A client asked a question today: “Should I use a Country-Specific Domain Name (TLD) If I Am Targeting [That] Market?”
The short answer is Yes.
There are several benefits from doing this, and having a site aimed at each country you are targeting. But there are also some “traps” to watch out for if you do plan to do this.
Let me start with the benefits:
Increase Your Search Engine Rankings Where It Counts (Benefit #1)
This is the most simple, fundamental benefit of having separate web-sites for each country you are targeting - you get a big rankings boost.
Because most of my clients are Australian businesses who target an Australian audience, I work a lot with Australian (.com.au) domain names.
And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to notice that it’s clearly easier to rank better in Australian users’ Google Search results if you have an Australian .com.au domain name.
Have a look at this (click on images to see rankings):
Check it out - 9 out of the top 10 results are Australian web-sites.
Here’s what people in the U.K. see when they do the same search:
(Here 5 out of the top 10 results in the Search Engine Rankings are British web-sites.)
And for comparison, here’s the same page in the International version of Google:
Here you see a different set of results again - this time, more American and International web-sites, with 8 of the top 10 sites being owned by American companies.
So we very clearly see there’s a very clear positive correlation here between having a site targeted to a particular country, and search engine rankings.
Increase your Click Through Rates (Benefit #2)
If SEO isn’t your style, and you’re more looking at Adwords results, consider what a country-specific domain name does to your credibility in that market.
If you have a .com.au domain name as the display URL in your Google Adwords account, and you’re targeting an American or British audience, in the half second it takes for someone to review your ad and decide to click, the seed of doubt enters their mind and they decide your site is “probably not relevant”.
On the other hand, if you were targeting an Australian audience, and your display URL showed a .com.au domain name, you would immediately GAIN credibility.
Increase your Conversion Rates by Tailoring Content to Each Market (Benefit #3)
Finally, one of the great things about having separate web-sites for each country you are targeting is that you can tailor the content to suit your market.
For example, the American market is less offended by heavy-selling, hyped-up advertising copy - whereas Australian, New Zealand and British consumers are generally more conservative in the marketing messages they respond to.
This presents businesspeople who own several different country targeted web-sites a unique opportunity to optimise their content in the same way that some successful direct mail marketers will segment and target their lists.
WARNING: Duplicate Content
But… There’s one BIG issue to consider if you’re planning to set up a second version of your web-site under a country-specific URL.
Duplicate Content on Multiple Domains Case Study #1
Recently, a client’s web-site was ranking poorly in search engines.
Found they were running the same site on both the .com and .com.au domain names - and every page (on one of the two sites) had received a duplicate content penalty. That meant roughly half the pages on each site were working.
The client was targeting an Australian audience, but they wanted to avoid some domain squatter or competitor owning the .com version of their domain name - so they registered both.
…And they couldn’t bear to not use the .com version of their domain (and let it sit there, going to waste), so they set their site up so that it would run on both the .com and .com.au domains.
It all seemed pretty logical to the web developer who set up their web-site… but little did they know it would end up causing big problems for their client.
When Google found their web-site(s), they quickly found all of the content was identical on the two domains and had to decide which version of the domain was the “legitimate” owner of the content, and which should be penalised for copyright infringement.
Google ended up deciding some of the content legitimately belonged to one web-site, and some belonged to the other - and it penalised both web-sites.
Ouch!
It only took a tiny bit of Search Engine Optimisation work to fix this.
We 301 (permanent) redirected all pages from one version of the site into the other (so that they kept the links that they had on both domains), changed some settings in their Google Webmaster Tools accounts (to fix a second issue to do with domain canonization) and did some minor on-page SEO tweaks.
Ever since, their rankings have been improving, and their positioning in search engines has never been better!
The Lesson: The lesson here is simply - if all of your customers are in one country, don’t run two web-sites.
(Oh, and speaking to an SEO guy can pay off - even if you’re *logically* doing the right thing.)
Duplicate Content on Multiple Domains Case Study #2
This one’s a doozie… and it happened just prior to the last Google Algorithm update.
