Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
My .com ranks well in the US but not in the UK or other countries?
-
My companies is based in the US, but our customer base is 50% international. The majority of our international customers are from english speaking countries like the UK, AU, NZ, etc. We currently rank well for 2 of our industries core keywords in the US, but are not even on the radar in the UK or AU.
I do generate international backlinks, although not as much as the US backlinks (approximately 25% intl, 75% US). Should I purchase localized urls like .co.uk or .com.au and point those at my .com? Any guidance the community could provide would be greatly appreciated?
-
Hi Batchbook,
I am going to give you a slightly different answer than seowoody.
The issue you are looking at is geography based, not language based from what I can tell right now. That means you don't need hreflang (maybe). This might be different for the actual situation though. Your customers needs determine what route you should go down for international, and I can't tell you what to do without knowing more (Like SEOWoody said).
With all of that being said, use this tool and report back to me your end result (it's something I built). Then I can help you figure out how to deal with this:
-
Hi
Should I purchase localized urls like .co.uk or .com.au and point those at my .com?
This will not help you.
What are you giving Google to help them understand that your website is also for a UK audience? You need to provide flags for Google to understand or it will look at the major factors, e.g.:
- Name, Address, Phone number on your .com domain (are these US, or do you also list a UK address)
- Citations of these details ^ (are they cited on US based websites/directories)
- Server location (is site hosted in US)
- Domain registration details (US address)
- Inbound links (you mentioned 75% US, need more UK focussed + UK PR)
It's hard to give advice when I don't understand your business, but if possible, could you create localised versions of each page? i.e. www.domain.com (original) and www.domain.com/uk/ and www.domain.com/au/ (simple enough if site is built on Wordpress with the WP ML plugin).
This way your www.domain.com/contact/ would remain 'as is' but www.domain.com/uk/contact/ as an example would contain your UK address, UK phone number etc (don't forget you can buy postal addresses in most major cities around the world for ~£30/month).
You'd then build all your external UK links to your www.domain.com/uk/ pages.
One thing to beware of, this approach would only work if you could truly rewrite every page with unique content, which is much harder when it's EN-US to EN-GB or EN-US to EN-AU etc.
Do not copy the content from www.domain.com/product1 to www.domain.com/uk/product1 and think that changing the Americanized spellings to English will work for you. It won't! And you will risk a duplicate content penalty.
This is a good exercise, if done correctly as you'd be surprised how keywords change per country, especially long-tail phrases, even between English speaking countries.
Take vehicle rental as an example - van, truck, suv, rv, ute are all variations of pretty much the same thing, used across different English speaking counties.
Then the longer tail is more complex as American's are more familier with 'Rental', whereas English more commonly use 'Hire'. So if you're targeting one phrase only on domain.com and that phrase is suv rental, the guys looking for ute hire in Australia will never find you.
Oh -- You'd also need to implement href lang tags into your meta head to tell Google which version is for which Country.
Hope this helps.
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
-
Page rank and menus
Hi, My client has a large website and has a navigation with main categories. However, they also have a hamburger type navigation in the top right. If you click it it opens to a massive menu with every category and page visible. Do you know if having a navigation like this bleeds page rank? So if all deep pages are visible from the hamburger navigation this means that page rank is not being conserved to the main categories. If you click a main category in the main navigation (not the hamburger) you can see the sub pages. I think this is the right structure but the client has installed this huge menu to make it easier for people to see what there is. From a technical SEO is this not bad?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AL123al0 -
If a page ranks in the wrong country and is redirected, does that problem pass to the new page?
Hi guys, I'm having a weird problem: A new multilingual site was launched about 2 months ago. It has correct hreflang tags and Geo targetting in GSC for every language version. We redirected some relevant pages (with good PA) from another website of our client's. It turned out that the pages were not ranking in the correct country markets (for example, the en-gb page ranking in the USA). The pages from our site seem to have the same problem. Do you think they inherited it due to the redirects? Is it possible that Google will sort things out over some time, given the fact that the new pages have correct hreflangs? Is there stuff we could do to help ranking in the correct country markets?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ParisChildress1 -
How to rank for a location/country without having a physical address in that location/country
How do I go about it if my physical address (office) is in Country A but I want to rank my website in Country B, C and D (without having an office or physical address in the countries B, C and D)? I am aware of people setting up virtual offices in other countries/cities and adding them to Google Places/Maps with toll free phone numbers, but I don't wish to do any of that. I know Google will catch up with this one day or the other and punish me hard for trying to play games with it. Is there a way rank a website in another country without actually having a physical location there? If yes, please guide me how to go about it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KS__0 -
Using a US CDN (Cloudflare) for a UK Site. Should I use a UK Based CDN as it says my server is based in USA
Hi All, We are a UK Company with Uk customers only and use CloudFlare CND. Our Site is hosted by a UK company with servers here but from looking online and checking where my site is hosted etc etc , some sites are telling me the name of our UK Hosted company and other sites are telling me my site is hosted in San Fran (USA) , where I presume the Cloudflare is based. I know Cloudflare has a couple of servers in the UK it uses but given all my customers are UK based ,I don't want this is affect rankings etc , as I thought it was a ranking benefit to be hosted in the country you are based. Is there any issue with this and should I change or is google clever enough to know so i shouldn't worry. thanks Pet
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Ranking on google but not Bing?
Any reason why I could be ranking for Google but not Bing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edward-may0 -
Moving from a .org to a .com
We have been a .org website for as long as the web as been around. We just recently got the .com for our organization and wondered what the transition process would be like. We offer a lot of content to help parents with parenting and so as a content driven site we have about 13k external links and 1,200 linking root domains links to our site. Will we loose all our links in the transition to the .com? Is there a way to do this well that helps our brand and also retains our google ranking? Thanks so much for any and all help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | movieguide0 -
If I own a .com url and also have the same url with .net, .info, .org, will I want to point them to the .com IP address?
I have a domain, for example, mydomain.com and I purchased mydomain.net, mydomain.info, and mydomain.org. Should I point the host @ to the IP where the .com is hosted in wpengine? I am not doing anything with the .org, .info, .net domains. I simply purchased them to prevent competitors from buying the domains.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djlittman0 -
Changing a url from .html to .com
Hello, I have a client that has a site with a .html plugin and I have read that its best to not have this. We currently have pages ranking with this .html plug in. However If we take the plug in out will we lose rankings? would we need a 301 or something?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0