International SEO
-
Okay, so I have read through the following link in respect to International SEO (https://moz.com/learn/seo/international-seo), and I believe that the way forward it a ccTLD.
My thought was to have .com, .co.uk and .eu.
Currently my site is .com, but receives most of its traffic from UK sources. I'm concerned that when I switch over to ccTLDs, the .co.uk in particular, that my UK traffic could dry up. Switching from .com to .co.uk and then using the .com to target the US market makes sense, but I would like to know others opinions on the potential dangers of doing this.
Also, are ccTLDs kept on the same hosting or would they require individual hosting? The link doesn't cover this question.
-
You can try by approaching the top brands in your niche to get the high quality and authority link insertion for your website SEO. There are many website examples that doing the same for guest posts.
-
Perfect candidate for geo-targeting! You can keep them on one domain though if you're interested. You can do subfolders and geo-target each, but not sure if that works with your setup. Regardless, if you do the .com, and want that to be US only, make sure to claim that domain in GSC and Bing WMT as the US. .com is a general TLD, so it doesn't auto-geo-target. ccTLDs like .co.uk do automatically take care of this.
Keep in mind that in best practices, if you have two pages with the same content across two domains, usually the SEs will pick one, the older stronger one. Try to find a way to differentiate the content that is the same across the two sites. You can also use hreflang between the two sites to help the association, but that is really meant for translated content only. However, people have seen it help.
To ensure people are getting to the right content, I recommend detecting the user's location by IP and ASKING if they live in the US, UK or others you might geo-target. Then set a cookie. They will always get to the right content. Google will crawl from the US, ignore the JS for the most part, and will index everything.
Think about the .com and subfolder idea, that might be better for you.
-
Hi Kate,
Thanks for the reply.
We have a warehouse in the UK and USA and the products sold on each site vary, so we need to keep them seperate. We want our efforts to be pushed towards SEO best practice, that is to say that the hosting we want regionally and also to merge the brands together (they're currently under two different brand/domain names).
The site we have operating in the US currently isn't doing great and is taking a lot of effort in terms of SEO, effort we could be putting towards the .com. If we bring the US site under the flag of the .com our hope is that it will benefit from the .com's authority and receive a boost (we would also 301 redirect all traffic from the previous domain as not to lose any juice).
-
Hi Moon boots!
First be aware of the .eu TLD, it isn't a geo-targeted TLD as the EU isn't a country. Keep that in mind, you can't target regions, just countries.
Can I ask why you want to go down the route of ccTLDs? Does your content need to be different in each country? There is no problem with keeping everything on a .com, but let me know if there are external factors at play here.
Where you host the TLDs doesn't matter much. The localization is a signal, but not a huge one. If you can give us some insight into your situation, we can help better. Thanks!
-
Any follow up?
-
Also, if I am using hreflag tags, am I still able to have both sites on different servers with their own localised IPs? This is necessary for SEO.
-
Thank you for the response, Nigel. A few follow up questions:
Using the lang tag in a link, i.e. www.website.com/?lang=en, isn't that a detractor for SEO? I was under the impression that the route to the product should be as short as possible for SEO, i.e. www.website.com/product, as opposed to www.website.com/?lang=en/product. Or will google ignore the ?lang in terms of SEO?
-
Hi spacecollective
As long as you tag the sites correctly then you will not have a problem.
Add Hreflang tags to the pages. They can be identical pages on the same server in if you wish but this is how I would do it. As long as they are separated like this.
website.com for the US
website.com/en for the UKAny other country would then have its own directory.
This avoids you having to mess with the various country TLDs like .co.uk or any other you'd wish to set up.
Then add Hreflang tags to tell Google which country is targetted and the relationship between each one.
https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag
(The first part en is the language and the second, the country)
The combination of search console and Hreflang tags is enough for Google to know that there is no duplication.
You would move UK users on to the gb version and US users would see the .com. It would all resolve pretty quickly as you are telling Google the alternative country versions in the Hreflang tag.
I hope this helps
Nigel
Carousel Projects
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
-
CcTLD vs subfolder for international SEO
In what situations is subfolder better than ccTLD, and vice versa.
International SEO | | MedicalSEOMarketing1 -
Dutch SEO Professionals
Hi, I am seeking a fluent Dutch speaker to assist with the On-page optimisation for a Dutch mini site for a world wide engineering company. Any recommendations are welcome..
International SEO | | kpaulin0 -
International SEO: best practices for local variants of the same language?
