What shall we do to increase organic traffic for both the sites?

[CyrilWilson]

We have 2 English language bookselling websites targeted for USA and UK audience with some content variations but 60%-70% of the content on site remains the same.

The site is hosted in USA. One is hosted on brandname.co.uk (for United Kingdom) and one is on brandname.com(For United States)

The precautions that we have already taken to save it from being marked duplicates are:

1. used rel=alternate element for all product detail pages
2. currency in both the sites are different that is GBP and USD
3. Geotarget settings done for USA and UK respectively through webmaster tools Launched backlink campaign to gain from local sites and directory respectively
4. have tried to differentiate the product by using different product specific terms like Publishing Year: vis a vis published in:

Author Vis a vis Written by

Format vis a vis binding type

Add to cart vis a vis add to basket and so on

What remains the same:

1. Product detail pageTitle

2. Product detail page Meta Description

3. Product Name- That is Title of the book which cannot be changed anyways

4. About the product text –The memo or “About the Book” that comes along with the book and is same across each booksellers site. This is impossible to be differentiated as the database have more than 3 Million books

brandname.com which is older (2 Yrs) of the two  has traffic around 2500-3000 daily visits while the brandname.co.uk which is 5 months old has 150-200 daily visitors. Both sites have around 4 Million pages.

Need suggestions what are we doing wrong and what extra can be done to boost organic traffic?

[Adam.Whittles]

Firstly, I have to ask why you are using both the .co.uk and .com domains? You really only need the .com as you should be able to get rankings in the UK relatively easily with the .com. Of course it is nice to have the .co.uk for brand/reputation management but it isn't necessary to rank in the UK. Also when you say the site is hosted in the US, I assume your hosting for the .co.uk domain is also in the US? If this is the case, then it is kind of pointless having the .co.uk domain in the first place.

My advice would be to consolidate your sites into one, using the .com domain as the primary domain considering it is older and has more authority. After that you will need to make sure that it contains both US and UK specific content (prices £/$, shipping etc.). Then you will need to change your link building to incorporate a percentage of UK based links.

This way you should be able to rank well in both the US and UK, without any duplicate content worries.

Hope that helps,

Adam.

[Tintanus]

I totally agree with you, although people don't like to receive answers that might brake their strategy. .co.uk is pointless.

[CyrilWilson]

Thanks for the answer but it is really difficult to undo what has been done. We are trying to reach out as many country as we can with multiple TLDs. We have launched 2 and in next month going to come up with .de and .jp with translated content in local languages.

The idea to have co.uk, .com. .jp. .de was purely brand management, localization of currency, language barrier, some operational convenience, accounting etc.

Is there anything that can be done with the existing strategy to boost traffic?

[irvingw]

• .co.uk sites have a better chance of ranking  in google UK still.
• he's doing all the right things to send the right signals to Google.
• Google doesn't care where the UK site is hosted.
• he's geotargeting so even if it's duplicate content it's getting filtered properly.
• there is not really any problem as to how this is implemented if he has no problem with maintaining two sites.

What can be done to boost traffic is a different question. Better on page SEO, if we had the URL we could offer suggestions there.

[CyrilWilson]

Thanks Irving for understanding it. Here are the links for both sites

http://www.printsasia.com

http://www.printsasia.co.uk