Same Website - Two Countries

jj1 · Apr 10, 2012

A UK customer wants the same website (brochure website describing products to wholesalers) to be available in two countries - UK and South Africa. The South African business venture may turn out to be the most important in the long term.

What is the best way of doing this so the website does well in both Uk and South African SERPS:
1 duplicate websites with .co.uk and .co.za
2 .com website with national subdomains
3 .com website without subdomains

Would appreciate advice of anyone who has gone down this route. I understand from Googlewebmastercentral that duplicate content "is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries".

I would prefer to host the website in the UK with our normal hosting company.

Aegean · Apr 10, 2012

In my eyes, you have 5 two options. Either:

1. Do well in the google.com serps with one site which contains two country sections, chosen manually by the user: eg, 'select your country'

or

2. Build two seperate sites, one on each country domain, with the same branding and appearance. However if you do, vary the content so it is unique for each one and promote them individually.

If you have a reasonable amount of money or its quite a big player client, go for option 1. If you're working on a lower budget or there won't be any future countries added, go for option 2. I hope that helps a bit.

** If going for option 2 and using country domains, host them in their respective countries.

namealot · Apr 10, 2012

Client should no which is there preferred…? e.g. bigger market , the most profitable, , staffing, offices, maintenance marketing cost etc also what the site offers product , service, demand ( % population ?) etc etc most countries preferred is local cctld but not always, you’d need to research…

They tend to want a return ASAP choose the one marketing, research tells you is more suitable and devlope first then use the profits to break/susidise etc into the other ..

The com often favors the company home base location or biggest target audience you’d reg all three if you believe the garb about were its hosted effecting the seo, serps etc then cctld’s in each country .com used to boost whichever flags behind

If they whine about the cost its simple ignore what research, marketing etc say and reg and develop whichever is the cheapest?