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Technically it is okay as long as you are TARGETING Ireland. If there is no reason to have an .ie content wise, if everything is exactly the same, it might not be worth it to you. The .co.uk is already set up and has links, doing the same for the same content on another domain is a lot of work. And the .co.uk is so close that it'll probably out rank it for some time because the content is exactly the same.

So if you do this, take the time to focus the site to the Irish. You might not change all the content, but if it doesn't need to be changed at all, you might just focus your efforts on the .co.uk site.

Can you give us an example of a SERP result?

Yep, do try to get them to translate the content by a native speaker, not by machine. And optimize like any other page. The new title tags (because of the language) should start showing for searches in that language.

Hi Kyle!

Before I go into this, let me explain one thing. Search engines operate by country, not language. So if your client has made a German language version of their site, a duplicate of their English site, then it should not just target Germany. There are many other countries and people that speak German. Rather, I would submit a sitemap to google of the german content only and let them crawl the content in German. The indexation should raise over time naturally, and if you track that subfolder in Analytics, you should be able to see what countries are landing on the German language content naturally.

If you wanted to launch a site for the German people (citizens of Deutschland), you should recommend that the content and business be developed for that country and either launched as a subfolder or their domain.de acquired. Only if the content is different because different targeting is required should you launch a site (or area) just for a country. In terms of the TLD, this is simply because if you launch a new domain and target to the country, that is a whole other site that will need link building. That's a lot of work. If you launched to target with a subfolder, you could actually target with WMT to the country Germany, but again, the content needs to be different than the main site.

So ask them what the point is, just to translate or to target Germany. That changes what you should do. But I think it's just the language, so I say let it happen, track indexation and the language subfolder in Analytics and make sure the SEs understand that it's german language content. That'll be shown to users in any country that wish their content to be in German.

Kate

Actually all of them are going to be inaccurate if you are using them for traffic numbers. The best tool is still the Google Keyword Tool, but it's numbers are averaged over the last few months and then rounded. They have been know to grossly over and under estimate natural traffic many times over. Use any tool as a gauge of it's importance in relation to other keywords, not of exactly how much traffic you might get.

For long tail, if you can find it in a keyword tool, it's mid tail, not long tail. The good long tail traffic is received when you write on topics that are relevant to the end user, answer questions, etc. These are impossible to know via a tool, if you want to know for sure the best tactic is to ask your users. Surveys and just conversations are the best inspiration for content ideas.