google (and I am guessing other engines too), had to "learn" to recognize these sites in order to rank them for other Countries as well.
-
Typically a ccTLD is suited for that specific country/region. So having a .co.uk will make you more relevant to searchers in the UK but not for searches from say the US looking for something in the United Kingdom (unless they happen to be searching through Google.co.uk). This is not 100% always the case though but generally so. If you're attempting to globally reach people searching for that term, you'd probably be better off with a generic TLD.
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
-
Hreflang - different navigation for all countries
Hi all! Currently we are implementing the href lang tag. I'm not really sure how to solve this: We sell our products in the Netherlands and Belgium. For the Netherlands we have 1 category page for pebbles (stones) which contain both rounded and non-rounded pebbles. In the Netherlands there is not really a difference between them (people search for pebbles and that's it). The URL: https://www.website.com/nl/pebbles. In Belgium there is a difference (people specifically search for rounded/non-rounded pebbles). Therefore, in Belgium we have 2 pages (we don't have an overall page): https://www.website.com/be/pebbles-rounded.
Technical SEO | | AMAGARD
https://www.website.com/be/pebbles-non-rounded. My question now is, what to do with the hreflang tags on these pages? Thanks in advance! Best, Remco0 -
WooCommerce category naming conventions
I am managing a woocommerce store selling prescription glasses/spectacles. We have a lot of categories with similar names and I want to adopt the best possible naming convention to get the best from search. So we have a number of similar categories for both Men's and women's glasses. Currently they are named as follows: Women's Glasses-Women's Rimless Glasses
Technical SEO | | SushiUK
-Women's Semi Rimless Glasses
-Women's Plastic Glasses
-Women's Metal Glasses
-Women's Retro Glasses Currently, this results in the following URL structure for sub categories: https://www.glassesonspec.co.uk/product-category/womens-glasses-2/womens-rimless-glasses/ (For some reason WooCommerce is adding -2 to the end of the primary category name, it will not let me change it for some reason, this is the subject of a further investigation!) So first question, is there too much duplication of the word glasses on the sub items? for example, should they read; Women's Glasses
-Rimless
-Semi Rimless
-Plastic
-Metal
-Retro Hence giving this URL structure: https://www.glassesonspec.co.uk/product-category/womens-glasses-2/rimless/ OR, should we change the top level category name to just Women's and let the sub categories complete the picture?: Women's
-Rimless Glasses
-Semi Rimless Glasses
-Plastic Glasses
-Metal Glasses
-Retro Glasses Giving this example URL structure: https://www.xxxxxxxxxxxxx.co.uk/product-category/womens/rimless-glasses/ This would solve my hyphenation problem, however my fear is the top level category on it's own is not descriptive enough when viewed as stand alone: https://www.xxxxxxxxxxxxx.co.uk/product-category/womens/ The second part of my question relates to how to deal with the change in URL structure. I am using Yoast Premium, so will that pick up the changes and automatically redirect to the new one as it does when done manually? Or will I need to take a different approach using HTACCESS commands? I hope the above makes sense, Many thanks, Bob0 -
Should summary pages have the rel canonical set to the full article?
My site has tons of summary pages, Whether for a PDF download, a landing page or for an article. There is a summary page, that explains the asset and contains a link to the actual asset. My question is that if the summary page is just summary of an article with a "click here to read full article" button, Should I set the rel canonical on the summary page to go to the full article? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | Autoboof0 -
For a web agency, can the same WHOIS registrant name information between different domain names hurt SEO?
Hi, I own a web agency and we often register domain names for our clients. When we register those, I just realized that we always use the same registrant name and other whois (ex : Louis-Philippe Dea), for all domain names. Can this hurt the SEO of our clients? Hope that you'll understand when I'm trying to say in spite of my bad english :S Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | Louis-Philippe_Dea0 -
Why has my keyword dropped and risen so much in only 7 days?
Sorry if this question is really obvious (or unanswerable) but my client asked me for an explanation and as a relative SEO 'noob' I couldn't really answer them. The client's site http://www.solentlep.org.uk/ dropped 29 places for the keyword LEP last week (all the other keywords had small rises and falls) and then this week has jumped back up the same 29 places. I made no changes to the site in the 7 period (as I hadn't worked out what to change) and although everything is fine now I'd still like to let the client know what caused the blip, or is it one of those things that 'nobody knows'.
Technical SEO | | bendyman0 -
Keyword targeting & differentiation between similar keywords
I'm having trouble wrapping my head around keyword targeting when two keywords are very similar. Here's my dilemma, lets just I sell ACE brand Widgets I'm doing well with “ACE Widgets” queries but not “ACE” How do I fix this since “ACE” is already all throughout the results page & supposedly anchor text is playing a less and less significant role in link relevancy so just getting links with “ACE” as the anchor text wouldn't really help (I wouldn't think) Just a little confused. Thanks
Technical SEO | | SheffieldMarketing0 -
Sub-domains for keyword targeting? (specific example question)
Hey everyone, I have a question I believe is interesting and may help others as well. Our competitor heavily (over 100-200) uses sub-domains to rank in the search engines... and is doing quite well. What's strange, however, is that all of these sub-domains are just archives -- they're 100% duplicate content! An example can be seen here where they just have a bunch of relevant posts archived with excerpts. How is this ranking so well? Many of them are top 5 for keywords in the 100k+ range. In fact their #1 source of traffic is SEO for many of the pages. As an added question: is this effective if you were to actually have a quality/non-duplicate page? Thanks! Loving this community.
Technical SEO | | naturalsociety0 -
Keyword ranking not moving
Hello, We have a very important keyword for our website (www.decorplanet.com) that hasn't moved in any direction in over a year. The keyword is "bathroom vanities". Our current SEO company has told us that the previous company has "over- optimized/linked" for this particular keyword and now Google is penalizing us for this. They told us that we need to leave it alone for a while and concentrate on other keywords and this one should naturally come back up (I should mention that at some point, we were much higher than where we are right now for that particular keyword). Many of our other high-profile keywords have been moving nicely to the first page. Keywords like "modern bathroom vanities", "antique bathroom vanities", "contemporary bathroom vanities", but the one that we really want ("bathroom vanities") hasn't budged at all. Does anyone have any thoughts on this. Is it possible that Google put us in some sort of a "sand-box" - I mean we are on page 2 so it doesn't sound like that's the case. It's just very bizarre that we can't seem to do anything with this keyword. Really appreciate any thoughts or input on this.
Technical SEO | | steven11330