9 replies to this topic

[Arien]

Hello everyone!

I'm looking for some advice, if you guys can help me.

I do the SEO for a US based company, wich wants to get into the european market now. We've been doing a huge research analyzing the competition and the market itself and we now that this would involve a lot of hard work and basically we realized that we need another website with a different design line, and for this we were plaining to use ourdomain.co.uk.

But we have a doubt now, because this website it's going to be translated to several languages, so my question is in this case what would result better: to use different extensions of the domain for each targeted country (i.e. domain.de for germany) or to put all the pages under the same domain?

This is the first time I have to work for the european market and I've seen that the competition use both techniques, so I'm not sure which one is the best.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts on this matter ;o)

[chrisbiber]

Hi Arien,

I would not recommend building many different sites for the different countries. It's far more straigthforward, easier to administer, and better for link building etc. if you do something like this:

www.yourcompany.co.uk resolves to www.yourcompany.com/uk/
www.yourcompany.de resolves to www.yourcompany.com/de/ etc... (making sure that search engines don't see double

If your European sites use a different design, you could handle this via a different stylesheet... If the difference is too drastic for that, then (and only then) would I consider going with a different European site (with country-specific subdirectories)

Just my $.02 or .01 Euro.

Viel Glück,

Chris

[Arien]

Hi! Thanks for your opinion Chris. Yes, I think that would be the better way to go, to have just one domain with diferent subdirectories for each country, that way we could even take advantage of all the work we have already done for the US website.

But the design actually has to be absolutely different. So I think we may have to go with the 2nd option, create another website and build the subdirectories there... But if this is the case, should we use a .com extension or a .co.uk?

[Randy]

I assume you've already read through the pinned thread on the subject right Arien?

Given what you're shooting for and the restrictions you've got, it can get quite confusing. Each regional area is going to be a separate entity where the search engines are concerned. So a site that you get ranking well as a .be is not necessarily going to rank well for .nl. It's a conundrum.

I honestly don't have an answer, but I do have a question to throw out there that may help if anyone else has tried it.

I've been wondering for some time now what would happen if someone got one of the .eu (European Union) domains when they're trying to target users in two or more cooutries in the region.

Would this sort of approach give a leg up in getting things listed in more than one European country? If I were going to try it --and I won't because it's difficult and not cost effective for me to ship there-- I would definitely opt for a .eu over a .com just to see what happens.

[Arien]

Hi Randy, thank you so much...

Actually, I read a part of that thread some time ago when I was looking for something else and I forgot about it... I read it completely this time and I think it was really helpfull. Thank you for remind me about it!

About the .eu domain, I have no experience with that either but it was said by mcanerin in one of the responses on that thread that "it is not localized to anything - treat it as if it were a .com". Is that right?

[Randy]

We'll have to wait for Ian to answer that one Arien. He's done tons more testing and has a veritable train load more information about this subject than I could even want to.

[Baronnn]

.eu is like a .com domain (as the US for example officially has a .us domain). I think it is better to use a .eu domain, or create .fr, .uk, .de etc instead of using a single .uk domain.

Only using one country extension is still perceived as a distance, even though it is the internet.

Who can get a .eu domain name:
All residents of the European Union are allowed to register a .eu domainname. The only obligation for registering a .eu domainname is residing or being established (for companies) in the European Union. The registration is open to private persons as well as to companies. Companies who are establised abroad, but that own a trademark in Europe or Europeans living outside Europe will contract out.

[Clintorius]

Arien I think the concerns of the SE should not be your first concern. You must think consider the market (customers taste, laws, it literacy, connection types etc.) and how much the company will expend on maintenance (centralized, local, tools).

If the design is global and only the text and perhaps certain products differ among markets a CMS with version control and work flow (on a single domain) would be a good choice. The process of updating data for several languages is much easier this way.

If your different markets demands different designs and minimal reuse of pictures, downloads etc. , then just open domains for each market and taylor the site to the customers. Maintenance would be hell but often these solutions are handled by a country manager for each region with the help of design manuals or local web bureaus.

C.

[Arien]

Hello,

Thanks for the replies. Well, I've been quite busy with some urgent issues for our main website, so it's until now I get back to this european matter

And thanks for your advice, Clintorius, yes, it'll be much easier to use a CMS, the problem is that the design of our us website is absolutely made for the us market. And actually, we have been doing an extensive research about the european market, and there are a lot of offline aspects we're taking care of, but about the website I think we've got to the conclusion that we need to follow certain design code according to this market, because the area is quite competitive and quite standard as well, for example, european costumers are very comfortable with finding certain information at certain section of the site, displayed on certain way... at least in our area.

So, considering all this aspects, I think we will have to go with the second option, buy different domains for each market, and this means lots of hard work...

[-=seth=-]

just reading what you guy were saying about different domain names .co.uk, .eu .fr etc but surely the biggest thing to concider when targeting a country is having your website on a server in the target region, google (i might be wrong) doesnt look at .com, .co.uk, she knows where your based by matching up the ip address