How to make a .co.uk work in the US
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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
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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).
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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.
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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
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