Should I have two sites for my services? .com & .co.uk

[DomainM]

I provide design services and about 2 years ago moved from .com to .co.uk. Previous to this move I was working with more international clients. Since moving this has now become very UK centric.

I am considering launching a new .com site, re-instating my old domain. The .co.uk domain would be targeted at regional/UK clients while marketing the .com for international US business.

Is this an awful idea? Should I just focus all my limited time into the .UK domain and hope that this would be sufficient or go wider for an international audience.

Interested to hear SEO opinion on what I should be considering here. Thanks

 

[dee]

If you're talking about having two identical sites but just different extensions, the you'd get hit with duplicate content penalties so bad idea. I think you'd have to have two completely different sites and treat them as independant entities.

If it were me, and if I was aiming at international clients and uk , then i'd go com and redirect the co.uk & uk toward the com. Com is fine in uk . If it was purely uk business then I think co.uk & uk generally does better for regional searches.

Is you uk site already established ? You could set up identical url scheme and redirect pages ?

 

[DomainM]

I was thinking that both sites would have unique text copy, no duplicate content issues. These sites would effectively become their own entities under the same company name. I would possibly use some form of IP redirect for UK and non-UK visitors to avoid confusion. The reason for not forwarding the .UK domain is branding related. I have already invested a lot of time into building a single word .UK domain which appears on vehicle livery etc. The .COM domain is the longer form of my business name so I feel comfortable using it for non .UK clients.

There are also other considerations also. In the UK I use UK English, promote the regional nature of my services and show prices in GBP. On the .COM site I would be using US English, shows USD and promoting the remote working nature of my services.

I wouldn't use the same URL structure as the .UK site has been optimised for UK SEO.

 

[Admin]

I was thinking that both sites would have unique text copy, no duplicate content issues. These sites would effectively become their own entities under the same company name. I would possibly use some form of IP redirect for UK and non-UK visitors to avoid confusion. The reason for not forwarding the .UK domain is branding related. I have already invested a lot of time into building a single word .UK domain which appears on vehicle livery etc. The .COM domain is the longer form of my business name so I feel comfortable using it for non .UK clients.

There are also other considerations also. In the UK I use UK English, promote the regional nature of my services and show prices in GBP. On the .COM site I would be using US English, shows USD and promoting the remote working nature of my services.

I wouldn't use the same URL structure as the .UK site has been optimised for UK SEO.

This all sounds fine. You state you would use unique copy so then the answer to your question is really a wider 'business decision' and not an SEO dilemma.

 

[Matt1966]

You can use both. The 'duplicate content' comment is false, the way you do this properly is through HREFLANG implementation which will tell Google this is targeting X country, and that is targeting X country.

You could also do this all on the .com domain if you wanted to make it all in one place.

.com* = worldwide.
.com/gb/* = UK.

But using both TLDs would also work.

 

[Admin]

Matts right. You can also set international targeting in GSC by directory or by domain so you can basically achieve exactly what you want with a few simple settings in GSC and setting of correct hreflang tags. It's a business decision as to whether you use 2 domains or 1.

 

[Silver]

Rather than having two sites for different markets, I'd agree with Dee. As someone who specialises in SEO and has done for a number of years I really wouldn't be going down the route you're looking at.

By having one site targeting different markets/geographic locations, you're going to build up more domain authority.

More content, more backlinks, more authority.