International SEO: What to do when you're using a ccTLD and want to go global
-
I'm hoping someone in the Moz community can help me with this one! Essentially, we have a .co.uk brand which wants to have more of an international presence. My question is, purely based on the fact that we're a .co.uk, will we find it more challenging to develop a search engine presence in European/BRIC markets? In a perfect world, we'd have a .com/country or a .es/ etc, but if this isn't possible, how hindered are we if we stick with the .co.uk and want to build a presence in Spain?
-
Hi Jimmy,
Great to hear from you. My initial reaction is that it might be trickier to rank with the .co.uk, as well. Context wise, I hope this helps... this would be for a B2B website that sells into various countries, including the likes of Spain, Italy, Germany, as well as China, Vietnam, Thailand and more.
Primarily we'd be looking to rank for our brand name in various different languages, e.g. simplified Chinese, Thai, German, all from a .co.uk.
My initial suspicion is that a .co.uk may be trickier than getting a .com or country specific TLDs ranking (e.g. brandname.cn brandname.de), especially with Baidu which doesn't seem to have a lot of love for .co.uks.
Based on this, would you stick with .co.uk, go global with a .com or country specific with ccTLDs for each target market?
Holly
-
Hi Holly,
I think you might struggle with the .co.uk to be honest - in theory, getting links from spanish websites will help, however you would have to ask yourself why someone would link to your UK site from a local one. To help you further I'd need to understand a little more. Can you give more context to the situation? Also, are you trying to rank for English or Spanish queries in Spain?
Jimmy
-
That's super helpful, thank you. American markets aside, are there any other countries where it would be a hindrance?
-
Its not as much of a hindrance in other European countries as it would be if you're trying to expand into American markets. Not having that country's TLD does hurt your SEO in that country somewhat but the way to get around this is to work on getting links from websites in that country. If you can get the domain great, if not it's not the end of the world.
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
-
Negative SEO
I have got some idiot bombarding my site with spam links, most likely a negative SEO attempt. It started off very small and has ramped up to between five and 10 spam links per day. I think it may be having a slightly negative affect although difficult to tell. I can do a link cleanup, but I'm not sure that is a long term solution, I'm just going have to do it again in a few weeks time. Does anyone have any experience?
Technical SEO | | seoman100 -
Google how deal with licensed content when this placed on vendor & client's website too. Will Google penalize the client's site for this ?
One of my client bought licensed content from top vendor of Health Industry. This same content is on the vendor's website & my client's site also but on my site there is a link back to vendor is placed which clearly tells to anyone that this is a licensed content & we bought from this vendor. My client bought paid top quality content for best source of industry but at this same this is placed on vendor's website also. Will Google penalize my client's website for this ? Niche is HEALTH
Technical SEO | | sourabhrana1 -
Trailing Slashes and SEO
Hi, We're currently using a third party blog platform (Blog Engine) on our site and we have a trailing slash issue. I can add as many trailing slashes as I want to the blog's homepage URL, but they don't redirect and our dev guys say this cannot be done with Blog Engine. We're in the process of building our own blog but, in the meantime, I just wanted to know if this will cause an issue? Individual blog posts with trailing slashes are redirected, it's just the homepage where it can't be done. I haven't noticed any traffic going to a blog URL with trailing slashes, and I don't believe any URLs with trailing slashes are being indexed, so should this be OK? Cheers, Lewis
Technical SEO | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
Page has a 301 redirect, now we want to move it back to it's original place
Hi - This is the first time I've asked a question! My site, www.turnkeylandlords.co.uk is going through a bit of a redesign (for the 2nd time since it launched in July 2012...) First redesign meant we needed to move a page (https://www.turnkeylandlords.co.uk/about-turnkey-mortgages/conveyancing/) from the root to the 'about-us' section. We implemented a 301 redirect and everything went fine. I found out yesterday that the plan is to move this page (and another one as well, but it's the same issue so no point in sharing the URL) back to the root. What do I do? A new 301? Wouldn't this create a loop? Or just delete the original 301? Thanks in advance, Amelia
Technical SEO | | CommT0 -
SEO for a franchise business
Were about to embark on an SEO project for a franchise business with about 150 franchises. Would it be best to give all of the franchises individual domain names or house them under the one domain? If they were on the same domain would it be worth setting them up with sub domains or with a URL so city.mydomain.com vs mydomain.com/city Thanks
Technical SEO | | acs1110 -
Should I use these Meta Tags or Remove it?
Hi, I have a lot of older pages that I am cleaning up older pages, and I see that I have <title>Actual Title</title> (I understand the importance of this tag.) (I have some text in this meta tag on a lot of pages, sometimes matching my title tag exactly but in some cases I treated it like a mini description. Should I remove the on my pages, or keep it and make sure it is the exact as the main Title Tag. -------- Question about meta tag #2. I have heard rumors that the keywords tag should be removed. example: Thanks in advance! Force7
Technical SEO | | Force70 -
SEO Checklist
Ok I know that this would be a huge over-simplification but I am wondering if there is (at least a bird's eye view) a checklist of SEO do's and dont's? I checked to see if something like this existed but could not find one. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks~
Technical SEO | | bobbabuoy0 -
Does server location (IP) help with international SEO?
If I have a .com.br domain with all my content in Portuguese, will it make a difference if I host in the US or if I host on a server in Brazil? I thought I had the answer to this from Rand in one of his Whiteboard Fridays a while back where he said hosting in the target country would help, but the lady who did the international SEO presentation in MozCon 2011 said any SEO who says this helps doesn't know international SEO. Can anybody point me to a case study on this? I have US and Brazilian dedicated servers but I'd prefer to get rid of the Brazil server expense.
Technical SEO | | jargomang0