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
-
Traffic drop on this site
I am SEO'ing this site but need some assistance in the analysis. it was doing not too bad but in the last 4 months the google traffic has really fallen off, i suspect the keywords may need improving but any tips or observations would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | crowng0 -
Merging Two Unrelated Sites into a Third Site
We have a new client interested in possibly merging 2 sites into one under the brand of a new parent company. Here's a breakdown of the scenario..... BrandA.com sells a variety of B2B widget-services via their online store. BrandB.com sells a variety of B2B thing-a-majig products and services (some of them large in size) not sold through an online store. These are sold more consultatively via a sales team. The new parent company, BrandA-B.com is considering combining the two sites under the new brand parent company domain. The Widget-services and Thing-A-Majigs have very little similarity or purchase crossover; so just because you're interested in one doesn't make you a good candidate for the other. We feel pretty confident that we can round-up all the necessary pages and inbound links to do proper transitioning to a new, separate third domain though we're not in agreement that this is the best course of action. Currently the individual brand sites are fairly well known in their industry and each ranks fairly well for a variety of important terms though there is room for improvement and each site has good links with the exception of the new site which has considerably fewer. BrandA.com DA = 73 - 19 years old
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OPM
BrandB.com DA = 55 - 18 years old
BrandA-B.com DA = 40 - 1 year old Our SEO team members have opinions on what the potential outcome(s) of this would be but are wondering what the community here thinks. Will the combining of the sites cause a dilution of the topics of the two sites and hurt rankings? Will the combining of the domain authority help one set part of the business but hurt the other? What do you think? What would you do?0 -
Site Not Ranking- No Reason Why
I have a client with a HUGE website who should be ranking for it's competitive keywords. No penalties, or bad links. Old domain. Not ranking for anything. Client has a huge AdWords spend and my theory is that it's not ranking organically because of the AdWords spend. I can't think of anything other reason. Anyone? Thanks. The keywords I'm trying to rank this client for aren't even competitive.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 01023450 -
Two Webstites Targeting the Same Keywords
If I aquire a website in the same industry targeting the same keywords. Should I merge them into one? I understand it's a bad idea to have multiple websites promoting the same thing, but i'd like to capture the customer base of a competing website. What's everyone's thoughts? A- Merge new to main website with 301's? will google like that? B- Keep them separate? Will google like that? C- Don't bother. D- Toss the computer and get into Horticulture
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | residualboulders0 -
E-Commerce site - How do I geo-target towns/cities/states if there aren't any store locations?
Site = e-commerce Products = clothing (no apparel can be location specific like sports gear where you can do the location specific team gear (NBA, NFL, etc)) Problems = a. no store front b. I don't want to do any sitewides (footers, sidebars, etc) because of the penguin update Question = How do you geo-target these category pages and product pages? Ideas = a. reviews with clients locations b. blog posts with clients images wearing apparel and location description and keywords that also links back to that category or be it product page (images geo- targeted, tags, and description) c. ? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cyclone0 -
Is this site legit?
http://www.gglpls.com/ is this site legit? Submit website to google + directory?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
A Site in Flash to Optimize
Hello, I have to understand if this site www.spacemilanmodels.com.pt can be optimize since the entire website is in flash wich is not good for optimizacion. What do you guys suggest? Recommendations? Is it possible only with link-building? Tks for the help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PedroM0 -
My Job Site is having Indexing Issues
I have 2 job sites that I am managing and working on. One of the sites has a great deal of job vacancies and expired job pages that have been indexed. This one below: http:// job search.cctc .com/cctc Jobsearch/expandedjobsearch.do This job site does not have any job pages index: http://www.cross countryallied. com/ctAlliedWebSite/ travel-nurse-jobs/job-search.jsp Why and what can I do to get the dynamic pages index and ranking? Any help tips would be much appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Melia0