What's the best strategy for acquisition?
-
Hi All,
Recently acquired a competitor company. This acquired company is small in size but is the exclusive UK distributor for a gigantic Swedish company. This is the way the current domain structure is divided.
- swedish-supplier.se (Not owned by us - swedish supplier )
- Swedish-supplier.co.uk (owned by us, operating as the swedish supplier in the UK)
- New-acquired-company.com (owned by us)
The supplier doesn't want us to have two websites as they keep getting confused customers. Because of this we have agreed to remove www.swedish-suplier.co.uk and solely sell the product at www.new-aqquired-company.com.
However, because of the sheer size of the Swedish supplier, a lot of traffic comes through to swedish-supplier.co.uk.
My question is, how can we work together with the supplier to remove this domain and still maintain a good amount of UK traffic?
Should we point swedish-supplier.co.uk back to the suppliers original translated web site and have them pass enquiries onto us or should we point it to our website? & What's the best way to go about it?
Thanks,
Danny
-
Hey Danny, sounds like you have a big migration project ahead of you! As others have said, you're going to have to do mass 301 redirects to the site you want everything to live on moving forward. You should also engage with an international SEO consultant to help you out with this, because you're likely going to need country-specific subfolders and use HREFLANG to send the search crawlers for the right languages to the right pages and rank them accordingly.
Happy to recommend some if you'd like.
-
Just another quick point - the downside of pointing towards the Swedish site is that it's on a .se domain, and is probably hosted etc in Sweden, so while that wouldn't stop it from ranking in UK searches, it won't help.
(Funnily enough I've resumed learning Swedish recently, as I have family ties there, but haven't got on to flooring yet!)
-
So if you're wanting to remove the swedish-supplier.co.uk site and only use the new site, the logical thing would be to redirect the current swedish-supplier.co.uk site with 301 redirects.
That'll keep most of the authority you've accrued in the past, and transfer any current customers across.
The key task is to map out how it will work, because the homepage will be a straight swap, for example, but your old site may have content which isn't currently on the newly-acquired company domain, so you'll either need to direct those pages to the most suitable equivalent, or create new pages on the newly-acquired company domain to point the old stuff to.
Assuming no issues, you should see a pretty straight swap between authority and traffic as the redirects take effect. But if you're wondering about how to go about it, it's probably worth investing a small amount in getting an SEO professional/agency with experience in cross-domain redirects involved, even if you do the bulk of the work yourself and just get them to sanity check it.
You'll also probably want to check that the new domain is set-up correctly, and is registered with Google Search Console and the location is specified etc, plus it's also worth thinking about whether you want to continue using the same analytics account from the newly-acquired domain if it's got some installed, or from your swedish-supplier site, in which case, you need to copy across your existing code, remove it from the old site, and note the change in your GA account to be able to refer back to it...
-
Hi Sean,
Sorry, I got mixed up when typing - swedish-distributor.co.uk and swedish-supplier.co.uk were meant to be the same domain. Edited the question!
-
Danny,
I am not clear on relationship between these three or four domains? Is swedish-distributor.co.uk a fourth?
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
-
Who is the best SEO expert in the World?
Hey everyone, i am creating a blog post on Top SEO Experts in the World. I need your recommendation who is in the top 10 list? Your suggestions is highly appreciated for me. Thanks!
International SEO | | gxpl090 -
How To Proceed With Int'l Language Targeting if Subfolders Not An Option?
I’m currently working with my team to sort out the best way to build out the international versions of our website. Any advice on how to move forward is greatly appreciated! Current Setup: Subdirectories to target languages - i.e. domain.com/es/. We chose this because… We are targeting languages not countries Our product offering does not change from country to country Translated site content is almost identical to the english version Current Problem: Our site is built on WordPress and our database can’t handle the build out of 4 more international versions of the site. The database is slowing down and our site speed is being affected for multiple reasons (WordPress multilingual plugin being one of them). **What to do next? **My developers have said that we cannot continue with our current subdirectory structure due to the technical infrastructure issues I’ve mentioned above (as well as others I’m yet to get full details on). Now I’m left with a decision: Change to a subdomain structure Change to a ccTLD structure Is there an option 3? From what I’ve read it does not make sense to build out language targeted sites on a ccTLD structure because that limits the ability for people outside of the targeted country to find the content organically. I.e. a website at www.domain.es is targeted to searchers in Spain so someone in Columbia is less likely to find that content through the engines. Is this correct? If so, how much can it hurt organic discovery? What’s the optimal setup to move forward with in this case? Thanks!
International SEO | | UnbounceVan0 -
Shall I automatically redirect international visitors from www.domain.com to e.g. www.domain.com/es? What is best SEO practice?
