Same language manage many country

[nono_1974]

Hello,

I would like to hear how you would handle the following situation. I make website for people with a .be domain that also want to score in .nl . Both countries speak dutch. There are however slight variations between the two countries. For some it does not matter for others it can be handy. Ex. A specific product might be called diffrent in one country then the other.

The main problem is for those that have a .be domain will not score on a .nl domain and visa versa. This due geo targeting. What would you do? Imagine we already have a .be domain  (.be == belgium, .nl==Netherland both speak dutch)

A: Buy a .nl and copy and show the same content on .nl as .be
B: Buy a .nl and make new content (lots of work)
Buy a .EU, .com adres and Geotarget nl.somedomain.eu , be.somedomain.eu . But what about the content

The main problem is double content and targeting the two countries.

[Chris.Menke]

That's actually a business decision your client's should make. The best option would be to do the two domains with different content but whether that would make business sense for them is their call.  They may ask you how much more traffic they would get if they did B. and part of what they pay you for should be to provide them with that information but not necessarily to make that decision.  I think that too often clients ask SEOs ask us to make executive decisions but only want to pay us SEO wages.

[nono_1974]

Would .eu not be then the best option. What would be the difference for it if you would not found? geotarget this? versus geotarget...

[Chris.Menke]

Wouldn't you be producing separate content  for both domains in the case of B and C?

[nono_1974]

Actualy I think there is a D option

use .eu domain but don't determine the geografic region you should score.

Would that not result in higher score. Becouse .be and .nl are geografic determined.

Recreate 1000+ product and copywrite just to score better in .be and .nl would be way over budget. And very unpractical

[gfiorelli1]

The .EU domains name are generic ones, hence you could create a unique site both the Belgium and Netherlands.

Said that, it would not be logical to geotarget th domain name to one or the other nation in Google Webmaster Tools, because that would screw up the nature itself of having just one site/content for both countries.

In that case, in order to have a good geolocalization you will need to rely - apart on site factors - on link building from BE and NL sites.

[gfiorelli1]

D surely is an option to take into account (see my answer just above).

Said that, I would monitor constantly the % of traffic from BE and NL and if one of them starts being relevant, I would use that data so to propose the migration to a .be and/or .nl domain name.

Remember that, in that case, you will also start thinking in implementing the rel="alternate" hreflang="x-X", in order to solve the duplicate content issue between the two sites.