SuitcaseLifestyle.com

So I’m slowly building an E-commerce empire. SEO rankings are hugely important because it’s longterm free money. At the same time, I also want to rank well in multiple countries at the same time.

My original line of thinking was to build one domain and make it huge. This also conflicts with what my mentor taught me(Long story short, the guy who sparked my interest with E-Monies a few years ago), one of his lessons being, “don’t give users too much choice, get them to the credit card page in the least clicks possible“. So for that reason, I want my customers to think that the site they are buying from is local. If they are from the US, the site is going to be plastered with little US flags, and all prices will be in USD. If they are from the UK, the Union Jack will be around the place with all prices in GBP. It also helps to build trust. That aside, when deciding the best course of action, there are normally 2 schools of thought:

Subdomains: For example, us.widgets.com, uk.widgets.com and so on. Apart from being a little bit ugly, subdomains are more or less treated as individual domains, as they won’t pass any positive or negative to the main domain(there are exceptions but they aren’t important in this case).

Subdirectories: For example: www.widgets.com/us, www.widgets.com/uk and so on. Because these sit on top of the same domain, all the subdirectories benefit from the ever increasing authority of the main domain. The downside of this is because your site is more or less the same in multiple directories, you can face duplicate content penalties. From a search engine point of view, your cloning your shit on the same domain.

So which is the best option?

Neither… (But if you had to choose one, I would choose Subdomains).

The best thing to do in this case, is register every local TLD you can get your hands on. Yep:

bluewidgets.com (for the US)
bluewidgets.co.uk (for UK)
bluewidgets.com.au (for AU)
bluewidgets.ca (for CA)
bluewidgets.co.nz (for NZ)
etc

That should be enough to dominate the english markets before moving onto Spanish, French, German and eventual world domination. Just because you see large international companies using subdomains, doesn’t mean it’s the best thing. Either way, if you believe in your business, invest into your long term future and buy every TLD you can get! For an example of a company that does this very successfully, look at VistaPrint. I recently ordered some business cards from VistaPrint.com.au, and the cards came from the Netherlands. Avoid the “choose your local site” crap and get your users to the right site/currency/language straight off the bat.

It is impossible and unlikely that you’ll ever get a single domain to perform well(Top 10 for a decent/popular phrase) across multiple countries, and to be realistic with a long term business like E-Commerce, it really is not difficult to get into a top search position with some good old fashioned hard work and patience.

I have always noticed that local TLD’s perform better on search engines in their own local countries, so is definitely the best way to approach this.