Dumb International SEO question?

[Nightwing]

Buongiorno from 18 degrees C Wetherby UK...

Client asks -  "My swedish site is http://www2.kingspanpanels.se/ how important is having the swedish suffix in the url with regards to rankings in Sweden?"

I find these questions really challenging, its like the Hey if i change this url my SEO problems will be fixed, as if its that easy.

So my question is - "How weighted is the url suffix / ccTLD in terms of SEO success for a territory / country" Put another way "If the swedish suffix .se was removed would it impact rankings in any way in Sweden?"

Grazie tanto,
David

[Antony_Towle]

From my limited experience in my opinion i find it a strong factor, we have a couple of websites in different countries that seem to rank particularly well with the correct country code,

But i remembered this Matt Cutts video which should give you a better idea http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJqZIH_0Ars

Hope this helps

James

[David-E-Carey]

Hi David,

I think it is pretty important where you can employ the ccTLD of the target country.  I have Swedish clients and I do want to reach out and target our potential clients in this country. However I don't have a Swedish domain.

This page which is in Swedish does rank in Sweden http://www.instantatlas.com/Helse_Nord_Story-swe.xhtml

I have adopted schema for it and as well as obviously having the page in Swedish I did add the following:

So as much as possible if I don't have the ccTLD I at least try to cover all the other potential options such as title, description.
I suppose as well could change the URL to something more Swedish.

Hope that helps a little.

David

[newtraffic]

Hi David,

All your questions are basically answered in this article http://searchengineland.com/11-considerations-for-international-seo-117798 

For starting it's a plus to have the .se domain. However it takes more time to build up a nice link profile for a single domain in contrast to a TLD with subfolders. There you have s stronger domain authority. It's a matter of budget here. I'm sure the article will deliver the rest. Hope this helps

[David-E-Carey]

Thanks Mark I'll have a look at the article.

Best regards

David