Targeting Different Countries... One Site or Separate?

[BlinkWeb]

I have a client who has 3 ecommerce sites. They are somewhat differentiated but for the most part sell the same stuff. Luckily 2 of them are quite authoritative, old and rank reasonably well.

Most of the visitors and sales come from the US. He wants to start targeting Europe, Mexico and Canada.

What are your suggestions for doing this? Are we better targeting on the main domains? Not really sure how to do that?

Should we use a subdomain and a new store front for each geo?

Should we use a .co.uk .co.mx and .co.ca each with a unique storefront?

It looks like we are moving to a Magento platform so setting up multiple storefronts on a single database is not a big issue.

Anyone have any experience with this?

[Getz.pro]

Most assuredly use different CC-TLDs! I would also point to each from each as you have seen on many global sites. This will allow you to use different keywords also as Europe and the US have different spellings for the same words. So make sure your shopping cart software allows this if you are using the same across all domains.

This will help in link building also as it would be harder to get a spanish website linking to an english website even with sub domains.

[BlinkWeb]

I like that a lot! Can you rewrite product descriptions without maintaining separate databases? Would that involve a custom field or something?

[MarkLoud]

Roger, The way we have approached this in the past was to go with separate TLD's using Magento. The main thing we did was to focus on a complete content rewrite for all pages including product descriptions to remove any possibility of duplicate content issues holding back the new sites and then set about localising with directories, webmaster tools and some low level link building. This seemed to do the trick in getting our .co.uk and .ie domains to rank above the older .com original site.

[Red_Mud_Rookie]

Hosting on a US server is not as much of a problem as it used to be because the search engines have worked this one out.

Where it appears you may have a problem is that the site is already established in the US which will make it more difficult to establish a UK site unless you go for the uk tld.

If you want to make sure UK visitors to the .com are sent to the right site, then a lightbox generated using JavaScript for non-US IP users would do the trick e.g. www.travelzoo.com

Once the user has selected UK then a cookie is dropped and they will always be sent to the UK site.

Make sure your country select page includes a no index, follow tag so that it doesn't get indexed, but does pass any link juice it happens to acquire.

[nonlinearcreations]

It depends a bit on the client. While it's true that a new .ca domain will do better in Canada than a new .com domain, a brand new .ca may not do as well as your established .com which already has some authority. What we've often done was to setup a structure of www.clientsite.com/ca for the regional site. You can register www.clientsite.ca and 301 redirect it to to the subfolder.

If you do that, you can handle it in WT by creating multiple entries for the site, not declaring a region for the main domain but creating separate regions for each subfolder.

[BlinkWeb]

I kinda figured that was the case.

I know it is going to be more complicated then setting the market in WMT. Any specific advise around geo targeting for e-commerce?

Is hosting on a US server a problem if we were going to launch a site in the UK?

[Red_Mud_Rookie]

If you are going for other markets with the same language e.g. UK (English) then I would go with a separate local TLD because a .com with a /uk will struggle to establish itself in a new market like the UK.

Believe me when I say that it is not as simple as indicating in webmaster tools which markets you wish to target, especially if you already have an established site in the US on a .com

Go separate. Go local tld.