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I'm going to leave this as status "Unanswered", as I don't think we are much closer to any substantial conclusions on to what extent a non-generic ccTLD influences keyword matching for the country name itself.

Based on my own non-scientific searches for various countries and terms like "hotels", "conference venues", "events" and so on, I've found > 50% of first page results from the relevant ccTLD without those sites keyword stuffing the country name into their URLs, so I am going to omit the country name from the website structure itself and stick with a structure of http://mybrandname.ccTLD/service/

Thanks, good point. I'm sure Google are struggling with this a little but begrudgingly treating the .co's, .io's, .ly's as global where applicable. In my particular case though it's a ccTLD which is essentially never appropriated for "cool" domain names and the only purpose for having the extension is to do business in or about the country itself.

Thanks, Mike. I've searched extensively on this before now and have been unable to find any definitive answer. I agree that a ccTLD increases visibility for searchers from within that country, as it should. It seems it's still unknown how much the ccTLD increases visibility for people outside the country but who include the full country name in their keyword query. There's no reason why having a ccTLD shouldn't achieve both ends, and I would expect that in a perfect world it should do so too, as that would most benefit searchers.

The challenge I have with my target and niche is that it's a relatively mature one but with little SEO optimization from the big players, so the results I see are fairly well correlated with the size and quality of the websites, regardless of .com or ccTLD. I suppose I should try to think up some more countries and niches to study to try to draw a conclusion.

FYI currently for a query of <country niche="">from an overseas location and not logged in, I see 6 of the 10 first page results use the country ccTLD. Out of those 6, only 1 has the country name embedded in the URL (all are branded, none have the country  name in the domain itself).</country>

Right now I still feel the best is brandname.ccTLD instead of country-brand.com, as word of mouth will be as important as organic search, and the more brand-able the better.

[Hypothetical situation - domain, country and industry changed]

Let's say I have registered http://mybrandname.hk (i.e. Hong Kong) and my goal is to reach people in all global locations searching for Hong Kong hotels. The target audience will almost always put "Hong Kong" into their query, e.g. they might search for "Marriott Hotel Hong Kong". Does the .hk TLD implicitly give me a match for "Hong Kong" or would I structure my URLs such that all hotel info pages fall under a top level subdirectory "hong-kong".

i.e. is it enough to have a structure like:

• http://mybrandname.hk/hotel/marriott

Or should I have it like:

• http://mybrandname.hk/hong-kong/hotel/marriott ?

It is safe to assume that other on- and off-page best practices will be followed, e.g. links from other Hong Kong sites, some backlinks anchor text including "hong kong", etc.

Of course Marriott is just one example, there would be hundreds of hotels in this example.