Geotargeting SEO

[trickcreative]

Hi,

We are and SEO company based in Scotland and have taken on a project where the client works in the UK but has distribution in mainland Europe and the US.

He currently is working off 3 websites targeted at each area Uk, US and Mainland Europe

We are going to rebuild one site and have each area on the site, however we are unsure if sub folders or sub domains would work better.

My personal opinion is that sub domains would be better, but I dont have information to back this

Can anyone advise? Any advice on geotargeting SEO also would be appreciated!

Many Thanks

Chris

[trickcreative]

Hi Guys,

This is great advice! Thank you!

Cheer

[ChrisDyson]

Hi Chris

As with all things SEO it depends.

If you're working for a huge brand and have the budget it might make sense to have different cc-TLD's and target those to each market.

It's a common belief that subfolders are better than subdomains and Google treat a subdomain as a separate site so in terms of maintaining domain authority you might want to take this option.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html

It all will come down to budget, time and long term goals - do people in Germany prefer to see .de extensions do UK people trust .co.uk over .com?

The only advantage I have found for using sub-domains is you can host them on separate servers quite easily - but you can get similar benefits with a CDN.

[SEM-Freak]

Hi Chris,

Take a look at some of Aleyda's posts: http://moz.com/community/users/14053

Working on an international project and am using a combination of country level domains: .co.uk. .de etc. and folders on a .org domain i.e. domain.org/italia. It kind of depends on the size of the operation and budget available.

Most advice I found was don't do it.domain.org.