Is .in domain affecting international traffic inflow to my site?
-
My holiday website http://seekandhide.in/ was completed and went live in Feb 2012.
Last month I got 83% traffic from India and 3-5% each from USA and UK. The rest is a mixed bag from other countries. This is largely the trend since the last 3-4 months. I want to attract more organic traffic from UK and rest of Europe. My SEO consultant says that with a .in domain that will be difficult.
My website currently features unique holiday properties in India that typically attract European tourists so I don't think it is a product issue. But both website visits and sales enquiries remain primarily Indian even though total number of visitors have increased gradually over the last 6 months..
My queries are
1. Is it only the .in domain that's affecting inflow of international traffic?
2. Is there anything that I can do to offset it?
3. I own seekandhide.co.uk too. Is there something I can do with that site without building a whole different website there? If I shift completely to .co.uk, I will have the same issue of being geographically limited and end up losing Indian traffic.
4. Is there something else that is not ok on the site that I am missing?
5. Advice that I get from a lot of consultants is to buy seekandhideindia.com but I plan to add international properties in a couple of years so that name would limit my appeal.
Thanks in advance!
Sudha
-
Alice
Thank you for the reply and it was very useful. I will talk to my SEO consultant about canonicals and geo-taregtting (through Webmaster) and see how we can implement it.
Best,
Sudha
-
Marko
Thank you for taking the time to reply. I agree that my SEO is not good enough currently. But that is precisely the reason I and so many other are here asking questions so that we can do better SEO with the SEOmoz community's inputs.
Rgds
Sudha
-
Hi Sudha,
In response to question 3, I would say that if you already own the .co.uk domain, and you're targeting audiences in the UK, it's definitely a good idea to take advantage of it.
Users often prefer to click on a familiar ccTLD because of the trust that they associate with them (consciously and subconsciously).
You wouldn't have to build a whole new website or stop using the .in site. If you use canonicals and geo-taregtting (through Webmaster), you'll avoid major problems with duplicate content.
Good luck!
-
Google's goal is to return the best and most relevant results to the user, regardless of the top-level domain. If their system determines that the best result is a page on a new gTLD, they'll return that page in search results.
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1050724#gTLDs
You and many others that ask questions here are simply not doing enough good SEO (content, optimization, design, social, etc.). Focus on applying the practices outlined on SEOmoz by 100% and you'll be on a good way.
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
-
Help with international targeting
Hi all! Okay, so we've got a site, let's say example.com - we sell training courses worldwide with a particular focus in just 8 countries.
International SEO | | JamieM1611
Historically, we've never targeted users in different countries effectively, we've just got the example.com that floats about ranking in different countries, but our content is dynamic (obviously a big SEO no-no - we pick up the IP of the user and show the content relevant for that country without the URL's changing)
This obviously presents an SEO flaw in that we can effectively target people in our key countries effectively. So, we're introducing the targeting as subfolders (/uk/, /ie/ etc) my questions are: 1. Would this be the correct implementation of hreflang AND canonical tags for the URL: https://www.example.com/es/ 2. The second thing I was wondering is the 'international targeting' in search console. We haven't (because of our current set up) set a target country for www.example.com (because of the lack of regional targeting and dynamic catch all) - would we be better leaving that untargeted and only specifying the regional targets for the new subfolder URLs (www.example.com/us/ /uk/ etc) or should we set the .com as the USA as default? We'd be a bit weary of doing this because most of our traffic comes from the UK and South Africa, so I'm assuming it would be best to leave this alone unless someone else has a different opinion? I know Googlebot almost always crawls .coms from US, which is why we were thinking of leaving the .com as the 'catch all' and specifying the US version. 3. Finally, we do have a lot pages which don't really change at all (like the about us page) would we give these any special directives to avoid duplicate content (as the content on these won't be changing at all?) or do we just keep the structure as shown above? I.E would the about us page (even though not changing) still be (with the canonical): URL: https://www.example.com/about-us/ (x-default) ? Thanks in advance!0 -
Does not having any hreflang tags for U.S Visitors lead to an increase in International Visitors?
