How to make a .co.uk work in the US
-
Hi
Anyone out there got any tips on the best way to get a .co.uk working well in Google US? We have a Travel site working fantastically well in the UK for some very competitive keywords. It is ranking okay for the same keywords in US but nothing particularly great. Any tips on bespoke activity to drive the ranking for the site in the US without undermining the UK rankings.
Thanks
Pete
-
Hi Pete,
both answers by Greg and Malcom are correct.
More over, take into account that any territorial domain name, as the .co.uk, automatically geo-target the given country territory. That is the reason why .co.uk sites do not perform well on Google.com
The best solution is to have separate domain names for the two territories and implement the use of the rel=alternate hreflang in order to suggest to Google what URL show in the SERPs of the two domain, being both in English.
Be aware that - even though Google sometimes suggests to use that tag along with the cross domain canonical one, that is true just for those pages of both sites, which have exactly the same content.
Said that, remember always to geo-localize the content for US and UK in order to make them different (language, currency, address, phone numbers).
-
I have never seen an example of a .co.uk ranking well in the US market. The logical approach is to use a .com TLD and use Google WMT to set the target to US. You can't set a .co.uk as far as I believe because it's main purpose is to serve the UK market anyway. I have been in situations where a .com and .co.uk have both targeted at the UK and they basically end up cannibalising each other until one wins and one disappears.
Your best bet is to create a US-separate site (with different content!).
In my personal opinion you will never reach #1 with a .co.uk on google.com, I could be mistaken though and having a US IP address, US links pointing in may help.
-
Hi Pete,
I would suggest having a separate US version of the site (ideally on a .com domain matching your .co.uk) rather than trying to target both from the .co.uk domain name. I think (as you've already experienced to an extent) it would be very difficult to target both and could have long-term negative effects on your work in the UK rankings.
Hope that helps.
Thanks, Greg
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
-
I am working on a site with a .global TLD. What are the SEO implications?
In particular, I have a PA and DA score of 1 across all pages on the site - is this the cause?
Technical SEO | | Ronanmartin0 -
Unable to demote contact us & about us pages from sitelink?
Hey all, It's been 3 months now I demoted contact us & about us page via search console but it still appearing in my sitelink. Is there any other guidelines to be followed? Do anyone have the same experience? Susan.
Technical SEO | | promodirect0 -
Bigcommerce only allows us to have https for our store only, not the other pages on our site, so we have a mix of https and http, how is this hurting us and what's the best way to fix?
So we aren't interested in paying a thousand dollars a month just to have https when we feel it's the only selling point of that package, so we have https for our store and the rest of the site blogs and all are http. I'm wondering if this would count as duplicate content or give us some other unforeseen penalty due to the half way approach of https being implemented. If this is hurting us, what would you recommend as a solution?
Technical SEO | | Deacyde0 -
If I want clean up my URLs and take the "www.site.com/page.html" and make it "www.site.com/page" do I need a redirect?
If I want clean up my URLs and take the "www.site.com/page.html" and make it "www.site.com/page" do I need a redirect? If this scenario requires a 301 redirect no matter what, I might as well update the URL to be a little more keyword rich for the page while I'm at it. However, since these pages are ranking well I'd rather not lose any authority in the process and keep the URL just stripped of the ".html" (if that's possible). Thanks for you help! [edited for formatting]
Technical SEO | | Booj0 -
What changes do i need to make to my site to get into google news
Hi, when we had the old design, we were in google news but then when we upgraded our site, we had a major problem which forced us to have to redesign our site. Since then we have not been included in google news and we would like to get back in. We only want to be in google news for the following page http://www.in2town.co.uk/Latest-News-Headlines But for some reason, no matter what we do we keep getting knocked back. I would love to know what we should be doing to get into google news and see what the problems are. We have moved to a bigger dedicated server to increase speed so i know it is not that. Any help would be great Also is there an alternative to google news that i can get our site into to generate traffic and to get our news stories straight out to people Hi, Thank you for your note. We appreciate your interest in sharing your content with us. However, when we reviewed your site, we found that we cannot include it in Google News at this time. We have certain guidelines in place regarding the quality of sites which are included in Google News. Please feel free to review these guidelines at the following link: http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=40787 We know it can be frustrating to not have more information about this but we appreciate your efforts and understanding. We will log your site for future consideration. Please keep in mind that we will be unlikely to review your site for at least 60 days following this email. Thanks for your understanding and your continued interest in Google News. Regards,
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-184886
The Google News Team0 -
Making one landing page rank higher than another
I have a website which uses an individual landing pages to greet traffic for each suburb in our service area. For a long time we had one landing page which covered a region of suburbs but we've since added individual pages for those suburbs as well. However, Google will always display results for the old regional page, even though the new pages are optimized for searches in that area. Is there anything I can do to get Google to display the pages I want?
Technical SEO | | mark.schad0 -
How can i get google adsense to work properly to earn income
Hi i am trying to get google adsense to work properly but i am not winning. What i am trying to do is, to get the adverts to reflect on the content. So for example this page here http://www.in2town.co.uk/news/mark-feehily/westlife-mark-feehily-announces-split-from-long-term-boyfriend I would like google adsense to have celebrity adverts such as celebrity news sites, celebrity fashion, concert tickets etc. I want the adverts to be related to celebrity but it is not happening. Can anyone please let me know how to do this and also if i have the google adsense in the right place as since rebuilding the site we have not earned anything with google adsense many thanks
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Seomoz api for domains working, for domains+directory not?
We're working on a tool using the seomoz api ... for domains we're always getting the right values, but for longer URLs we're having troubles ... Example: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/6-reasons-why-qa-sites-can-boost-your-seo-in-2011-despite-googles-farmer-update-12160 won't work http://www.seomoz.org/blog works Any idea what we might be doing wrong?
Technical SEO | | gmellak0