Targetting site in 3 countries

[seoug_2005]

I have read the seomoz post at - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday   before asking the question We recieved a query from one of our client regarding targetting his site in 3 different countries namely - US,UK and Australia. Specifically, he has asked us-

1. Whether i should buy ccTLD like -  www.example.co.uk

www.example.com.au

www.example.com

and write unique content for each of the above.

or

2.

or go for subfolder approach

www.example.com/UK

www.example.com/AU

will it affect SEO if the subfolders are in CAPS.

Would like to have advice of moz community on what advice will be the best.

Thanks

[Dr-Pete]

I'm going to take the opposite perspective, because I don't think this is a one-size-fits-all situation. Building out unique, ccTLDs does have ranking advantages within those countries, but it also has a couple of disadvantages:

(1) Your marketing efforts and link-building are now all split 3 ways, and your authority is split 3 ways. The again you get from international targeting may not offset what you lose by splitting your SEO efforts. If all 3 markets are mission critical, and you have a large budget, 3 domains has advantages. If one market is much bigger than the other two, though, and you don't have a lot of time and money, I think subfolders are a better choice.

(2) You may have more complex duplicate content issues with similar English content across 3 domains. Google isn't always as good as they should be about isolating international content. Granted, though, this is a problem with subfolders, too. We can say "write unique copy", but you can only say the same thing in the same language so many ways. A few colloquial spellings and phrases aren't going to make for unique content.

[jandunlop]

Yes this will help a bit - will also give your users a faster responding website

[augustos]

agreed. Also you can focus more your content, I'm not a native english but probabbly there's some different slangs for each country.

I'm Brazilian and to be honest sometimes I just can't understand what peoples from Portugal say....

[seoug_2005]

The client says he has enough budget to go with first approach.

[seoug_2005]

Thanks Jan.

My question is does hosting a site in respective country will have an effect,  even a small one on the rankings for that particular country.

[JamesNorquay]

In the end of the day it depends also about budgets, we worked with one client and did 20 different TLD domains for a global website, it is doable if you have budgets.

You need to remember in .com.au market links from .com.au will be way more powerful then links from .co.uk for example.

[fdl4712_aol.com]

There are off-web considerations also, particularly if you choose to go for multiple domains.

There's the obvious one of the cost of running multiple link-building campaigns.

Then there's the question of what to do with printed materials. Are brochures/leaflets etc to be reprinted for each target market with the localised url? Or is there to be one main url with a country choice page? Which leads on to...

Another issue is what to do if you get one countries' customers on another countries' site (eg a UK visitor on say a US site). Do you redirect them? Or just hope they will notice the country links?

My experience is that there are loads of problematic ramifications. There's a lot of worry about whether to go for domains or subdomains or directories. But it's what happens afterwards that I have found really difficult.

That isn't much of an answer. But it is a warning that the best solution for seo can be quite hard to manage.

[JamesNorquay]

"Foreign entities can register com.au domain names with an ARBN or a registered trade mark."

[jandunlop]

Best option is to have top level domains e.g. .co.uk and .com.au with unique content on each and host the sites in each country.

With this approach, its easier to get local links, usually requires less links to rank each site plus you get higher click-through rates from the serps.

If you use directories /uk/ and /au/ case does not matter - my pref would be to use lowercase urls

Note: AU has restrictions on domain registrations (have to be an AU business) but you can get someone to register on your behalf.

[JamesNorquay]

Best way to do it from my experience,

www.example.co.uk

www.example.com.au

www.example.com

Then you have specific content for each market.

It will work more powerful then using a sub domain method especially if you come up against all .com.au websites in local SERPS.