Ecommerce site in Europe

[MartinJC]

A client is looking to expand their ecommerce business into Europe. They have already purchased a number of European brand domain names and want to start their expansion in Ireland.

Is it better to have a single website with pages translated for each language or a seperate site for each domain/country?

With Ireland the only obvious difference is the currency, language shouldn't be an issue. But if we choose seperate sites for each domain/country will having the same product content/descriptions especially in the case of Ireland be an issue?

Thanks in advance

[Andy-Halliday]

Ireland a bit tricky in registering a country domain - you have to prove you have a business in the country, even in the UK it can be difficult to get a domain.

Having different sites means doubling, tripping your SEO efforts, whereas if you have the one site you can use the existing links to boost your initial ranking in a country.

There a pro and cons for either method, but I always prefer 1 domain, then your content strategy is for one site so a blog post can be useful to multiple countries and you don't need to re-write the content.

[MartinJC]

Andy, thanks for your reply.

We secured the irish domain, proving we already operate in Ireland was the easy part.

I'm with you on a single site, single point of administration. My huge concern was with the duplicate content.

For this to work we need to secure the .com domain.

[badgergravling]

If you go with a single domain, you can use hreflang to cover duplicate content targetting each location, which works for same-language/different country.

From https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

'Some example scenarios where rel="alternate" hreflang="x" is recommended:

• You keep the main content in a single language and translate only the template, such as the navigation and footer. Pages that feature user-generated content, like forums, typically do this.
• Your content has small regional variations with** similar content in a single language**. For example, you might have English-language content targeted to the US, GB, and Ireland.
• Your site content is fully translated. For example, you have both German and English versions of each page.'

[gfiorelli1]

Remember also that you can geo-target subfolders in Google Search Console, creating a specific profile for the subfolder you want to geo-target.

Therefore, in your case, the domain.com/en-ie/ subfolder can be geo-targeted to Ireland.

All the other things suggested by Dan are correct.

Regarding using subfolders or a cCtld, don't think in terms of SEO but of business.

It is true that, if your main domain is very powerful, via internal linking you can give some initial boost to a your new geo-targeted /en-ie/ subfolder, but it is equally true that it is very hard, if not almost impossible, for an internal URL to earn backlinks naturally. In other words, the Irish Time will probably link to your home page (www.domain.com) instead of your "Irish" home page (www.domain.com/en-ie/).

So, if your brand is already know in Ireland or you have the possibility to promote it well from the very beginning, it can be worth starting from zero with a new www.yourbrand.ie domain name.

Finally, if you decide to go for the subfolder way, remember at least to set user browser 302 redirections (but - important - not forcing it every time), so that the users will always land on a /en-ie/ version of your site if they are using en-IE english in their browser (or 302 redirect via IP detection).

[MartinJC]

Guys,
I'd like to thank you both for your answers and help with this. I have a much better idea of the way forward now.