If we should add a .eu or remain .com solely

[Tom3_15]

Hello,

Our company is international and we are looking to gain more traffic specifically from Europe. While I am aware that translating content into local languages, targeting local keywords, and gaining more European links will improve rankings, I am curious if it is worthwhile to have a company.eu domain in addition to our company.com domain.

Assuming the website's content and domain will be exactly the same, with the TLD (.eu vs .com) being the only change - will this add us benefit or will it hurt us by creating duplicate content - even if we create a separate GSC property for it with localized targeting and hreflang tags? Also - if we have multiple languages on our .eu website, can different paths have differing hreflangs?

IE: company.eu/blog/german-content German hreflang and company.eu/blog/Italian-content Italian hreflang.

I should note - we do not currently have an hreflang attribute set on our website as content has always been correctly served to US-based English speaking users - we do have the United States targeted in Google Search Console though.

It would be ideal to target countries by subfolder rather if it is just as useful. Otherwise, we would essentially be maintaining two sites.

Thanks!

[seoelevated]

My company currently uses an EU subdomain (similar approach to what you're describing, except varying the subdomain rather than the TLD). But one of the issues we have found is that the search engines have no geo-targeting options for Europe as a whole. They allow to target a single country. Or a single language. Or a country-language combination. But there are no options to target "Europe". So, with hreflang tags, and also with GSC settings, you will experience some challenges because of this. We haven't resolved all our issues, whcih is why I'm not providing a solution to you, but we are far enough in to know it is problematic.