Help: Newbie trying to optimize for several international domains

[edward-may]

We have three domain names co.nz, com.au and com.  We are very new and have been told to optimize for co.nz first before going into com.au and com.  Having said that, we have outsourced an seo company to optimize our co.nz site, however I would like to optimize the com.au and the com based on the information we currently receive for co.nz.

Any suggestions on how to go about doing this? I looked at our competition and it seems they have the same content across all 3 domains, but they have changed the meta tags for each domain and that's about it.

Any tips or ideas on how we could possibly do better? I know its early stages.... but as a newbie some advice around this would be great!

Thanks

[grobro]

I appreciate it if people tell me when I am on the wrong path.

[gfiorelli1]

I'm sorry gobro, but I had to thumb down your answer because, even if not completely wrong, it was too much generic.

Suggesting the beginners guide to SEOs to someone asking for International SEO, is like offering the Encyclopedia Britannica for consultin about a very specific topic :-).

Moreover, what Matt Cutts told and that you cites was proved incorrect by hundreds of professional specialized in International SEO.

[gfiorelli1]

I strongly suggest you to check the section dedicated to International SEO, which you can find in this part of the Learn SEO part of the Moz.com site.

Remember that if you published the same content, or even clone sites in different territorial domain names, risks are high of having very poor organic visibility for all of them.

Even if they are in the same language, remember that culture is different in those countries, as well that their English is not the same (New Zealand English has expressions that are not used elsewhere).

As gobro wrote, small things as currencies, addresses and any other "localization" elements are essential too for helping Google understanding what country a website is really targeting.

At the same time, then - as you can see more deeply in that section I linked above - you should implement the international seo mark up rel="alternate" hreflang="x-X".

Finally, remember to earn local links for each web site. Not only them are needed for making each website more authoritative, but also for reinforcing the geo-targeting of the websites themselves to Google eyes.

i.e.: if a website has more links from australian sites then american ones, that probably means that it is more relevant for australian people than american one, hence it should be shown more in google.co.au than google.com

[grobro]

You can do a lot better if that's really everything they did. This is a great resource to get started: http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

Side Note:

Matt Cutts told in a video in 2011, that it's not a problem to have the same content on like 3 or 4 top level domains, if they are for different countries but in the same language. But you should make sure that country specific words and for example currency signs are correct.