.CA or .COM?
-
If a real estate client of mine only wants to rank in the Google.ca, Yahoo.ca, and Bing.ca listings (doesn't care about the U.S. search engines), would it be advantageous of me to have her domain name by .ca and forget the .com?
She lives here in Phoenix, is originally Canadian, and goes back and forth. Interestingly, when searching in Google.ca, most domain names or .com. Is this because these people are trying to target both search engines?
Thank you!
Chris Gray
-
Well, even the Moz staff/associates don't seem to be agreeing on this one - it's definitely an unusual situation. There were some calls to try a .ca domain, but since you see so many .com's ranking, we're not sure that's going to have much of an impact.
Part of the problem is that real estate is a really competitive market for SEO, and many of the agents targeting Phoenix-related properties will also be local. My guts says that, if your client can only take on Canadian customers, then push the Canadian "local" signals hard, and don't worry about the Phoenix signals as much (except for content and keyword targeting).
-
No, you're not crazy
It's basically two local SEO problems in one, and I'm honestly not sure where the sweet spot is. If you overoptimize for Phoenix, you may hurt your standing on Google.ca.I suspect you have to keyword optimize for Phoenix/Arizona, but geo-target for Canada. Since Canada pulls a lot of .com results, though, you can afford to have some Phoenix-based geo-cues. I'm not sure anyone can tell you the perfect balance. I'm going to see if the broader Moz team has experience with this issue.
-
-
Peter,
True, it is a task. But there quite a few competitors in this area if you search for 'phoenix real estate,' 'arizona real estate,' etc. in google.ca.
It seems like I need to show the search engines that my goal is to rank in the Canadian search engines, but that I'm local in Phoenix. Therefore, I need to do heavy-duty local optimization for Phoenix.
Does this sound like it would work or am I making things up?
-
I would probably recommend doing both the .com (since it's more universally accepted, esp. here in the USA) as well as the .ca (since you could probably script it with French, English and so forth for local people who know your realtor).
Additonally, having reciprocal backlinks will ease the transition for those who are local or snowbirds who like the sunniness of AZ.
Best of luck Chris!
-
So, just to clarify, she's basically looking for Canadians who want to buy property in Arizona? Wow, that's quite a niche, and not an easy SEO problem. You're crossing 2 geo-targeting streams, in a sense.
-
I am trying to have her rank for: Arizona Real Estate, Arizona Homes for Sale, and Phoenix Real Estate (all in Google.ca, Yahoo.ca, and Bing.ca)
-
What keywords is she trying to rank for? This will help us answer the question
-
Her business is located officially in Scottsdale, AZ. She does have an office in her home in Calgary, Canada, but doesn't want people to know about it (because it's in her home). Thoughts with this new info?
Also, can you elude a bit to these other factors to target Canada? This way I can do further research. Thank you so much!
-
Is her business located in Canada (e.g. she has a physical Canadian office address that will be on the site)?
I would recommend that, along with the .ca, plus dozens of other factors to specifically target Canada.
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
-
International website sharing with .com/.au/.uk
I have a small business in the United States and would like to copy our main website for my international partners. My website is a .com. I think that their domains will end in their country codes: .au and .uk. We are open to using different domains. We plan to share blog articles and other content, but do not wish to be penalized for duplication. I have tried to read articles on this topic, but am unfamiliar with a lot of the terms. Is there any way to do this simply? Many thanks, Steph
International SEO | | essential_steph0 -
Geo-Targeting separate TLD's where both are .com domains
Hi I have a client who owns two separate TLDs for the same brand (for the sake of this post, we'll call the two sites www.site-a.com and www.site-b.com). For site www.site-a.com the website has been around for a while and is their primary site for their US operations which is their heartland, is well established in the SERPS and is where they make most of their money. As they looked to expand to the UK, they then created www.site-b.com and added the UK as a subfolder (so www.site-b.com/uk) and geo-targeted it towards the UK in Webmaster tools . The site has recently launched but they now find that, when a customer searches for their brand in the UK, they find www.site-a.com in position 1 (which, given it's tailored for a primary US audience, has a significantly lower conversion rate for UK traffic) and www.site-b.com in position 2. However, the client doesn't want to specifically geo target www.site-a.com to the USA as they feel it might affect where they appear for other international markets aside from the UK. So the question is, how can they, with the existing infrastructure, help remove www.site-a.com from the UK SERPs without adversely affecting their rank elsewhere? Hope this makes sense and thanks in advance for your help. James
International SEO | | jimmygs19820 -
Shall I automatically redirect international visitors from www.domain.com to e.g. www.domain.com/es? What is best SEO practice?
We have chosen the one domain approach with our international site having different language versions in subdirectory of main domain:
International SEO | | lcourse
www.domain.com/es
www.domain.com/it
etc. What is SEO-wise best practice for implementing international index pages. I see following options: entering www.domain.com will display without redirection the index page in language of user (e.g based on IP or browser) in www.domain.com
Example: www.booking.com entering www.domain.com will always show English index page.
Additionally one may display a message in the header if IP from other country with link to other language version.
