Advice needed; Scrap mature .co.uk and move to .com, or run two separate domains?

[thewebpreneur]

Asked before, we have a .co.uk domain name and it has grown with rankings over many years with many quality links made to it. Since, we also have acquired the  .com of our agency brand, and want to also focus on US market - something hard to do with a UK domain.

However, we aren't sure which route to go from here... Should we keep the .co.uk active and allow that to focus on the UK market, and grow the .com from scratch with a site that looks the same with slightly different content and interlink the two with regional flags. Or move across to the .com totally and scrap the .co.uk.

I know we could do a redirect and save a good number of the links made on the .co.uk, but is that worth even doing? And what would the risk be of having two sites the same with similar content?

Since this isn't an area I've dealt with before, we are interested to get some real advice to understand which decision is right given the scenario.

[seoelevated]

There are definitely pros and cons of both approaches. I will say that as someone who currently manages 5 different regional variations of a site, no matter how well we implement our hreflang tags and canonical tags, etc. the search engines still don't index us exactly the way we want them to. That has been my experience elsewhere too. In theory, you should be able to maintain two very similar, or even identical sites, and as long as you properly implement hreflang and canonicals, you should be able to target one site to US and the other to UK. But in practice, I've found that even with these things well implemented, you end up with some pages from each site being served as results in the wrong country.

So, I think it depends on how significant that impact is to you. In the case of the sites I currently manage, it is very significant as our product assortment, inventory levels, fulfillment options, etc. are different in each region. So, when a customer clicks through to the wrong region's page, and doesn't follow the suggested geo-ip-based guidance we provide when we detect that, they have a bad experience and we lose customers.

In the case of the sites I manage, it is not an option to consolidate into a single site/page across these regions, because we operate independently in each country with different products, inventory, prices, etc.

If that's the case for you as well, then I would recommend to do your best at properly implementing hreflang and canonicals, and just recognize that the search engines won't perfectly respect your directives for indexation. But if, on the other hand, your business could serve the same content to both regions, you would avoid those indexation pitfalls by consolidating on one domain.

In your case, there is also another factor, which is the perception (in both markets) of the .co.uk domain as being local for UK. So, that helps you in the UK, and hurts you in the US. The .com domain will be better in the US, and not necessarily problematic in the UK, but also would lose some of the local credibility that your .co.uk domain has there. So, that's another consideration.