Can a country level domain perform well in international SEO if all the targeted keywords are related to that country domain?
-
Hi fellow Mozers,
I am doing international SEO on Google US, UK, UAE and Saudi Arabia. All my targeted keywords have my country name in it, for example, export companies in France, best import companies in France and so on. Finally, my website has a country level domain i.e. www.xyz.co.fr
_Hence, my questions are: _
1. Is it good have a country level domain in this case or should I go TLDs?
2. Should my Google Plus page be a local business page or company page from SEO perspective? I have more than 10000 users who have +1 my website.
_Thanks in advance. _
-
_Should my Google Plus page be a local business page or company page from SEO perspective? _
- Local Business or Place
This is usually the one to go for as it gives the option of giving your phone number which will be tied to your Google Places account. Its for A business in a location with a name Joe's Pizza in Aberdeen or Jean's Pet Shop in Paris - Product or Brand
This is used if the product is less geocentric and clearly defined like clothes, cars, electronics and financial services - Company, Institution or Organization
Use this category if you are less focused on selling and more of a service provider (Oxfam, Red Cross) - Arts, Entertainment or Sports
If you set up a fan page .. here is where to do it. TV, films, music, books, sports and theatre - Other
Suffice to say .. you will be asked if the material is suited to under 18 year olds or if there is any alcohol related material (from:http://www.calcouk.com/set_up_google_business_page.html)
This is of first importance, SEO will work the same way for most of these, for more specific SEO advice to G+ Pages see here: http://maximizesocialbusiness.com/google-plus-seo-8351/
- Local Business or Place
-
I've not done a lot of geotargeting links but I would assume the same rules as normal link building apply but with an eye as to the country of origin. Maybe look at some of your competitors and see where they have links from. Maybe talk to local suppliers and see if they could give you a link. In your case, you want the links to indicate they're in France.
I don't know that a localize Google+ page will help you geolocate. I've not experimented with Google+ in that way.
-
Hi Highland,
Thanks for your time and giving a very detailed answer.
Yes, I have .fr ccTLD and I am targeting multiple geographies.
Let me make my situation clearer.
For example,we provide export management ( and most of our work come from foreign companies). Hence, if someone in UAE wants to outsource his company exports to a French company and searches in Google UAE " "Exports Management services in France" or " Exports companies in France". Now, which domain would you prefer?
Now to answer your questions,
1. Do you have different pages in different languages? -- No, our complete site is in English. ( as 95% of our international sales happen in English only)
2. Do you have links from the regions you want to target? - How do we go about it? Is their any Moz tool that can help to find the targeted links?
Moreover, regarding User Behavior, in our case, wont a person sitting in UAE click on .fr site considering it to be more relevant and as our Meta Title and Description are in English would it not help him to know here is a French site that has content in English? ( Perfect for his business )
Finally, regarding Google +, I internally checked and our team is telling me that we have a company page, can we create local Google Plus page as we have hardly posted anything in the company page?
-
So, just to get on the same page, you have a .fr ccTLD but you want to target US, UK, Middle East, etc. Is that right?
Remember that a ccTLD is a hint to Google that it is targeted towards that geographical region. But, at the end of the day, a TLD is a TLD. What makes a site rank for a given term is far beyond just the TLD. Do you have different pages in different languages? Is that copy well written in those languages or are you simply dumping them into a translation program? Do you have links from the regions you want to target?
There's no reason a .fr can't rank well for any term in any region. I see .co.uk results in the US SERPs all the time. But it does bring up another problem: user behavior. If a UK person sees a .fr they might skip your site, assuming it's French. Then again, they might just ignore the ccTLD and click it anyways. it might be best to get a gTLD instead if you want to go the single site route.
The best solution with geotargeting is always to segment by ccTLD. There's no duplicate content penalties, each domain sends its own hint, and it makes marketing it all easier. Plus users know that domain is for their country/region.
As for Google+... depends on your answer to the question above. If you're going to segment by ccTLD then build a localized page. if not, go with a company.
