Geographic targeting general question

[activitysuper]

Hi,

I've been looking at some of the Google help centre pages for Geo-targeting and it says flat out if you use for example .co.uk and Geo-target in webmaster tools US then you will not rank as well as using .net, .com and a few others they list.

So if you got a UK online business and want to expand into another country then staright away your in a negative situation if you want to rank in the SE for that location.

[Vahe.Arabian]

You are right about your recent comment. Buying individual CLD's is definently alot easier, however you can buy a .com to use as your global and create subfolders to geo target specific countries.

There are also other options you could do. This blog post clearly states it - http://dejanseo.com.au/one-domain-multiple-geo-targets/

Hope this helps,

Vahe

[activitysuper]

Thanks for super quick reply.

Suppose another question really is if you don't set the location (basically open to global SE's) then im guessing ranking will become near impossible, someone who sells a service such as SEOMOZ would want this I guess.

From what I can see, buying a .com is the best and geo-targeting the location you would like to target, if in the future the market dries up in your location you could geo-target another without the problem of having a location specific extension.

But if you do have a .co.uk and target the UK, ranking becomes a lot easier then a .com targeting the UK.

[eyepaq]

Unfortunately that is correct. TLD's are very important. There is no real way around it.

It makes sense some how as in US if a user will see .co.uk in serps will likely click on a noter result (depending on the subject). France is very extreme with .fr domains - users have a huge CTR behavior on fr domains vs .com, .eu etc.

I have a client with a dot com german site with really great PR / DA and still he is outranked in some cases by dot de domains.

Your best choice in this case will be to go, if possible with separate TLDs (.co.uk for UK, -com for US, .de for Germany,  fit it for Italy and so on).

If you make a good TLD strategy you can have great results.

Hope it helps.