Targetting site in 3 countries
-
I have read the seomoz post at - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday before asking the question We recieved a query from one of our client regarding targetting his site in 3 different countries namely - US,UK and Australia. Specifically, he has asked us-
1. Whether i should buy ccTLD like - www.example.co.uk
and write unique content for each of the above.
or
2.
or go for subfolder approach
will it affect SEO if the subfolders are in CAPS.
Would like to have advice of moz community on what advice will be the best.
Thanks
-
I'm going to take the opposite perspective, because I don't think this is a one-size-fits-all situation. Building out unique, ccTLDs does have ranking advantages within those countries, but it also has a couple of disadvantages:
(1) Your marketing efforts and link-building are now all split 3 ways, and your authority is split 3 ways. The again you get from international targeting may not offset what you lose by splitting your SEO efforts. If all 3 markets are mission critical, and you have a large budget, 3 domains has advantages. If one market is much bigger than the other two, though, and you don't have a lot of time and money, I think subfolders are a better choice.
(2) You may have more complex duplicate content issues with similar English content across 3 domains. Google isn't always as good as they should be about isolating international content. Granted, though, this is a problem with subfolders, too. We can say "write unique copy", but you can only say the same thing in the same language so many ways. A few colloquial spellings and phrases aren't going to make for unique content.
-
Yes this will help a bit - will also give your users a faster responding website
-
agreed. Also you can focus more your content, I'm not a native english but probabbly there's some different slangs for each country.
I'm Brazilian and to be honest sometimes I just can't understand what peoples from Portugal say....
-
The client says he has enough budget to go with first approach.
-
Thanks Jan.
My question is does hosting a site in respective country will have an effect, even a small one on the rankings for that particular country.
-
In the end of the day it depends also about budgets, we worked with one client and did 20 different TLD domains for a global website, it is doable if you have budgets.
You need to remember in .com.au market links from .com.au will be way more powerful then links from .co.uk for example.
-
There are off-web considerations also, particularly if you choose to go for multiple domains.
There's the obvious one of the cost of running multiple link-building campaigns.
Then there's the question of what to do with printed materials. Are brochures/leaflets etc to be reprinted for each target market with the localised url? Or is there to be one main url with a country choice page? Which leads on to...
Another issue is what to do if you get one countries' customers on another countries' site (eg a UK visitor on say a US site). Do you redirect them? Or just hope they will notice the country links?
My experience is that there are loads of problematic ramifications. There's a lot of worry about whether to go for domains or subdomains or directories. But it's what happens afterwards that I have found really difficult.
That isn't much of an answer. But it is a warning that the best solution for seo can be quite hard to manage.
-
"Foreign entities can register com.au domain names with an ARBN or a registered trade mark."
-
Best option is to have top level domains e.g. .co.uk and .com.au with unique content on each and host the sites in each country.
With this approach, its easier to get local links, usually requires less links to rank each site plus you get higher click-through rates from the serps.
If you use directories /uk/ and /au/ case does not matter - my pref would be to use lowercase urls
Note: AU has restrictions on domain registrations (have to be an AU business) but you can get someone to register on your behalf.
-
Best way to do it from my experience,
Then you have specific content for each market.
It will work more powerful then using a sub domain method especially if you come up against all .com.au websites in local SERPS.
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
-
Targeting several keywords at once.
Curious how some of you are able to target several keywords on one same page, for instance for the page www.tutoroo.co/arabic-tutor-dubai we aim to rank first on Google for keywords such as "Arabic tutor" and "Arabic teacher" but also for "learn Arabic" or "learning Arabic". How do you rank up number 1 for several phrase keywords without jeopardizing current rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicolasvhe1 -
Google Mobile site crawl returns poorer results on 100% responsive site
Has anyone experienced an issue where Google Mobile site crawl returns poorer results than their Desktop site crawl on a 100% responsive website that passes all Google Mobile tests?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MFCommunications0 -
How to jumpstart a new Ecommerce site
Hello, I've got a new Ecommerce site I'm jumpstarting. It's one of those sites that takes a while to rank for. Here's what we're doing: 1. Creating a beautiful, mobile friendly site. 2. Adding a long detailed home page answering all the questions that people come to our industry keyword results with. 3. Adding detailed, beautiful cateogy pages. 4. Adding detailed, beautiful product pages. 5. Adding beautiful, long About Us & Resource Sites list pages. 6. Offering straight up obvious free shipping and no tax even though that's taking a hit in our industry. 7. We're going after the 2 main informational terms (keyword explorer) in the industry with a vengance - 20X as good as the competition for the main term. 8. We're adding 20-30 pages of articles to help our customers and hit major keyword search terms, although there's not much in our industry. What else would you recommend doing to jumpstart a new Ecommerce site that has difficulty being in the top 50? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Moving career site to new URL from main site. Will it hurt SEO for main page?
For one of our clients we are building a career site and putting it under a different URL and hosting service (mainly due to security concerns of hosting it under the same host and domain). almost 100% of the incoming traffic to their current career section (which it is in a sub-folder) receives traffic for branded keywords (brand + job/career/employment), that is, there are no job position specific keywords. The client is now worried that after moving the site, the inbound traffic to the main site will be severely affected as well as the SERP results. My questions are, will the non-career related SERPs be affected? I don't see how will they be but I could be wrong If no, how could we reassure her that the SEO to the main site wont be affected? are there any case studies of a similar case (splitting part of the website under a new URL and hosting service?) Thank you for your help. PS: this is my first post so please forgive me if this has been asked before. I could not find a good response.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rflores0 -
Sites banned from Google?
How do you find out sites banned from Google? I know how to find out sites no longer cached, or is it the same thing once deindexed? As always aprpeciate your advice everyone.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Redirection to mobile site
Calling all SEO ninjas! I'm currently developing single web pages for various clients which function as abbreviated versions of their main websites. They are all related & under a single domain. When a user visits these pages on a mobile device, CSS is used to display mobile friendly versions of these pages. My clients are thrilled with these mobile versions and now want to also redirect mobile visitors from their main site (which is not mobile optimised) to these pages. My questions are: Are there any negative implications if we did this? ie. redirecting to a different domain What is the best method for redirection? eg. JavaScript Can this be achieved by adding a single line of code to their main site Can this be done in an SEO friendly way so that the redirection acts like a backlink? Many thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | martyc0 -
Site comparison - what is wrong with me?
www.bcspeakers.com/ vs www.psbspeakers.com/ with the search term "speakers" why does BC speakers show up in around #50-60 and PSB is not in the top #1000? From all metrics on seomoz PSB kicks BC in every area by a large margine! can anyone see why BC is listed for that keyword and PSB is not?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kevin48030 -
ReLaunching a very old site
Hi, I am in the process of re-vamping a website that hasn't been touched for years and whose rankings slowly dropped. Any best practice in how to do it making sure that there's not any more loss and - hopefully - it could go back to the old glory? The website is http://www.nlp-world.com Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pdmonline0