We have chosen the one domain approach with our international site having different language versions in subdirectory of main domain:
International SEO | | lcourse
www.domain.com/es
www.domain.com/it
etc. What is SEO-wise best practice for implementing international index pages. I see following options: entering www.domain.com will display without redirection the index page in language of user (e.g based on IP or browser) in www.domain.com
Example: www.booking.com entering www.domain.com will always show English index page.
Additionally one may display a message in the header if IP from other country with link to other language version.
Example: www.apple.com entering www.domain.com will always redirect automatically to country specific subdirectory based on IP
Example: www.samsung.com Any thoughts/suggestions on what may be best solution from a SEO perspective? For a user I believe options 1) & 3) are preferable.0 -
What are the best practices for translation of city/state names for international SEO? (ie. New York in English vs. Nueva York in Spanish)
I'm working on international SEO / translation of a global travel site. While we have a global keyword research and translation strategy in process for each market they serve, I've run into a unique question. Overall, we are translating (and localizing) content for each market but aren't sure what to do with location names. Each country/state has cities and locations that have their own dedicated pages. I see three options for these location names (when titling a page and writing content): keep them in English, translate the names in the market languages, or use a combination of the two. The challenge with altering the location names to the market languages is that they are truly not known by those names. Though there are some instances where it may make sense…for instance **New York **in Spanish would be "Nueva York" with **‘**Nueva' being the Spanish translation of ‘new’. There are other instances, where no translation exists. If you’ve had a similar experience I'd love to hear your approach/recommendation.
International SEO | | JonClark150 -
International SEO: best practices for local variants of the same language?
We are translating our site into 17 different languages, including local variants of the same language (i.e. Mexican Spanish and Spain Spanish, Canadian English and British English, etc). Should we add all of these local variants to our site? We don't have the marketing / link building budget (or business need) to put these all on separate ccTLDs, so we are using country-specific subfolders instead (example.com/es/). The translations will be of exceptional quality. Our main goal is to pull in some additional traffic from these translations. If we add these local variants, do you think we can expect to see traffic from these different countries (additional traffic from Canada, England, etc)? Any advice / input would be appreciated.
International SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Risks of Migrating tld's to sub folders
Hi Guys, I am thinking of migrating our .co.nz and our .co.uk websites into sub folders on our .com website (eg: .com/uk and .com/nz). Do you think this is a risky strategy in regards to our performance in the localised search engines or should the centralisation of all these websites and their link authority into the .com help us move up the rankings? We are thinking of doing this in the next week, we have some really good rankings for the local googles, however we also have plenty of phrases sitting just on page 2 and I was hoping this might help boost them onto page 1? Has anyone else had experience migrating tld sites to sub folders on a .com and if so what was your experience of the impact on search rankings in the local googles and the timeframe that these changes took to have an effect? Did you have any negative results?
International SEO | | ConradC0 -
Multi-lingual SEO: Country-specific TLD's, or migration to a huge .com site?
Dear SEOmoz team, I’m an in-house SEO looking after a number of sites in a competitive vertical. Right now we have our core example.com site translated into over thirty different languages, with each one sitting on its own country-specific TLD (so example.de, example.jp, example.es, example.co.kr etc…). Though we’re using a template system so that changes to the .com domain propagate across all languages, over the years things have become more complex in quite a few areas. For example, the level of analytics script hacks and filters we have created in order to channel users through to each language profile is now bordering on the epic. For a number of reasons we’ve recently been discussing the cost/benefit of migrating all of these languages into the single example.com domain. On first look this would appear to simplify things greatly; however I’m nervous about what effect this would have on our organic SE traffic. All these separate sites have cumulatively received years of on/off-site work, and even if we went through the process of setting up page-for-page redirects to their new home on example.com, I would hate to lose all this hard-work (and business) if we saw our rankings tank as a result of the move. So I guess the question is, for an international business such as ours, which is the optimal site structure in the eyes of the search engines; Local sites on local TLD’s, or one mammoth site with language identifiers in the URL path (or subdomains)? Is Google still so reliant on TLD for geo targeting search results, or is it less of a factor in today’s search engine environment? Cheers!
International SEO | | linklater0 -
What's the best strategy for checking international rankings?
Hi There- I am looking to optimize sites serving the UK and Austrailia markets. I feel like I have a good handle on how to go about doing that, but what I am fuzzy on is, what's the best way to monitor the SERPs for the keywords I am targeting. I know based on experience that if I just search google.com.au from here in the states, my results will be 'americanized' and may/probably won't accurately reflect what someone would see if they were search from Austrailia. Are there any good tools or tactics for seeing what searchers in the countries I am focusing on woudl see? Thanks! Jason
International SEO | | phantom0