Another potential client - a corporate marketing firm - came to me asking to help them improve their search engine rankings.
Their web-site was part of a network of partner companies, each providing the same service in different regions. His site was targeting Australia.
I looked into the job and found that one of the major issues they faced was duplicated content… the same content was repeated over the multiple web-sites.
I’m not just talking about content which described their packaged services and business philisophy - they also had duplicated links pages which served to cross-promote the various partner companies.
But the client didn’t want to change these duplicate pages.
“I can’t do that. Part of the agreement with the international partners says we will all display these pages. They help us to get links to our sites, and mean we can cross-promote each other. And we haven’t been penalised so far…”
Famous last words…
A few weeks later when Google’s Algorithm was updated, all of the partner sites dropped significantly - all pages lost page rank, and the sites no longer featured on the first page of Google for any significant keywords.
They’re now “reassessing their options”.
The lesson: Don’t copy and paste content. Even if there is a short term benefit, it’s poison for search engine rankings.
Final Tip: Google Webmaster Tools
Australia (and many other countries) have tight restrictions on who can own their country-specific domain names. In Australia, there are a whole host of restrictions - and in general, you need a registered business entity in order to own the domain name you want to register.
But, if you don’t want to go to the effort of setting up structures in other countries, or if you already have a perfectly good .com domain name which you want to target to a specific country, the alternative is to set up a Google Webmaster Tools account for that domain and tell Google which country you are targeting.
Set up, or log-into your Google Webmaster Tools account, and make sure your site has been verified. Once you have done that…
- Click on Tools;
- Then Set Geographic Target;
- Then Associate a geographic location with this site, and finally;
- Select the Country or Region you want to target
Google does use some of its own tricks to work out which country or region a web-site is targeting, (you would have seen several British .com web-sites ranking well in search engines in the examples above,) but this helps to make sure they get it right.
This is as good as a country-specific domain name for Search Engine Optimisation purposes.
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24 responses so far ↓
1 Meg // Feb 22, 2008 at 7:53 pm
Hey buddy - nice to see you back
You’ve made some really pertinent points here.
2 Your page is now on StumbleUpon! // Mar 1, 2008 at 3:05 am
[...] Your page is on StumbleUpon [...]
3 Gavin Allinson // Mar 14, 2008 at 10:49 pm
excellent tips here.
How do you get to see the google results from the different countries.
Gavin
4 Brisbane web designer // Jun 16, 2008 at 12:08 pm
I suspect having a Google local business listing also helps. Nice post !
5 Maniquí // Jul 11, 2008 at 2:56 am
What about this case?
Business: a boutique hotel website in Patagonia, Argentine.
The owner wants to have international clients, from Europe, USA and Japan.
Which is a better option? To use the “.com” or the “.com.ar”?
Considering that search terms will be like “hotel boutique argentina” or “hotel argentina”, etc, I suspect the “.com.ar” will be a better option than the “.com”.
Particularly, because there are chances that potencial hotel visitors will be already located in Argentina, so they will be probably using “google.com.ar”, which will benefit local sites (thus, the “com.ar” will be a better choice) on SERPs.
I would like to read your opinion on this particular case.
Thanks in advance and excuse my english.
Ah, and thanks for this article, really good tips and advices.
6 Brent Hodgson // Jul 11, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Maniqui - I had a look into this and found that both the country-specific domains for the country you’re targeting - so for example “boutique hotel dunedin” will show .com.au and .co.nz domains for me in Australia.
7 Maniquí // Jul 12, 2008 at 4:34 am
Brent, thanks for your quick and helpful reply.
So, if I get it right, in this particular case for a hotel, it’s better to have a country-specific domain even if you are targeting for foreign visitors/consumers.
If it weren’t a hotel, and I would like to reach foreign consumers, I would probably go with a .com domain.
But in this particular case, the country-specific domain seems to be a plus, because it helps (even from a usability POV) to know where the hotel is located.
8 alex // Oct 29, 2008 at 9:34 pm
I have .me domain and cant associate a geographic location. What can I do?
Only buy new domain?
