Targeting Asia Pacific region with .com.au

[Saijo.George]

Hi folks

What are your thoughts on targeting Singapore and Hong Kong ( and Australia ) with a .com.au domain with subfolder example.com.au/singapore and example.com.au/hong-kong with relevant hreflang tags. Has anyone does this successfully or come across any case studies for this?

The content will be in English on all those pages but they will have local numbers and office in each location. The team and content will also be different on those pages.

If I could I would use .com BUT that is NOT an option in this particular case.

[Saijo.George]

Hi Aleyda

thanks for confirming that I look fwd to meeting you in person at BigDigital Adelaide

[Aleyda]

Hi there Saijo,

The .com.au ccTLD is by default already geolocated to Australia so unfortunately it's not recommended to be used to target other countries. Please see Google's ccTLDs treatment here where it says: "These are tied to a specific country (for example .de for Germany, .cn for China), and therefore are a strong signal to both users and search engines that your site is explicitly intended for a certain country.".

So if you want to use only one property to target many countries then you should use a gTLD with subdirectories for each country and geolocate them with the Google Search Console. You can also use hreflang annotations to avoid international search misalignments issues too but this can't "override" the ccTLD geolocation preference (in fact, if you go to Google Search Console with a ccTLD you'll see is already targeted to its specific country and cannot be changed).

The other option is to set specific ccTLDs for each country, but not using one ccTLD to target other or many countries for which is not targeted by default as you suggest. Sorry it doesn't work that way!