One Product - Two Same-Language Countries?

July 18th, 2008 by Ann Smarty | 12 Comments

This is another geo-targeting case study I decided to discuss at SEJ. Say you have one product and you plan to target two same-language countries: USA and UK. Which options do you have?

Set up only one .com website and promote it for both territories (e.g. build both US- and UK-related links). Really there are plenty of occasions when .com sites hosted in the USA do very well in Google.co.uk. Drawback: you’ll have problems delivering country-specific content (e.g. prices in US dollars and/or UK pounds). Besides, that won’t still be easy to rank in the UK with the American based website.
Set up two sites: domain.com and domain.co.uk and run them separately. Drawback: two sites mean twice as much effort needed. Besides, it will be hard to handle duplicate content as both websites will be dedicated to one product and target same language. There is an opinion that this method won’t bring any dup content issues as this is general practice but still it is hard to predict. In this case you can either host them separately (but in this case, duplicate content issues will be even harder to avoid) or host them in the USA (but in this case you risk losing “Pages from UK” search traffic). Real-life example: Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.
Set up one site on .com domain and the other one on a subdomain(uk.domain.com)/ subdirectory (domain.com/uk). Same drawbacks as in the above one. Real-life example: Apple and Apple (United Kingdom) (which by the way do have some issues with geo targeting).
Set up two sites on two subdomains: us.domain.com and uk.domain.com (same drawbacks as the above two).
Set up one site with two subdirectories: /us/ and /uk/ and use IP delivery to redirect visitors to the geo-specific direction. Drawback: that’s not very SEO effective as Google crawlers usually visit from the USA and they won’t rank your other version in the UK.

The SEORefugee post that inspired me to bring this up for discussion also lists the following tips to geo target properly:

run country-specific promotions (for UK/US holidays);
use British spelling to cover relevant traffic;
get more links from .uk domains;
cover topics that are interesting only to the British;
tailor content to the British, their interests and values (British humor, for example).

Comments

12 responses so far ↓

Andrew on Jul 18, 2008 at 4:43 am

This is exactly the situation I’m in right now — but because our UK site was well-established first on .com, we’ve gone for the inverse of #3 above, and have a subdomain targetting the US.

We’re fortunate, on the one hand, that the terminology for our product is different in the UK from the US, which helps keep the results clean, but on the other hand we’re having problems convincing Google that our US site isn’t UK based. We’ve geo-targeted the subdomain to the US in Webmaster Tools, and have even made sure our US subdomain is on a server located in the US, both with little effect as yet.

The impact is huge. If you search for [honeymoon registry] on Google Canada — where few results are actually Canadian-based — we’re consitently around position #20. In the US, we fluctuate between #150 and #300. In the UK, our US site for the same query is #1.

Right now, I’m thinking our Google local listing for the main (UK) site is negating our attempts to geo-target the US subdomain, but I’m anxious not to damage our actual UK results by simply deleting it.
Software Testing on Jul 18, 2008 at 6:56 am

@ Ann, I will always go with #4. This will help to show multiple results of same website for a search.
Raj Krishnaswamy on Jul 18, 2008 at 8:24 am

This is a great topic that I never thought about. I was going to jump immediately on point one, but then the disadvantages pointed to other options but they too seem to be laden with drawbacks, some of them quite significant. I tend to agree with the previous commenter that item 4 seems to be the preferred method in spite of drawbacks. Curious to see more input from others. Thank you.
Nick Stamoulis on Jul 18, 2008 at 12:01 pm

Great to see you covering this - it’s certainly a difficult challenge for websites owners who are interesting in geotargeting but awesome tips.
Tim Hawkins on Jul 18, 2008 at 12:55 pm

the uk/us debate is a little mute, as only 10-15% of uk users use the UK index directly. However both google and yahoo ip target their results, so that a uk user visiting google.com, will get uk boosted results (but not as much as the uk specific index), along with with uk based SEM. A point missed in your discourse is the importance of US vs UK server IP addresses, both google and yahoo use the ip-address geo-location of your servers to further position the pages you are serving in its regionally boosted indexes. The largely ineffectual option in the webmaster tools was supposed to allow you to set the physical location of your domain, but i think some google engineer forgot to connect the check-box up to any actual code. A final method is to use a technique known as TASER. a set of agent sensitive rewrite rules, that map the sites domain to the domain you wish it to be indexed as, but only for the bot. A corresponding set of non robot conditional rules map back the url’s for people clicking through from the search engine, for certain situations it can be very effective.
mevric on Jul 21, 2008 at 3:56 am

great post
Vinicius Paes on Jul 21, 2008 at 5:52 pm

Hi Ann, great post, i also had the same problem with Brazil and Portugal. Nice tips!
Software Testing on Aug 8, 2008 at 1:15 am

May be the Google blog can answer the above questions,

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/08/how-to-start-multilingual-site.html
Ann Smarty on Aug 8, 2008 at 1:37 am

@Software Testing : huge thanks for the link! The post is great but it describes an opposite situation of targeting multilingual countries, while this one discusses targeting same-language countries.
Software Testing on Aug 8, 2008 at 1:45 am

@ Ann, confused! sorry. If possible, remove the irrelevant link from my above comment.
Ann Smarty on Aug 8, 2008 at 7:30 am

@Software Testing : actually I liked the post you are referring to, so if you don’t mind, let’s keep it.
Software Testing on Aug 10, 2008 at 2:28 pm

Thanks Ann :) Lets keep it!