Thanks
9 Going Local with Keyword Research | Noble Samurai // Nov 11, 2008 at 1:09 pm
[...] country-specific domain names and seo - a client asked a question today: “should i use a country-specific domain name (tld) if i am targeting [that] market?” the short answer is yes. there are several benefits from doing this, and having a site aimed at each country you are … [...]
10 Abhilash // Jun 8, 2009 at 4:40 pm
Consider you do SEO for large organization that has branches and customers around the globe.. it needs to target each customer in each of the targetted country.
1. So should he go for specific domain names in each country?
For this he will have to make webites with different contents and domains for each country. Is that possible in all cases?
2. Can’t you set target locations more than one for your .com domain ?
Expect a good experienced answer to this question.
11 Deepak // Jun 29, 2009 at 11:20 pm
Hi Brent,
Thanks for your posting and it is very helpful.
Can I have one name website for different countries like.
dbuddy.co.in (india)
dbuddy.co.uk (UK)
dbuddy.com.au (Aust.)
dbuddy.ca (Canada)
I will host my website on country specific server.
Will it be a problem for google optimization? and google will remove my website for there directory.?
Please advice.
Thanks
Deepak
12 Redbrickstock // Aug 20, 2009 at 3:47 pm
Duplicate content can be a real problem with shopping cart sites. The rule is to always rewrite the product description. Thanks for the post.
13 Hammock // Mar 26, 2010 at 4:42 pm
Hi Brent, nice clear article. I’ve been reading about this and duplicate content across different country specific sites all day (till my eyes feel like they are bleeding!). I have multiple country specific sites, but have the same, or very similar content across all sites. The general consensus I get is that it really pays to have unique content across all these sites.
Thanks for helping to make this clear. TIme for more eye bleeding as I try and re-write 3 websites!
14 Ginigo // Jan 14, 2011 at 11:46 pm
First I want to say this is a great post. I took a SEO seminar with some experts and they told us the same.
But I have question about using country specific domains:
Consider the following scenario for selling traditional goods from India (i.e. jewerly and accessories) to the US and European markets:
If I get a domain like “indianjewerly.in”, would this have a negative/positive/neutral impact on my SERP in the US and Europe?
Would Google rank me “high” within India but low in the US because of using an “.in” domain?
I’d really appreciate any comments, thanks!
15 SEO India Webmaster // Jan 16, 2011 at 9:51 pm
thanks for all for sharing such a good explanation for choosing country specific domain for SEO point view..
16 Sandy // Feb 2, 2011 at 4:57 pm
I am already a great fan of Brent, you really make things simple to understand which is really appreciable.
Every business has its own needs and targeted audience and if by no means you are telling search engines which market you are targeting they will apply their own way to find it which sometimes may be wrong. Country specific domians are always a plus point.
But if you are not sure which audience to target for the selected niche then going for a .com is advisable.
17 Sagar // May 7, 2011 at 3:16 pm
Hi Brent you have really direct the attention of optimizers towards right direction. I also take attention while choosing a domain. Highly appreciated!!
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19 App Development // Jul 12, 2011 at 11:49 pm
Its really valuable information. Thanks a lot to posted this content.
thanks,
20 Adrian Popescu // Aug 1, 2011 at 6:03 am
Hi there!
I wonder if you can tell me how google consider backlinks for a local domain (.ro) depending on what TLD it comes from. They weight more a link from .ro than a link from .com or elsewhere ?
21 Kat // Sep 23, 2011 at 1:59 pm
Hi Brent,
Thanks for this valuable information. I would like to know if we own the same business in two countries, is it ok to have the same site name in two different domains and have two copies of the website. As it is a e-commerce website, the products and currency will vary between the domains. Is that a positive or will encoiunter conflicts? like australian users bumping into the asian website and vice versa?
Thanks in Advance
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24 Nuwan // Nov 10, 2011 at 8:27 am
Thank you for great information. I have a simple question here. Many people use .tv .me and .fm I heard that these are country specific but their target is global. Is it possible reach global market with country specific domain names.
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