What shall we do to increase organic traffic for both the sites?
-
We have 2 English language bookselling websites targeted for USA and UK audience with some content variations but 60%-70% of the content on site remains the same.
The site is hosted in USA. One is hosted on brandname.co.uk (for United Kingdom) and one is on brandname.com(For United States)
The precautions that we have already taken to save it from being marked duplicates are:
- used rel=alternate element for all product detail pages
- currency in both the sites are different that is GBP and USD
- Geotarget settings done for USA and UK respectively through webmaster tools Launched backlink campaign to gain from local sites and directory respectively
- have tried to differentiate the product by using different product specific terms like Publishing Year: vis a vis published in:
Author Vis a vis Written by
Format vis a vis binding type
Add to cart vis a vis add to basket and so on
What remains the same:
1. Product detail pageTitle
2. Product detail page Meta Description
3. Product Name- That is Title of the book which cannot be changed anyways
4. About the product text –The memo or “About the Book” that comes along with the book and is same across each booksellers site. This is impossible to be differentiated as the database have more than 3 Million books
brandname.com which is older (2 Yrs) of the two has traffic around 2500-3000 daily visits while the brandname.co.uk which is 5 months old has 150-200 daily visitors. Both sites have around 4 Million pages.
Need suggestions what are we doing wrong and what extra can be done to boost organic traffic?
-
Thanks Irving for understanding it. Here are the links for both sites
-
- .co.uk sites have a better chance of ranking in google UK still.
- he's doing all the right things to send the right signals to Google.
- Google doesn't care where the UK site is hosted.
- he's geotargeting so even if it's duplicate content it's getting filtered properly.
- there is not really any problem as to how this is implemented if he has no problem with maintaining two sites.
What can be done to boost traffic is a different question. Better on page SEO, if we had the URL we could offer suggestions there.
-
Thanks for the answer but it is really difficult to undo what has been done. We are trying to reach out as many country as we can with multiple TLDs. We have launched 2 and in next month going to come up with .de and .jp with translated content in local languages.
The idea to have co.uk, .com. .jp. .de was purely brand management, localization of currency, language barrier, some operational convenience, accounting etc.
Is there anything that can be done with the existing strategy to boost traffic?
-
I totally agree with you, although people don't like to receive answers that might brake their strategy. .co.uk is pointless.
-
Firstly, I have to ask why you are using both the .co.uk and .com domains? You really only need the .com as you should be able to get rankings in the UK relatively easily with the .com. Of course it is nice to have the .co.uk for brand/reputation management but it isn't necessary to rank in the UK. Also when you say the site is hosted in the US, I assume your hosting for the .co.uk domain is also in the US? If this is the case, then it is kind of pointless having the .co.uk domain in the first place.
My advice would be to consolidate your sites into one, using the .com domain as the primary domain considering it is older and has more authority. After that you will need to make sure that it contains both US and UK specific content (prices £/$, shipping etc.). Then you will need to change your link building to incorporate a percentage of UK based links.
This way you should be able to rank well in both the US and UK, without any duplicate content worries.
Hope that helps,
Adam.
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
-
Can service request pages be indexed for a service site?
I think there is no point in indexing service request pages for a service site. And it causes the indexing of the main pages to be done with a delay. Does anyone have experience with indexing service request pages and their results?
On-Page Optimization | | sora.ya04680 -
Word Count - Content site vs ecommerce site
Hi there, what are your thoughts on word count for a content site vs. an ecommerce site. A lot of content sites have no problem pushing out 500+ words per page, which for me is a decent amount to help you get traction. However on ecommerce sites, a lot of the time the product description only needs to be sub-100 words and the total word count on the page comes in at under 300 words, a lot of that could be considered duplicate. So what are your views? Do ecommerce sites still need to have a high word count on the product description page to rank better?
On-Page Optimization | | Bee1590 -
Company name in Site Meta description?
Ok. So I know that you should have your company name in the site title, but is it all that important in the site description? The reason I ask is because I am competing with another company for the #1 position (I was number 1, now #2) that has an 8 character name and mine is 22 taking away from a great deal of real estate in my 150-160 character site description in which I could provide additional information describing my company. Should I remove my name in the site description enabling me to use more descriptive keywords and actionable text such as (Find, research, contact, professional, info) etc. Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | photoseo10 -
Should I index news and blog posts which receive little traffic
Hi all, I have a very large site at the moment with a handful of high authority pages with great content which describe the charity's work. But the main content on the site is blogs and news article which, while being good quality content from a reader's point of view, receive little traffic from search engines as they are so niche and long-tail. They do, however, get ok internal traffic from other pages. Should these pages be indexed still or should I remove them? Is there a rule of thumb regarding minimum clicks/bounce rates that an indexed page should have? What do big news agencies do with really niche articles that may get next to no traffic but have valuable content on for those that do click through? Thanks in advance! Den
On-Page Optimization | | Deniz0 -
Yesterday our site had a page rank of 5, today not ranked.
All pages on our site as of today are showing current page is not ranked by google, we have been page rank 5 for about 4 years now, we still seem to be showing in google searches. Anyone have any ideas as to why?
On-Page Optimization | | wcuk0 -
Does anyone have any experience with using Altruik for optimizing a retail site?
Greetings - can anyone offer an opinion on the services of http://www.Altruik.com/? They claim to be able to effectively optimize the deep pages of online retailers. I welcome any and all feedback! Eric
On-Page Optimization | | Ericc220 -
Site architecture
Hi guys, I have a new website in the recycling bins sector called recyclingbins (dot) co (dot) uk. We are building it as we speak and just wondered if the below would be a good choice for our category pages? office recycling bins kitchen recycling bins outdoor recycling bins school recycling bins home recycling bins What i am particularly interested in is whether having the keyword recycling bins at the end of every category is too much? Thank you Jon
On-Page Optimization | | imrubbish0 -
Best practice for franchise sites with duplicated content
I know that duplicated content is a touchy subject but I work with multiple franchise groups and each franchisee wants their own site, however, almost all of the sites use the same content. I want to make sure that Google sees each one of these sites as unique sites and does not penalize them for the following issues. All sites are hosted on the same server therefor the same IP address All sites use generally the same content across their product pages (which are very very important pages) *templated content approved by corporate Almost all sites have the same design (A few of the groups we work with have multiple design options) Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks Again Aaron
On-Page Optimization | | Shipyard_Agency0