: Targetting overseas users to .co.uk site I have a well established .co.uk site. The site is mainly specific to the UK but parts of it are starting to get traffic from other countries. I'd

@Berumen354

All your options are viable, they just become requirements in order to fulfil a determined organisation structure, business processes and target audience. You just need to be congruent with all the things you do offline and online.

The TLD you choose will help you define your online business purpose to search engines and most importantly to users. So you need to consider how having a .net site will assist you defining you online purpose. For this reason I hope that your potentially .net site is not going to be used for ecommerce purposes.

The decision to serve or not an overseas audience with a brand new website will depends on how you are currently satisfying people’s search intent, whenever these are UK users outside UK, why users will prefer your UK site rather than a local website, how your website is technically setup and developed, etc.

Another important question more related to your business would be, how are you planning to serve internationally, how your operations will be impacted if your international audience increases, would having a separate website help with the operations, customer service, delivery or response times? How are you going to compete with local business? All this will be increasingly noticeable and Google will take note of that and reward you or not with better rankings.

a), b) and c) options are SEO technically feasible, but if you are not able to compete at the same level is not worthy having a separate website. Many webmasters have experienced good results having one domain and splitting the site into two (option b). Option c is the less favorable because you are basically starting two new websites and even though they have a good parent or referrer, everything else staying the same, it will take some time for them to take off. Using option a is a good alternative assuming the audience is on the rise and your are able to send authority signals to search engines. Here implementing hreflang meta tag is of a vital importance.

Vote Up Vote Down