Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
My .com ranks well in the US but not in the UK or other countries?
-
My companies is based in the US, but our customer base is 50% international. The majority of our international customers are from english speaking countries like the UK, AU, NZ, etc. We currently rank well for 2 of our industries core keywords in the US, but are not even on the radar in the UK or AU.
I do generate international backlinks, although not as much as the US backlinks (approximately 25% intl, 75% US). Should I purchase localized urls like .co.uk or .com.au and point those at my .com? Any guidance the community could provide would be greatly appreciated?
-
Hi Batchbook,
I am going to give you a slightly different answer than seowoody.
The issue you are looking at is geography based, not language based from what I can tell right now. That means you don't need hreflang (maybe). This might be different for the actual situation though. Your customers needs determine what route you should go down for international, and I can't tell you what to do without knowing more (Like SEOWoody said).
With all of that being said, use this tool and report back to me your end result (it's something I built). Then I can help you figure out how to deal with this:
-
Hi
Should I purchase localized urls like .co.uk or .com.au and point those at my .com?
This will not help you.
What are you giving Google to help them understand that your website is also for a UK audience? You need to provide flags for Google to understand or it will look at the major factors, e.g.:
- Name, Address, Phone number on your .com domain (are these US, or do you also list a UK address)
- Citations of these details ^ (are they cited on US based websites/directories)
- Server location (is site hosted in US)
- Domain registration details (US address)
- Inbound links (you mentioned 75% US, need more UK focussed + UK PR)
It's hard to give advice when I don't understand your business, but if possible, could you create localised versions of each page? i.e. www.domain.com (original) and www.domain.com/uk/ and www.domain.com/au/ (simple enough if site is built on Wordpress with the WP ML plugin).
This way your www.domain.com/contact/ would remain 'as is' but www.domain.com/uk/contact/ as an example would contain your UK address, UK phone number etc (don't forget you can buy postal addresses in most major cities around the world for ~£30/month).
You'd then build all your external UK links to your www.domain.com/uk/ pages.
One thing to beware of, this approach would only work if you could truly rewrite every page with unique content, which is much harder when it's EN-US to EN-GB or EN-US to EN-AU etc.
Do not copy the content from www.domain.com/product1 to www.domain.com/uk/product1 and think that changing the Americanized spellings to English will work for you. It won't! And you will risk a duplicate content penalty.
This is a good exercise, if done correctly as you'd be surprised how keywords change per country, especially long-tail phrases, even between English speaking countries.
Take vehicle rental as an example - van, truck, suv, rv, ute are all variations of pretty much the same thing, used across different English speaking counties.
Then the longer tail is more complex as American's are more familier with 'Rental', whereas English more commonly use 'Hire'. So if you're targeting one phrase only on domain.com and that phrase is suv rental, the guys looking for ute hire in Australia will never find you.
Oh -- You'd also need to implement href lang tags into your meta head to tell Google which version is for which Country.
Hope this helps.
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
-
Page rank and menus
Hi, My client has a large website and has a navigation with main categories. However, they also have a hamburger type navigation in the top right. If you click it it opens to a massive menu with every category and page visible. Do you know if having a navigation like this bleeds page rank? So if all deep pages are visible from the hamburger navigation this means that page rank is not being conserved to the main categories. If you click a main category in the main navigation (not the hamburger) you can see the sub pages. I think this is the right structure but the client has installed this huge menu to make it easier for people to see what there is. From a technical SEO is this not bad?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AL123al0 -
How to rank if you are an aggregator or a directory of resource?
Most of the SEO suggestions (great quality content, long form content, engagement rate/time on the page, authority inbound links ) apply to content oriented site. But what should you do if you are an aggregator or a resource directory? You aim is to send the user faster to other site they are looking for or provide ranking about the resources. In fact at a very basic level you are competing for search engine traffic because they are doing same things. You may have done a hand crafted, human created resource that is better than what algorithms are showing. And your site likely to have lot more outgoing links than content. You know you are better (or getting better) since repeat visitors keep coming back. So in these days of Search engines, what a resource directory or aggregator site do to rank? Because even directories need first time visitors till they start coming back again.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Maayboli0 -
Using a US CDN (Cloudflare) for a UK Site. Should I use a UK Based CDN as it says my server is based in USA
Hi All, We are a UK Company with Uk customers only and use CloudFlare CND. Our Site is hosted by a UK company with servers here but from looking online and checking where my site is hosted etc etc , some sites are telling me the name of our UK Hosted company and other sites are telling me my site is hosted in San Fran (USA) , where I presume the Cloudflare is based. I know Cloudflare has a couple of servers in the UK it uses but given all my customers are UK based ,I don't want this is affect rankings etc , as I thought it was a ranking benefit to be hosted in the country you are based. Is there any issue with this and should I change or is google clever enough to know so i shouldn't worry. thanks Pet
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Help! The website ranks fine but one of my web pages simply won't rank on Google!!!
One of our web pages will not rank on Google. The website as a whole ranks fine except just one section...We have tested and it looks fine...Google can crawl the page no problem. There are no spurious redirects in place. The content is fine. There is no duplicate page content issue. The page has a dozen product images (photos) but the load time of the page is absolutely fine. We have the submitted the page via webmaster and its fine. It gets listed but then a few hours later disappears!!! The site has not been penalised as we get good rankings with other pages. Can anyone help? Know about this problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CayenneRed890 -
Is it normal to initially rank low in the SERPs, then over time gain rank?
We just released a very targeted page for a specific item about 18 hours ago. For the main keyword as well as multiple variations, we currently are ranking around # 40 to # 50 depending on what the exact query is. Is it normal to initially rank lower in the SERPs and then as the page ages, gain? Thank you for your insights!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DJ1231 -
Combine .com and .co.uk domain? So forward .co.uk to .com for SEO?
Hello, A new client of mine has an .com and an .co.uk domain. Both the same content (and they don't have the capacity to make specific content on both domains). I am thinking building al domain authority to 1 domain. In this case the .com domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Seeders
And forward the .co.uk to this .com domain.
In this way, the .com will rank in both UK as in other English speaking countries, right? Or not?
Or should I use the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tag? I am not sure. But I do know big brands rank high in the Netherlands with .com domains (for example booking.com). Looking forward on feedback on best practices here... Thanks!0 -
How to NOT appear in Google results in other countries?
I have ecommerce sites the only serve US and Canada. Is there a way to prevent a site from appearing in the Google results in foreign countries? The reason I ask is that we also have a lot of informational pages that folks in other countries are visiting, then leaving right after reading. This is making our overall Bounce Rate very high (64%). When we segment the GA data to look at just our US visitors, then the Bounce Rate drops a lot. (to 48%) Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GregB1230 -
Subdomain for every us state?
Hi, one of our clients has an idea of making subdomains from his main website to sell his online advertisements in all states in USA. f.e: texas.web.com atlanta.web.com He wants to have a subdomain for every state and there to be information related only or mainly to this state? I am not sure about is this a good idea? What is your opinion about it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vladokan0