Impact changing domain from ccTLD to .com

[DougRoberts]

I've got a couple of clients who have an international market for their products or services. Both of these clients have a .co.uk domain.

For one site the US market is the major audience, the other it's european countries.

At the moment, neither of these clients have translated page or content targeted to a specific country. There are no plans at this stage to create such content.

Google considers the .co.uk to be targeted to the United Kingdom. The assumption is that by changing this to .com it will increase their international reach.

For both the domains, referral and direct traffic is much more diverse than organic (which as you'd expect is heavily UK weighted - but there is some international organic traffic)

Does anyone have any experience making such a change? How did the change affect your international reach/visibility?

Does anyone have any metrics that they'd like to share that could be used to make a case to clients?

(Note, I'm not interested in how you'd go about handling the domain change - I'm happy/confident about doing this.)

[Optimise]

I know this is an old question and I don't have anything to add myself but I'd be interested in hearing if anyone has any thoughts on this because we're looking at doing a similar thing.