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
-
Keyword Stuffing
Working on optimizing my e-commerce website. We have managed to obtain very good ranking on most keywords that we use directing to different products. However, there is one that ranks very low, and Moz alerts that keyword stuffing might be one of the reasons. While I have edited the content to include less of the same keyword on that particular page, the links to different products that contain the same keyword from the same page (accessories and related products) I believe are increasing my count and it seems to be working against me. \ Should I start eliminating some of these links so as to eventually obtain a better ranking? any help would be greatly appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | NewVape0 -
Problem with internal links.
Hello,I am trying to do an audit of the internal links of my site at zenplugs.com. I am having great difficulty simply trying to establish how many internal links there are on the home page. Off the top of my head I think there are probably 20-25 but Screaming Frog tells me there are 574, the MozBar is listing zero and Open Site Explorer is telling me my site hasn't been indexed yet. I have tried several web based services but most of them don't work. Can anyone recommend a tool which has given them a number they trust? My second query is that one of the tools told me that there are 4 links on the home page with no anchor text, linking to http://zenplugs.com/#. Is this a problem? Many thanks, in advance. Toby
On-Page Optimization | | T0BY0 -
Homepage SEO
Hi I have designed my site with about 10 pages which focus on my main keywords. My question is what should I do about the homepage? Do I focus on a keyword on just my brand name? The homepage is a showcase of all my services and a bit about us. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | TIG990 -
Would Panda target this?
Hi guys, We suffered a massive rankings drop in September 2012, same date as Panda 20, so we've been trying to fix the issues since with no little to no success. I think these Q&A's work best if I ask a specific question, instead of just screaming for help, so hopefully we're looking in the right place at least. One area I've been looking into, is of course, content (being a Panda penalty). However, I'm not sure what about our content is causing a problem. We provide a phone unlocking service and have over 6000 handsets that we can unlock. We only allow search engines to index 5 of them, due to these being those with unique product descriptions (there are over 100 more but we want to start getting our rankings back a bit at a time). We also let them index our manufacturer pages, news and support pages, 160 approx in total. On our handset and manufacturer pages we have much of the same content, with a few words difference to alter the price or the name of the manufacturer/phone. We also change our delivery times for some, as it can vary and have a "Why use us" section which is the same for each handset page. In my mind there is no point changing these areas to be unique to each page as they clearly describe our service and what we offer. Changing each one for each page, especially if we wanted to start adding our other remaining 5995 handset would be ridiculously. It would also clearly be manipulative is we're just rewriting the same thing in a slightly different way to benefit a search engine and not the users. Does anyone know if this type of content would be seen as duplicate content and would result in a penalty? And is there anything we can do about it? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | purpleindigo
Darren.0 -
How can my national ecommerce site geo target specific states for specific pages?
If I am selling sports related products for sports/teams across the country, how can I target specific states or cities through various pages on my website. I am using adwords but would like to use increase organic search results.
On-Page Optimization | | briggsb0 -
How would you target alternative names for your product with the use of internal/landing pages?
Recently, there has been some new industry names that have emerged for the type of software we provide and we want to make sure that we rank for those terms (of course!). The 3 names combined are too long for a title tag and would look odd to incl all 3 in the homepage. Any suggestions (or examples) of how this could done without looking spammy? I also don't really know where to put this within our website. e.g. enterprise portal, enterprise information portal (EIP) or corporate portal Any suggestions would be most welcome
On-Page Optimization | | alexpeps0 -
Should I bother with branded keywords in my onsite SEO improvements?
Someone recently told me that using branded keywords extensively in your copy and titles may be unnecessary so long as you have a substantial catalog of back links containing keyword rich anchor text. Can I take this to mean I can privilege non-branded terms over branded in my onsite SEO efforts?
On-Page Optimization | | bbelgard0 -
301 redirect (www.domain.com/index to www.domain.com)
Hello, Please let me know what are the exact right steps in order to get rid of the duplicate content issues related with: www.domain.com/index.html same as www.domain.com without creating an infinite loop. Do you have a step by step guide posted within seomoz including 301 redirect for non www to www for all urls and index.whatever to main domain name without going into a infinite loop ? btw how to you spot the loop ? is it obvious like never ending refresh of the home page ? thanks a lot !
On-Page Optimization | | eyepaq2