There come times occasionally (like today) where I have already been through a site, and I have already altered every page element in an attempt to help it perform better, and then the client tells me that they are going to be expanding their business abroad (most often from the UK to the US or the other way around), and would I be able to optimise their second site too? Enter; a whole host of new issues.
Marketing to foreign territories really isn’t as simple as just buying the .com version of your domain in addition to the .co.uk and then whacking an identical copy of your site on it, though I often wish it were that simple.
When setting up your second site (for the sake of this article I will write from the perspective of a UK business moving to the US) the first issue to avoid is duplicate content. In addition to often being the bane of my very existence, duplicate content is classified as one or more identical blocks of content mirrored across different URL’s. There are many many instances where duplicate content can pose a problem to our valiant SEO efforts, but they will be saved for another blog. For the time being we are talking about having the same content on www.mysite.co.uk and www.mysite.com
When search engines crawl your site they take note of the content, which is to say the raw source content, all the images including their filenames and alt tags, all the text that is displayed, and all the various other primary elements that are part of the site’s content. Layout elements such as CSS files and JavaScript are not taken account of in this process. If a search engine finds that www.mysite.com has identical content to www.mysite.co.uk it will assess which is the oldest domain (i this case the .co.uk) and penalise the newer domain for copying content. However this is generally only the case when domains are relatively far apart in age, if they are only say 6 months apart then both sites may be penalised, it has happened before.
So the first issue to overcome is that you need new content, you can keep the layout but make sure that your page-copy changes, if you feel the need to have a second site specific to a new country then you must have pretty good reason, so expand your content to reflect this and re-write pages to be specific to this new market. You can use the same images, but I would strongly advocate changing file names and alt tags.
Once you’ve done that there’s the issue of hosting, Google for example, will only display indexed pages in local results based on where the site is hosted. If you have a .com domain hosted in Germany - you will not rank in Google’s “Pages From The UK”. It is therefore advisable to match both your domain and your hosting to the market you are targeting, so in this case if you are already running a .co.uk from a UK based hosting company, it would be best to buy the .com and sign up its hosting with a company based in America.
Those are the main elements really, content, and location, the rest is the headache that I am facing today - which is optimising what is essentially another version of the same site, knowing what terms to optimise for and what is effective, but having to do it differently so as not to run into further problems. This is particularly difficult when writing Meta content because generally page titles and descriptions are so short and specific that it’s quite hard to be ‘creative’ in these areas while remaining effective.
Generally speaking I assess which the main site is (generally the oldest one) and use this site to target the biggest terms, which will (hopefully) rank internationally anyway. Then use the newer site to target more long-tail local listings that would be relevant to someone in that particular area.
The key is to work with the algorithms, not against them.
How did you find the transition of expanding your online business to new territories? I would love to hear any experiences that either support or oppose the above!
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