One site for multiple regions with a twist?
-
Hi there. I'm hoping to tap into the collective wisdom of this great community. I've just become involved in a business that spans two countries Australia and New Zealand. Currently we have one site in Australia "AAAA.com.au" and a similar site in New Zealand which is a joint venture with another company so for some reason they chose to merge the names to get "BBAAAA.co.nz". The Australian site is hosted in Australia and ranks #1 for targeted keywords in a competitive industry. The New Zealand site is hosted in NZ and has been live for nearly 2 years but ranks very poorly with targeted keywords i.e. not in the top 50! The content on sites is similar but not the same and phone numbers and location details are different etc. The NZ site has not been link building which is likely the main issue. What I want to do is now change the BBAAAA.co.nz site to AAAA.co.nz (the other company has agreed the name change is warranted) and service New Zealand from Australia using our well performing site. Any thoughts on the best way to achieve this to maximise the good ranking of the Australian site? The Australian site has a lot of back links from a range of sites. I've taken into account the following info at Google but I'm still stuck for the best answer given our tricky situation. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=182192#2 Would love to hear your thoughts on how to approach this one. Cheers in advance.
-
Thanks for the reply mate.
It's going to be tricky to run two separate site because our CRM is also storing info used by the front end (sorry I should of mentioned this before!).
Really hoping we can find a good way to service both regions from the single site.
-
Hey there,
I had to deal with something similar for Au and NZ in the past as well. Difference was that we shared a .com url and had ?site=au and ?site=nz queries. Nightmare! Au (for similar reasons you're looking at overcoming) was cannibalising NZ results. We then changed it all to seperate .com.au and .co.nz domains which ultimately turned them into two sites independant of each other.
This is kind of what you'll be doing. They will be seen as two individual sites which need individual attention to gain search ground. Problem we faced was that our market in Au was larger than NZ and as such had and got more 'internet love' (back links). Au also had the benefit of being around for a long time so it's domain authority was a lot more than the newly formed NZ url.
You could interlink between the two and give the new NZ site a bit of link juice from the established AU kudos but it sounds like you're gonna have to do a bit of leg work to get the new site similar attention the older and established AU site's been getting.
Most importantly would be to ensure that the old NZ domain is 301'd and canonical tagged to the new site. Update and add the new sitemaps. Perhaps media releases and blog/forum posts with the new url to promote it and get that url out into the world.
The other aspect is that it's a localised site (AU and NZ), so your best bet for success for NZ results is to get NZ-centric links. Last thing you want is for your NZ and AU results to get mixed up in the search engines due to an overwhelming amount of AU backlinks to and NZ site. Sorry to be the bearer of kinda bad news, but if my experience (albeit early on) is anything to go by you got to put in the hard yards to get the new NZ site some links and build its NZ kudos.
Good luck mate.
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
-
One domain or two for one company with two lines of business?
Let's say you are building a new company that is involved in two lines of business. Let's for example say one line of business is handling logistics for large conventions where the customer(s) are large corporation and the other line is for wedding planning. Let's say that for certain reasons the owner wants to operate under one brand name, say "PROEVENT" So they will market themselves as PROEVENT Convention Logistics and PROEVENT Wedding Planners. From an SEO perspective, if you have one side of the business doing B-to-B corporate business and the other doing B-to-C do you create two different websites on different domains (proeventconventions.com and proeventweddings.com) with unique design and content, or, do you just use provent.com in order to build better domain authority and on your marketing you use conventions.provent.com that takes you to the convention section of the website and weddings.provent.com takes you to the weddings section?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jazee0 -
SEO and former site
Hi, my client had a site built and hosted with Avvo but we now shut it down and are using a new server. My concern is that Avvo's internal link structure is causing SEO issues. For example, his site will list for "San Diego Criminal Defense Attorney", but is then removed for no reason. Far worse, while he had the AVVO site, it would never rank at all on Google. He's got great content, and no spammy links. This is the site: www.thesandiegocriminallawyer.com. Any thoughts of what I could do to disavow the AVVO pages that Google still has indexed? Does it matter? Or, is it simply a function of time? Thank you for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14400 -
Development site is live (and has indexed) alongside live site - what's the best course of action?
Hello Mozzers, I am undertaking a site audit and have just noticed that the developer has left the development site up and it has indexed. They 301d from pages on old site to equivalent pages on new site but seem to have allowed the development site to index, and they haven't switched off the development site. So would the best option be to redirect the development site pages to the homepage of the new site (there is no PR on dev site and there are no links incoming to dev site, so nothing much to lose...)? Or should I request equivalent to equivalent page redirection? Alternatively I can simply ask for the dev site to be switched off and the URLs removed via WMT, I guess... Thanks in advance for your help! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart1 -
Optimal site structure for travel site
Hi there, I am seo-managing a travel website where we are going to make a new site structure next year. We have about 4000 pages on the site at the moment. The structure is only 2-levels at the moment: Level 1: Homepage Level 2: All other pages (4000 individual pages - (all with different urls)) We are adding another 2-3 levels, but we have a challenge: We have potentially 2 roads to the same product (e.g. "phuket diving product") domain.com/thailand/activities/diving/phuket-diving-product.asp domain.com/activities/diving/thailand/phuket-diving-product.asp I would very much appreciate your view on the problem: How do I solve this dilemma/challenge from a SEO standpoint? I want to avoid DC if possible, I also only want one landing page - for many reasons. And usability is of course also very important. Best regards, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sembseo0 -
Is this site legit?
http://www.gglpls.com/ is this site legit? Submit website to google + directory?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
Questions about turning my wordpress site into an ecommerce site. Experience needed.
I have a wordpress site that is about a product that is now getting some great traffic. Right now It has affiliate stuff on it. I want to sell my own product so I will be turning this wordpress site into an ecommerce site. I want to redesign it so I am not looking for simple plugins to just add a cart. The part I am really confused about is what to do with my posts and categories? How does that work when turning this site into an ecommerce site? Lets say the site is "hats for adults" My post pages are things like "funny hats for adults", "hats for adult men" etc etc. Would I turn these posts pages into like category pages that have a category of products. Or should I create real categories and have my developer turn those into the ecommerce category pages and then redirect my posts to those categories? Maybe I don't even know what I am talking about. Is this even making sense? This is a small site (5posts and 1 category) and most of the traffic will come from the homepage keywords anyways.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PEnterprises0 -
Penalties for site going down often?
I have a client with a site that ranks for some very competitive terms who consistently has server issues and the site goes down for a day at a time. Each time this happens his site seems to drop in site wide rankings and then stay there for months without ever fully recovering. Only part of the rankings are usually recovered. Has anyone else seen this trend? Is it something Google keeps on record without fully removing any penalty addressed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iAnalyst.com0 -
ReLaunching a very old site
Hi, I am in the process of re-vamping a website that hasn't been touched for years and whose rankings slowly dropped. Any best practice in how to do it making sure that there's not any more loss and - hopefully - it could go back to the old glory? The website is http://www.nlp-world.com Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pdmonline0