Example: www.apple.com entering www.domain.com will always redirect automatically to country specific subdirectory based on IP
Example: www.samsung.com Any thoughts/suggestions on what may be best solution from a SEO perspective? For a user I believe options 1) & 3) are preferable.0 -
How to get EU visitors to .co.uk and US visitors to .com
Hi all Re: www.explanar.com and www.explanar.co.uk We have developed a website for the US and UK, with a shop on each. Each site has a network of countries they can export to. US sells and ships to US, South America, Caribbean and so on UK sells and ships to UK, Europe, and Africa, etc Currently, visitors from Germany (.de) searching for phrases "Explanar", or "golf swing trainer" get the .com (US) site. They cannot buy from this site, so we have added a message to tell them to go to the UK site (.co.uk, but what I really want is for the European visitors to find the UK site only. .com is the original URL, but with new content
International SEO | | Crumpled_Dog
.co.uk has just been set up In the long run, we will set up .de URLs with German language, and other countries will follow, but not all. Any thoughts would be great. Thanks
Scott0 -
Poor Google.co.uk ranking for a UK based .net, but great Google.com
I run an extremely popular news & community website at http://www.onedirection.net, but we're having a few ranking issues in Google.co.uk. The site gets most of its traffic from the USA which isnt a bad thing - but for our key term "one direction", we currently don't rank at all on Google.co.uk. The site is located on a server based in Manchester, UK, and we used to rank very well earlier this year - fluttering about in position 5-7 most of the time. However earlier this year, around July, we started to fall down to page 2 or 3, and at the start of this month we don't rank at all for "one direction" on Google.co.uk. On Google.com however we're very strong, always on page one. We're definitely indexed on .co.uk, just not for main search term - which I find a bit frustrating. All the content on our site is unique, and we write 2-4 stories every day. We have an active forum too, so a lot of our content is user-generated. We've never had any "unnatural link building" messages in Webmaster Tools, and our link profile looks fine to me. Do we just need more .co.uk links, or are we being penalised for something? (I can't imagine what though). It certainly seems that way though. Another site, "www.onedirection.co.uk" which is never updated and has a blatant ad for something completely unrelated on its homepage, ranks above us at the moment- which I find quite frankly appalling as our site is pretty much regarded as the worlds most popular One Direction news and fan site. We've spent the last few months improving the page-load times of our site, and we've reduced any unneccesary internal linking on the site. Approx 2 months ago we launched a new forum on the site, 301'ing all the old forum links to the new one, so that could have had an impact on rankings - but we'd expect to see an impact on Google.com as well if this was an issue. We definitely feel that we should be ranking higher on Google.co.uk. Does anyone have any ideas what the iproblems could be? Cheers, Chris.
International SEO | | PixelKicks0 -
International SEO: abcJP.com OR abcJapan.com
The ccTLD .jp is not available. What URL should I use instead? MybrandJP.com or MybrandJapan.com *Mybrand is a four-letter acronym
International SEO | | FXDD0 -
Chop down a .com to local domains - Is it worth it?
I'm wondering what would be the best approach for further expanding the online presence of the business I work for. Let me start off with the resources at my disposal. We own visafirst.com and run the business for 7 years. All that time we had the domain online. There was a penalty back in 2005, I think (for hidden text). I've been dealing with the domain since 2007. In the last few years we got translations in French, German, Italian, some pages in Japanese, and recently we got it translated in Spanish. The translations don't hold all the products the English version has. We translate only products which we can offer to the targeted audience. So far, I use language folders /en/, /fr/, /de/ etc. I have the settings in Google's Webmaster Tools set to the most appropriate country (the one we want to attract customers from). We own a lot of local domains .co.uk, .ie, .fr .de, .es, .jp, etc. Currently we either use them for small projects, like AdWords (to improve CTR) or have them point to the .com version with canonical. I like nothing more than the idea of having the local domains appear in local search results, without that inflicting damage on the .com version. If I decide to go with the local domains and redirect (probably I will use canonical to avoid the redirect mess) the existing portions of the site to their relevant local domain - visafirst.com/fr/ to point to visafirst.fr etc., I'm afraid that I would take too much away from the domain in terms of content and backlinks. So, I'm faced with the following question - Should I risk it with the local domains where we have physical presence, or should I continue using the flagship domain. Also, would local domains improve the CTR a lot? I will test that with AdWords in the days to come, however it would be nice to know if someone has faced this before. Thank You, Svet Stefanov
International SEO | | Svetoslav1 -
Multi-lingual SEO: Country-specific TLD's, or migration to a huge .com site?
Dear SEOmoz team, I’m an in-house SEO looking after a number of sites in a competitive vertical. Right now we have our core example.com site translated into over thirty different languages, with each one sitting on its own country-specific TLD (so example.de, example.jp, example.es, example.co.kr etc…). Though we’re using a template system so that changes to the .com domain propagate across all languages, over the years things have become more complex in quite a few areas. For example, the level of analytics script hacks and filters we have created in order to channel users through to each language profile is now bordering on the epic. For a number of reasons we’ve recently been discussing the cost/benefit of migrating all of these languages into the single example.com domain. On first look this would appear to simplify things greatly; however I’m nervous about what effect this would have on our organic SE traffic. All these separate sites have cumulatively received years of on/off-site work, and even if we went through the process of setting up page-for-page redirects to their new home on example.com, I would hate to lose all this hard-work (and business) if we saw our rankings tank as a result of the move. So I guess the question is, for an international business such as ours, which is the optimal site structure in the eyes of the search engines; Local sites on local TLD’s, or one mammoth site with language identifiers in the URL path (or subdomains)? Is Google still so reliant on TLD for geo targeting search results, or is it less of a factor in today’s search engine environment? Cheers!
International SEO | | linklater0
