Targeting different countries with domain name

[jayoliverwright]

Hi currently have a eCommerce store .com.au targeting Australia. We want to start targeting the US market with the same products.

I guess what would be the top choice in this case since our domain is location-specific to Australia and not a generic top-level domain (gTLD)?

Cheers,

Chris

[_nitman]

Hi Jay,

I would suggest you to buy the .com domain if its available. Using a country specific domain to target international market is not a good idea. If .com isn't available, you can think about buying country specific domains to target various countries.

https://moz.com/learn/seo/international-seo can help you understand more on this. Hope this helps!

[seoman10]

Typically the TLD should match that of the country you want to target, although practically I've never seen it make much difference.  If it was a very competitive market sector and very location specific it may make more of the difference.

One thing you should be aware of do not just add a second TLD to your website, this will cause Google to see duplicate content which it doesn't like possibly other search engines as well.

[DirkC]

@Seoman10 - don't really agree with your answer:

1. Targeting the us market with a .com.au extension doesn't make sense (source https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399)

"If your site has a generic top-level domain, such as .com or .org, you can help us determine which countries are most important to you. If your site has a country-coded top-level domain (such as .ie or .fr) it is already associated with a geographic region (in this example, Ireland or France). If you use a country-coded domain, you won't be able to specify a geographic location. "

2. Duplicate content on different TLD's if they target different countries / languages can be handled using hreflang tags (check https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077) in combination with geotargeting (check https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en#2)

Dirk