Web3.ca moving into U.S Market

[Web3Marketing87]

I run an agency called Web3 Marketing Inc. in beautiful Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. We have been very busy over the past few years, but now, with the lower price of oil, there is less work in our province. We are still busy, but are looking for new opportunities in the U.S.

We currently use the domain Web3.ca

The domain performs very well in Edmonton and has exceptional reviews (about 22 with a 5 star rating). Unfortunately, I am aware that a .ca will not rank well on Google.com for U.S. viewers. This leaves us with two options:

1. Re-brand Web3.ca completely (eg. brickwebdesign.com) and 301 redirect the .ca to a .com domain. This should give us a head start in the states.. last time I checked, this should redirect 90% of the authority to the new domain. However, theoretically, we would be risking our organic position for "Edmonton web design."

2. We start with a brand new domain. Considering how competitive the market for "web design," is in cities like Portland, San Fransisco and San Diago, this seems like a fairly daunting task. We will likely have to do a LOT of citation development and supplement it with paid advertising for a couple of years.

Outside of local address and phone number, do you guys have any comments about my options / strategy?

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.

1. True about redirect and risk for rankings.

2. You would have to do it no matter which way you choose to go due to high competition.

Now, the question - are you actually moving or expanding? I got the impression that you are expanding. If so - first idea is really bad. You will lose rankings in canada and it will take time to start ranking because you'd be new and because of the domain move.

My recommendation would be  to get new domain, either create new brand for us market or simply have unique content and use crossdomain hreflang to let search engines know that you are the same company. And you will have to do advertising, marketing, link building for US website no matter how you decide to "move". So, get crrranking

Hope this helps

[katemorris]

Dmitri is right, you are going to have to do a good amount of work regardless of the path you choose.

First, you need to start with looking toward the future. Are you going to want to always market to US cities? Will that grow? Are you looking to expand in 10 years to another country? These are questions that need to be answered before you choose what to do next.

Let me know what your plans are there, and then I'll expand on recommendations on what to do next. But I have a feeling that transitioning to a .com or other gTLD is going to work out best for you in the future.

[Web3Marketing87]

Thank you for your answer Dmitrii,

I was thinking more-less the same thing regarding a new brand. That being said, can you expand on crossdomain hreflang?

I haven't explored this concept before.. how would web3.ca tie into this?
Thanks,

Anton

[DmitriiK]

hreflang is basically a way to tell search engines that you have a version of a website per country (or, actually per spoken language).

Read here on what it is and how to use it: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

In your case, since you gonna have US and Canada website you gonna have something like this:

in your header.