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
-
Site map creator
I have a large website with about 1300 pages. I can't find a good sitemap creator that will crawl the whole site and spit out the xml file. Any ideas or suggestions for good services? Also, a site this large, should I consider mutiple site maps?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dwebb0070 -
Multiple Keywords for a site
I have a client that is OBSESSED with KWP ranking (don't go there...I know) This client offers multiple services, dog boarding, dog grooming, dog training, dog daycare and dog walking. Essentially these are our focus. She ranks on page one for all of these words (locally of course) BUT she wants to rank in positions 1 and 2 for all of these words. Here's my rub, with her limited budget, we focus on 1 word (and associated long tails like "dog boarding in the south loop) and it takes a couple of months to zoom up to positions 1 or 2 (not counting map pack....she wants ORGANIC) While we're focusing on this 1 word, the others maintain their ranking or slip a few spots (like from 6 to 😎 Conversions average about about 1 a day, organic traffic is roughly 1000 hits a month. In your opinion is it better to split this focus between the 5 target words every month, more slowly building ranking, but maintaining it for longer periods of time. Or do it the way we have been chase dog boarding, then chase training, and so on. It just seems like we are CONSTANTLY chasing something while something else falls. Thanks Tracy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lkilera0 -
How to do Country specific indexing ?
We are a business that operate in South East Asian countries and have medical professionals listed in Thailand, Philippines and Indonesia. When I go to Google Philippines and check I can see indexing of pages from all countries and no Philippines pages. Philippines is where we launched recently. How can I tell Google Philippines to give more priority to pages from Philippines and not from other countries Can someone help?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ozil0 -
Mobile Site Annotations
Our company has a complex mobile situation, and I'm trying to figure out the best way to implement bidirectional annotations and a mobile sitemap. Our mobile presence consists of three different "types" of mobile pages: Most of our mobile pages are mobile-specific "m." pages where the URL is completely controlled via dynamic parameter paths, rather than static mobile URLs (because of the mobile template we're using). For example: http://m.example.com/?original_path=/directory/subdirectory. We have created vanity 301 redirects for the majority of these pages, that look like http://m.example.com/product that simply redirect to the previous URL. Six one-off mobile pages that do have a static mobile URL, but are separate from the m. site above. These URLs look like http://www.example.com/product.mobile.html Two responsively designed pages with a single URL for both mobile and desktop. My questions are as follows: Mobile sitemap: Should I include all three types of mobile pages in my mobile sitemap? Should I include all the individual dynamic parameter m. URLs like http://m.example.com/?original_path=/directory/subdirectory in the sitemap, or is that against Google's recommendations? Bidirectional Annotations: We are unable to add the rel="canonical" tag to the m. URLs mentioned in section #1 above because we cannot add dynamic tags to the header of the mobile template. We can, however, add them to the .mobile.html pages. For the rel="alternate" tags on the desktop versions, though, is it correct to use the dynamic parameter URLs like http://m.example.com/?original_path=/directory/subdirectory as the mobile version target for the rel="alternate" tag? My initial thought is no, since they're dynamic parameter URLs. Is there even any benefit to doing this if we can't add the bidirectional rel="canonical" on those same m. dynamic URLs? I'd be immensely grateful for any advice! Thank you so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Critical_Mass0 -
Our Site's Content on a Third Party Site--Best Practices?
One of our clients wants to use about 200 of our articles on their site, and they're hoping to get some SEO benefit from using this content. I know standard best practices is to canonicalize their pages to our pages, but then they wouldn't get any benefit--since a canonical tag will effectively de-index the content from their site. Our thoughts so far: add a paragraph of original content to our content link to our site as the original source (to help mitigate the risk of our site getting hit by any penalties) What are your thoughts on this? Do you think adding a paragraph of original content will matter much? Do you think our site will be free of penalty since we were the first place to publish the content and there will be a link back to our site? They are really pushing for not using a canonical--so this isn't an option. What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline1 -
Niche sites: how to optimize them?
Dear SEOmozzers, I am focusing on those keywords I find using the "Keyword Analysis" tool that are not too competitive (among 20%-30% competitiveness). I then buy domains that include those keywords. The sites are in Italian and targeting the Italian search engines, so the competition is lower than it would be in the US. Basically, I'd like to build niche sites and I'd like to ask a few questions that I hope somebody with a good experience in this field can answer: How do I optimize a niche site. Specifically, how do I go about link building? How many backlinks should I get to see some results? How long does it take for a typical niche site to start appearing in the search engines for a certain keyword, after launching an effective link building campaign? Please kindly provide any recommendations you believe to be important when building niche sites. For example, is there a company/professional you know that specializes in this field and who is trustworthy/reliable? Thank you very much for your help. All best, Sal
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | salvyy0 -
How to deal with 1 product in 1 country and 3 languages?
After reading multiple posts on dealing with multilanguage sites (also checked http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=12a5507889c20461&hl=en), I still haven't got an answer to a very specific question I have. Please allow me to give some background:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TruvoDirectories
I'm working for the official Belgian Yellow Pages (part of Truvo), and as you might know in Belgium, we have to deal with 3 official languages (BE-nl, BE-fr, BE-de | the latter is out of scope for this question) and on top of that we also have a large international audience (BE-en). Furthermore, Belgium is very small, meaning that someone living in the French part of Belgium (ex. Liège) easily might look for information in the Dutch part of Belgium (ex. Antwerpen) without having to switch websites/language. Since 1968 (http://info.truvo.be/en/our-company/) we have established 3 different brands, each brand is adapted to a language, each has a clear language specific connotation:
for the BE-nl market: we have the brand "gouden gids"
for the BE-fr market: we have the brand "pages dor"
for the BE-en market we have the brand "golden pages" Logically, this results in 3 websites: www.goudengids.be, www.pagesdor.be, www.goldenpages.be each serving a specific language and containing specific language messages and functionalities, but, off course, serving a part of the content that is similar for all websites regardless of the language.
So we do have following links ex.
http://www.goudengids.be/united-consultants-nv-antwerpen-2000/
http://www.pagesdor.be/united-consultants-nv-antwerpen-2000/
http://www.goldenpages.be/united-consultants-nv-antwerpen-2000/ When I want to stick with the separate brands for the same content, how do I make sure that Google shows the desired url when searching in resp. google.be (dutch), google.be (french) google.be (english)? Kind Regards0 -
Migrating a site
Hello, I have what a I think it's a noob question.. I have a medium size website and need to put it into maintenance for the next 2 months, and afterwards activate a completly new site. My client asked me to do this, cause the same people whoe run the constant flow of information on the site, are the ones who are going to develop the new site, so he wants to just close it out So... what are the steps for doing this with minimum impact on any SEO advances made this past months?.. How do I tell the search engines, Hey, just under maintenance for a while....then... i'm back in the game but this is my new structure. and the old one should go here
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daniel.alvarez0