We are translating our site into 17 different languages, including local variants of the same language (i.e. Mexican Spanish and Spain Spanish, Canadian English and British English, etc). Should we add all of these local variants to our site? We don't have the marketing / link building budget (or business need) to put these all on separate ccTLDs, so we are using country-specific subfolders instead (example.com/es/). The translations will be of exceptional quality. Our main goal is to pull in some additional traffic from these translations. If we add these local variants, do you think we can expect to see traffic from these different countries (additional traffic from Canada, England, etc)? Any advice / input would be appreciated.
International SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
International Landing Page Strategy
Hello, I'm looking for some insight in an area that I don't have much experience in - hoping the community can help! We are a healthcare staffing company serving clients in the U.S. (www.bartonassociates.com). We are interested in attracting clients in Australia and New Zealand. I'm wondering if anyone as experience with best practices for doing so (both from an SEO and PPC perspective). Would it be best to purchase .au and .nz domains for these landing pages and link back to our US site for more information (or even recreate a modified version of our US site for .au and .nz). My concern here is duplicate content issues, among other things. Or, would it be better to create Australia and New Zealand focused landing pages on our US site and drive PPC there? My concern here is that we would never get organic traffic from Australia and New Zealand to our US site, in light of the competition. Also, the messaging would be a bit mixed if targeting all three countries. Our core term is "locums" and "locum tenens". Greatly appreciate any insight from you guys. Thanks, Jason
International SEO | | ba_seomoz0 -
Looking for content writers for multi-language SEO
Hi All, I'm currently doing a lot of work for a UK client who has multiple sites outside the UK (all part of the same business). We're currently discussing the option of us handling all of his SEO for his German, French, Spanish and Italian sites too, but we only have access to one person in the office who can speak French and Spanish. They're currently booked up on other jobs that we can't really move them off, so I'm looking for options of outsourcing some of the content writing. My question is, does anyone know of any high quality content writing services that have writers available to write for the countries languages above? We're going to focus initially on their on-site strategy and building up their high quality content. At the moment, they don't have much relevant content on their website, so we're going to initially look at this. Moving forward, we'll be looking at their off-site strategy and trying to find areas to submit high quality articles, look at guest blogging and PR opportunities. Any tips anyone has on this side (in terms of outsourcing to native speakers) would be quite useful too! Many thanks,
International SEO | | PinpointDesigns
Lewis0 -
Local SEO - My Ranking depends on City of the user - Rank tracker is failing
Hello, The search results differ completly depending on the user location. The websites yoagbarcelona.org targets poeple from barcelona: Barcelona; User location Barcelona web is on the last position on first page: http://screencast.com/t/ZsIeiCeLRM User location New York 1st. http://screencast.com/t/PzaLbwWW4xx: Also SEO MOZ rank tracker is showing me that im no 1in google.es for yoga barcelona. The problem is that this is only true for users outside the region 😞 The site has very bad ranking in google places and you need to go down to page 10 until my yoga studio shows up in the maps results. I did some hardcore citation building and signed up in almost all local directories that google pulls data from within one month and optimised the google places / plus profile. Please give me some advice how I could overcome the problem.??? Especially on what part should i focus when optimising the page. ??? Are there any other good strategies for getting into google places ??? Do I need more links from local sites or how is this local serps working ???
International SEO | | stereo690 -
Does hosting content for one country in another country negatively affect its SEO ranking?
Hi, my content is primarily for Australian audiences, however due to a general lack of competitive hosting infrastructure, I tend to host a lot of content in the US. A 2007 article I read implied that it's not a good idea - does anyone have a definitive 2011 answer? Cheers, Jez
International SEO | | jez0000 -
Multi-lingual SEO: Country-specific TLD's, or migration to a huge .com site?
Dear SEOmoz team, I’m an in-house SEO looking after a number of sites in a competitive vertical. Right now we have our core example.com site translated into over thirty different languages, with each one sitting on its own country-specific TLD (so example.de, example.jp, example.es, example.co.kr etc…). Though we’re using a template system so that changes to the .com domain propagate across all languages, over the years things have become more complex in quite a few areas. For example, the level of analytics script hacks and filters we have created in order to channel users through to each language profile is now bordering on the epic. For a number of reasons we’ve recently been discussing the cost/benefit of migrating all of these languages into the single example.com domain. On first look this would appear to simplify things greatly; however I’m nervous about what effect this would have on our organic SE traffic. All these separate sites have cumulatively received years of on/off-site work, and even if we went through the process of setting up page-for-page redirects to their new home on example.com, I would hate to lose all this hard-work (and business) if we saw our rankings tank as a result of the move. So I guess the question is, for an international business such as ours, which is the optimal site structure in the eyes of the search engines; Local sites on local TLD’s, or one mammoth site with language identifiers in the URL path (or subdomains)? Is Google still so reliant on TLD for geo targeting search results, or is it less of a factor in today’s search engine environment? Cheers!
International SEO | | linklater0