Looking to rank a .co.uk domain in the USA
-
Hello Mozzers,
One of my clients sites is "domain.co.uk" and they are looking to rank in the USA with the same domain.
They are looking to change host (for unrelated reasons) and I think it may be beneficial for them to get hosting in the USA.
Essentially the business is moving to the USA but they want to retain their domain name as they cannot get their hands on a domain with their company name in that is .com / .net / .org etc. . .
I know that the .co.uk domain will adversely affect click through rates in the states, but there seems to be no way around this if they want their retain the company name as their domain name.
Would American based hosting help them rank better for searches from the USA or is the benefit of this negligible?
Net66
-
Thanks for the replies guys! Some really good answers.
I know that it will be harder, but I'm going to give it a go!
As they are already getting a company.com domain and will retain the company.co.uk page the only reason for the CLIENT-NAME.co.uk page is as a personal landing page / portfolio page.
It is worth seeing if I can rank their name in the USA. The domain is set up to rank for this already and is already ranking close to page one.
I have seen other name based domains rank in both countries. I think it is worth the risk as I doubt my clients UK rankings (for their name) will be altered. They have scores of links and the content is well targeted.
Once more, thanks for the advice!
Net66
-
Hey guys,
It currently ranks number 17 in the USA, so it is not too far away from the first page.
I think it is doable, but not advisable. It is always worth having a go, and failing that getting a new domain.
Thanks for all the help!
Net66
-
Hi Neil,
Ranking for a person's name in the US with a 'name.co.uk' is possible - for example I think if you do a search for 'Jane Copland' in the US you'll see janecopland.co.uk ranking 1st.
Do you know how well or otherwise the site is ranking in the US right now?
Essentially the ability to rank will likely be impacted by how common or otherwise the person's name is and how strong their site is.
In terms of actions from you I wouldn't be inclined to change hosting as that's unlikely to have an impact on it's own - however if as you say you're looking to change the hosting in any case then moving it the US probably wouldn't hurt. I'd also encourage you to build links to this domain to strengthen the site.
I guess I'm saying it's not necessarily impossible, but in an ideal world you'd get some sort of generic domain (.com / .net etc).
I hope this helps,
Hannah
-
I think that it's harder, you will need a lot of US links so it's a lot of work. The best would be to use a .com and to create a US version of your site.
USA users won't really be attracted to .co.uk and also the vocabulary you use on the site could be a real turn off for US users.
But if you absolutely want to do it, I would host a sub-domain of .co.uk on a server located in USA. But as I said, it's a lot of work that users may not appreciate to much.
-
My experience is that the .uk extension is a strong indicator for a local site and it creates extra work. US hosting, contact details and predominantly US links would help, however personally I would still be thinking about a separate non .uk name.
-
Hi Istavan,
Thanks for the quick reply!
Maybe I wasn't too clear.
The company would have a separate site a company-name.com. This would be US based and have the company address, and details on there.
The other site that (.co.uk) has no real income in terms of sales.
It is a photographer and this site is a personal profile site that will have links to his business site.
The idea of this site is to rank for his name, and his name alone as it gets a lot of searches. His UK rank for this does not matter as he will not be returning.
His domain is perfectly set up to rank for his name. His domain is "his-name.co.uk" and has some good content.
My question is really just related to ranking for the clients name. It is a very, very common name but ranks first in the UK.
Would it be possible to gain this ranking in the USA?
I have never tried to rank a .co.uk domain name in the USA, but I know that Google is trying to return local results. (Thus my conclusion that a .co.uk name would not be beneficial).
While I know this is not the best situation my client really wants to retain his current domain.
He is only looking to rank for his name, which is his domain name. Is this going to be a possibility?
Has anyone ranked a .co.uk domain in the USA successfully?
Finally, would US based hosting help at all?
Net66
-
Hi Net66,
As I read through your question my first impression was... No Waaaaay!
I wouldn't advice to mix things up. Just simple create a new brand for the US market. The reasons are the following:
1. When re-targeting an established website you can hurt your rankings in both UK and US results.
2. a .co.uk is a ccTLD which wont be very useful for a US targeting
3. for a better on-site optimization you will have to rewrite content to better fit the US English readers level (and there are major differences between US and UK English) - What happens to their established visitors?
4. if you reach to retarget somehow the .co.uk website, they will see a fall in the sales (because they will probably loose some ranks in the .co.uk and gain some new ones in the .com)
Ok. Now if you buy a new brand name for the US market:
1. You can develop from first stage an optimized website (information architecture, content, links, etc.)
2. You can have a brand name that is more catchy for US market.
3. They can run two different websites in the same time effectively. Until the US website comes up, they will have enough sales from UK markets.
I hope that helped,
Istvan
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
-
Redirect Chain Domain
MozPro is highlighting some redirect chain issues with our domain that I do not recall ever setting up in our redirect list. In our Moz Pro Campaign I see the Site Crawl has flagged 36 Redirect Chain Issues. I understand how the redirect chain errors can happen but I do not recall ever manually redirecting our domain, yet I have http://stickylife.com, https://stickylife.com & https://www.stickylife.com all associated in one of our redirect chain errors. When looking at our redirect files I do not see any of these domain redirects and wonder how this has happened and how to fix it. It appears as though our HTTP and HTTPS is causing some redirection. I wonder if this is coming from our DNS settings?