I have seen a massive increase in International Visitors on our website and visitors within the United States dropped off hard this month (by about 20%). Could it be possible that not having any hreflang tags can lead to an increase in International Customers visiting the site even though your sitemap is set to "Target users in United States" within the Google Search Console? In the Google Search Console, I have International Targeting set to "Target users in United States." However, Google Search Console is saying our site doesn't have any hreflang tags. In the Google Search Console, it says "Your site has no hreflang tags. Google uses hreflang tags to match the user's language preference to the right variation of your pages." I'm not sure when that was flagged, but recently we have seen a massive increase in International Visitors to our site from countries such as Russia, Vietnam, Indonesia, the United Kingdom and so on. This poses a problem since our chances of turning one of those visitors into a customer is extremely slim. Along with that, nearly every international customer is contributing to an extremely high Bounce Rate. Attached is a screenshot of the Error about hreflang tags. https://imgur.com/a/XZI45Pw And here is a screenshot of the Country we are targeting. https://imgur.com/a/ArpWe9Z Lastly, attached is a screenshot of all of the Countries that visited our site today: https://imgur.com/a/d0tNwkI
International SEO | | MichaelAtMSP1 -
International Link Building Vendors
I'm working with a large enterprise site with many international domains. I have most of the markets covered but am having trouble identifying link building specialists/vendors in APAC - specifically Japan and Korea. Any recommendations from the community? Many thanks in advance!
International SEO | | JonClark150 -
Is there a list of most important international web directories ?
Would like to submit the different language versions of our site to some non-english web directories worth submitting to. Does anybody know about a good list as a starting point? To get an idea what may be the 3-5 most important web directories in different countries/languages. Thanks
International SEO | | lcourse0 -
How to make Google consider my international subdomain relevant?
We have recently started to look deeper into international SEO. We have search engine optimized our international landing pages, title tags and meta descriptions with keywords etc. so each of the international language we support is SEO'ed for the local market. We support 12 languages, and each of them are located on a subdomain. That means if we say our site is helloworld.com, a person from Germany that lands on this site can switch to German and will then be redirected to de.helloworld.com and all content will be in German. Our problem is that we develop cloud-based software, we have a significant amount of traffic, but whenever we get media coverage or people link to us from anywhere in the world they always link to the root domain which in this case then would be helloworld.com. That means if I go to google.de and type in the exact meta description or title tag we use in German, the Google search engine can't even find us because "I assume" Google don't consider our de.helloworld.com relevant because nobody has ever linked to this site. I would appreciate very much if anyone can give me some advice on how I can address this issue. Thanks a lot! Allan
International SEO | | Todoist0 -
International algorithm update release dates.
Does anyone know if Google releases all algorithm updates worldwide or if they do it slowly across the globe? I have a SEO agency in Argentina and it does not seem like the algorithm updates hit us as they do in the USA. I’ll give you an example. Penguin 2.0 did not even create a dent in some really spammy websites that we watch. Thanks Carla
International SEO | | Carla_Dawson0 -
Good or Bad? - buying a .com domain name that is already branded under a different county code like .nl but a different business model completely
For example - www.example.com (I purchase) and www.example.nl (is in use and well optimized but a different business model) Seeing that this business (example.com) will be based here in the USA and theirs (example.nl) is in the Netherlands and they are both completely different models, is this ok? They are well optimized for the name and it will be a little bit of a challenge to outdo them here in the US as far as the name goes, but the name is really good and the client wants it!
International SEO | | Cyclone1 -
Best domain for spanish language site targeting ALL spanish territories?
hi, we're have a strong .com domain and are looking to launch a site for spanish speakers (ie latin america + spain). we already have various subdirectories for some foreign language sites (eg. ourdomain.co.uk, us.ourdomain.com, ca.ourdomain.com, ourdomainchina.com, ourdomainindia.com etc) we already have a B2B site ourdomain.com-es which will remain the same. I'm thinking best practice would be to launch translated copy for the following: ourdomain.com/es ourdomain.com/cl ourdomain.com/mx ourdomain.com/pt etc etc firstly is this the best option? secondly, i'm really interested to hear whether there is a less time/resource intensive route that would give us visibility in ALL spanish speaking territories? Also - if we go with just one of the above (eg ourdomain.com/cl) how likely are we to get traction in other spanish speaking territories? any help much appreciated!
International SEO | | KevinDunne0