Internationalising a .co.uk site - How to improve organic reach?

[dancook]

In the last 3 months I've built a price comparison .co.uk site (cheaply hosted in America)

It's was well received and even people from outside of the UK were interested in a similar thing for their countries.

So in the last few weeks I've start expanding it to include retailers from around Europe and the United States.

When a (for e.g. European) user visits the site it detects country, sets cookie, and shows them local results for their country but they can expand results to include other retailers that ship to them from across Europe and even the United States.

I've been thinking more about the SEO of late, but how do I reach a wider base on Google (other search engines exist) than just the UK? I get the occasional European visitor, but no one from the United States. How will I reach them organically?

thanks

 

[Community]

Depends on your structure and strategy but the basics such as setting your hreflang attributes should be implemented as needed. A good article covering most things can be found here

Conquer the World With This International SEO Guide

Ready to conquer the world? This guide to international SEO will teach you everything you need to know to optimize your website or multiple web properties for international audiences, from site structure options to international keyword research and link building.

www.wordstream.com

 

[dancook]

Depends on your structure and strategy but the basics such as setting your hreflang attributes should be implemented as needed. A good article covering most things can be found here

Thanks for the link, it covers some of what I've been reading.

Since posting I have been working on an implementation with rewrite to create these urls.

domain.co.uk/en-gb/
domain.co.uk/en-fr/
domain.co.uk/en-us/

Each with a matching hreflang,

I really only have one page I care to do this for, the homepage.

Could I just use the hreflang? maybe it's better this way else the previous would be creating duplicate content.

Yes I think I better get rid of the rewrite.

 

[DaveG437]

Hi Dan,

The truth is, building a site on a UK-based ccTLD makes it nigh-on impossible to compete with gTLD sites in the US SERPS.

Even if you did an amazing job of promoting the site and you managed to get some visibility over the pond, all other things being equal, the same amount of effort would achieve much more with a gTLD.

So why bother fighting it?

Your site is 4 months old, so I'm guessing you've got little to lose in terms of sunk costs and traffic?

Buy a gTLD and use a site migration service. I've previously used the paid bolt-on to Updraft in Wordpress. It was easy.

Plus, you can 301 the .co.uk which will preserve most of the benefits accrued from anything you have already achieved.

Or you could keep the .co.uk and run both sites (as in Option 1 in the article posted above). Shopify and Bigcommerce both do this (probably thousands of other successful firms too; I just happen to know about these two).

This is a great article (forget that; I need 20 posts before I can link. Just Google "Migrating from ccTLDs to a gTLD" it's the SearchViu article by Eoghan Henn) about the two structures. The author is a fan of the gTLD route. Personally, I think it boils down to the nature of the sites.

Dave

 

[dancook]

Hi Dan,

The truth is, building a site on a UK-based ccTLD makes it nigh-on impossible to compete with gTLD sites in the US SERPS.

For a person with no other income or work at the moment (Thanks Covid) I have been pushing the site quite hard, spent about £2000 on Facebook adverts, I've been emailing camera clubs, blogs to build up links using .co.uk - but I could 301 redirect .co.uk

In the last week Google tells me I've had 181 total clicks, 5220 impression, average position 26.4
I got 30 results for a search on the domain name, and 11 results for domain with .co.uk - and a few variations - where it seems people likely knew about the site already.

I own .org and .eu versions of my domain, but the .com is up for sale at $4000+ which I guess is the ideal domain to use? but I just don't have the money to commit to it right now.

My domain is usedlens, other than the blog it's pretty much a one page site.