Technical SEO | | StickyLife0 -
Purchased domain with links - redirect page by page or entire domain?
Hi, I purchased an old domain with a lot of links that I'm redirecting to my site. I want all of their links to redirect to the same page on my site so I can approach this two different ways: Entire site
Technical SEO | | ninel_P
1.) RedirectMatch 301 ^(.*)$ http://www.xyz.com or Page by page
2). Redirect 301 /retiredpage.html http://www.xyz.com/newpage.html Is there a better option I should go with in regards to SEO effectiveness? Thanks in advance!0 -
How to redirect old domain to new domain.
We just recently signed up to Moz with hopes of fixing our Moz Ranking. We have an old domain - http://at-net.net and a new domain - https://www.expertip.net We have set up 301 (Permanent) redirects from all pages on the old site to the new, but aren't getting the ranking or aren't getting recognized from external links to the old sites. I've read the moz article on 'Link Juice' and followed those practices, but it doesn't seem to help. Does anyone have advice on doing this? Thanks in advance,
Technical SEO | | greg.lanier
Greg0 -
Website not ranking but the blog is!
I am hoping someone might be able to help me, I am doing some work on a website. A new version of the site was recently launched and since then rankings have plummeted and the new blog pages are ranking better! When the new version of the site went live, the domain changed to the non-www version, plus an incorrect robots.txt file and we have never really been able to fully recover (both of these things were beyond my control!). The robots.txt file was corrected and some of the external links links changed to the non-www but there is a 301 redirect in place so changing to the non-www shouldn't have been the reason to drop the site out completely. Before the launch of the new website, the site was ranking on the front page of Google for a lot of relevant keywords such as outdoor blinds, outdoor blinds Perth, cafe blinds, patio blinds, etc. The quality of the links is pretty bad and I am attempting to remove them before doing a disavow of all the really bad quality links but unless we were really unlucky I don't think it's the links right now that are causing the problem. I have ran the site through numerous crawl tests, checked the robots.txt, there are no messages in GWMT, the pages are indexed but I have a feeling there is something wrong with the site that is stopping this site from ranking well. If anyone could give me any insights I would be really grateful. I know the site could be better structured from a keyword/ structure perspective but the site was ranking fine!
Technical SEO | | Karen_Dauncey0 -
Forwarding kw rich domains to main domain
Hi My client has a clutch of kw rich domains that want to point to main domain, apart from being good for promotional reasons is there any seo benefit for doing so (i know there used to be years ago but under impression hasn't been any benefit for a long while) Most importantly though can any bad come from doing this ? Best Rgds Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Looking for feedback about "look-ahead" navigation
Our company has been creating websites where the navigation is developed in such a way as to allow the visitor to get a preview of the image and/or content on that is on the page. Here are two websites that use this technology:
Technical SEO | | TopFloor
http://www.uniquepadprinting.com/
http://www.empathia.com/ (On this site, the previews are only available if you click on "Whole", "Productive" or "Safe" at the top of the page. I'm looking for feedback such as: What do you call this type of navigation (We call it look-ahead, but I can't find much info that term on the web) Have you experienced any issues with this type of navigation? Do you have any recommendations on it? Some of the things we've seen are: It adds the same content to every page of the website It creates a lot of internal links It can create a lot of code on pages It can slow page-load times0 -
.COM vs .CA rankings - .CA ranks on Google.com
Hi SEOMOZers, We have a fairly large retail client with both .COM and .CA domains. Each of the sites are almost identical in design and, in most cases, content (these would be product pages). The .US site has been live for nearly 2.5 years while the Canadian probably over a year younger or so. Both sites are hosted in the US. What we're starting to see as of the last few months are searches that used to rank .COM product pages now rank the Canadian page above the US page on Google.com. We've checked Webmaster Tools for each site and they target the appropriate country. With nearly all examples we've seen, we haven't noticed any more links pointing to the Canadian page, and where this is becoming a widespread occurence we're not convinced it's a linking issue. My question is why Google might see both versions but rank the Canadian page above the US page on Google.com for a search being performed in the US? Does anyone have any ideas on why this may be happening?
Technical SEO | | HarborOneBank0 -
Domain Redirect Issues
Hi, I have a domain that is 10 years old, this is the old domain that used to be the website for the company. The company approximately 7 years ago was bought by another and purchased a new domain that is 7 years old. The company did not do a 301 redirect as they were not aware of the SEO implications. They continued building web applications on the old domain while using the new domain for all marketing and for business partner links. They just put in a server level redirect on the folders themselves to point to the new root. I am on Tomcat, I do not have the option of a 301 redirect as the web applications are all hard coded links (non-relative) (hundreds of thousands of dollars to recode) After beginning SEO; Google is seeing them as the same domain, and has replaced all results in Google with the old domain instead of the new one..... My questions is.... Is it better to take the hit and just put a robots.txt to disallow all robots on the old domain Or... Will that hurt my new domain as well since Google is seeing them as the same? Or.... Has Google already made the switch without a redirect to see these as the same and i should just continue on? (even the cache for the new site shows the old domain address) Old Domain= www.floridahealthcares.com New = www.fhcp.com *****Update after writing this I began changing index.htm to all non relative links so all links on the old domain homepage would point to fhcp.com fixing the issue of the entire site being replicated under the old domain. I think this might "Patch" my issue, but i would still love to get the opinion of others Thanks Shane
Technical SEO | | Jinx146780