Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Let your business shine with Listings AI
      Moz Local

      Let your business shine with Listings AI

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. My .com ranks well in the US but not in the UK or other countries?

    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?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    3
    3
    1194
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • batchbook
      batchbook last edited by

      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?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • katemorris
        katemorris last edited by

        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:

        http://outspokenmedia.com/international-seo-strategy/

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • seowoody
          seowoody last edited by

          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.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • 1 / 1
          • First post
            Last post

          Got a burning SEO question?

          Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


          Start my free trial


          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.

          • See all categories

          Related Questions

          • JFA

            What to do with PDFs that rank well?

            Looking at some reports, I found that a client's site has PDFs that are ranking well for niche terms and getting some traffic. What can I do to get more out of them from a marketing standpoint? The obvious issue is that a PDF doesn't have the interactivity of a site visit, where we have analytics and CTAs. Someone has to follow a link back from the PDF to the site for us to even register a visit, let alone try to get their email or have them otherwise convert. My first guess is to make landing page summaries of the PDF content that link to the PDF, and canonical the PDF to the respective landing page. Has anyone tried this, or done something else that they would recommend again in this situation?

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JFA
            0
          • ParisChildress

            If a page ranks in the wrong country and is redirected, does that problem pass to the new page?

            Hi guys, I'm having a weird problem: A new multilingual site was launched about 2 months ago. It has correct hreflang tags and Geo targetting in GSC for every language version. We redirected some relevant pages (with good PA) from another website of our client's. It turned out that the pages were not ranking in the correct country markets (for example, the en-gb page ranking in the USA). The pages from our site seem to have the same problem. Do you think they inherited it due to the redirects? Is it possible that Google will sort things out over some time, given the fact that the new pages have correct hreflangs? Is there stuff we could do to help ranking in the correct country markets?

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ParisChildress
            1
          • seoanalytics

            Keyword difficulty and time to rank

            Hello, Is there a correlation between the keyword difficult and the time it takes to rank ? In other words let's say I try to rank for  the keyword "seo" and it is going to take 2 years to rank 1 st whereas if I go for "best seo tools in 2018" and it takes just 2 weeks ? Thank you,

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics
            0
          • Brett-S

            Ranking 1st for a keyword - but when 's' is added to the end we are ranking on the second page

            Hi everyone - hope you are well. I can't get my head around why we are ranking 1st for a specific keyword, but then when 's' is added to the end of the keyword - we are ranking on the second page. What could be the cause of this? I thought that Google would class both of the keywords the same, in this case, let's say the keyword was 'button'. We would be ranking 1st for 'button', but 'buttons' we are ranking on the second page. Any ideas? - I appreciate every comment.

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S
            0
          • creativeground

            Changing from .com to .com.au

            Hi All, we are looking for some guidance please, if at all possible. We have .com domain (the domain is older than 10 years), we have been using it for 2 years. We also have .com.au version of the domain (the domain is 2 years old, pointing to the .com domain) and isn't being used. We are an Australian based company. Our question is, should we be using .com.au instead of .com and if so, how would you advise going about doing the change over without having huge SEO impact on our business (negatively). We are on the home page for most of the searches we have optimized for, but we are always below the .com.au's - which is why we are considering the possibility of the move? Any advice would be GREATLY appreciated 🙂

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | creativeground
            0
          • KS__

            How to rank for a location/country without having a physical address in that location/country

            How do I go about it if my physical address (office) is in Country A but I want to rank my website in Country B, C and D (without having an office or physical address in the countries B, C and D)? I am aware of people setting up virtual offices in other countries/cities and adding them to Google Places/Maps with toll free phone numbers, but I don't wish to do any of that. I know Google will catch up with this one day or the other and punish me hard for trying to play games with it. Is there a way rank a website in another country without actually having a physical location there? If yes, please guide me how to go about it.

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KS__
            0
          • SeoSheikh

            Should I buy a .co domain if my preferred .com and .co.uk domain are taken by other companies?

            I'm looking to boost my website ranking and drive more traffic to it using a keyword rich domain name. I want to have my nearest city followed by the keyword "seo" in the domain name but the .co.uk and .com have already been taken. Should I take the plunge and buy .co at a higher price? What options do I have? Also whilst we're on domains and URL's is it best to separate keywords in url's with a (_) or a (-)? Many thanks for any help with this matter. Alex

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeoSheikh
            0
          • SEODinosaur

            Changing a url from .html to .com

            Hello, I have a client that has a site with a .html plugin and I have read that its best to not have this. We currently have pages ranking with this .html plug in. However If we take the plug in out will we lose rankings? would we need a 301 or something?

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur
            0

          Get started with Moz Pro!

          Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

          Start my free trial
          Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz API
          • Moz Data
          • STAT
          • Product Updates
          Moz Solutions
          • SMB Solutions
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          • Digital Marketers
          Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Authority Checker
          • Link Explorer
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • Brand Authority Checker
          • Local Citation Checker
          • MozBar Extension
          • MozCast
          Resources
          • Blog
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Help Hub
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • How-to Guides
          • Moz Academy
          • API Docs
          About Moz
          • About
          • Team
          • Careers
          • Contact
          Why Moz
          • Case Studies
          • Testimonials
          Get Involved
          • Become an Affiliate
          • MozCon
          • Webinars
          • Practical Marketer Series
          • MozPod
          Connect with us

          Contact the Help team

          Join our newsletter
          Moz logo
          © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
          • Accessibility
          • Terms of Use
          • Privacy

          Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.