Multi-country global company: Different TLD or one domain and several versions on it?

[Tiedemann_Anselm]

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[Malika1]

Hi Aviad,

The answer to this depends on the following or at least these should be kept in mind while making a decision on it -

1. Resources company is ready to allocate - Is company willing to spend more money buy having different websites on TLDs or just having one website is feasible?

2. What does the company want from brand point of view? This is bit of a vague question and maybe no one has the answer to it but its probably worth considering this.

Now, talking from SEO POV, different TLDs could potentially yield you better results as these are dedicated sites for different locations.

1. GEO TARGETING - You could host these sites on their local respective IP addresses.

2. LOCALISED CONTENT - Localise/customise the content of the website better since the websites are dedicated to specific countries.

3. USERS EXPECTATIONS/PREFERENCE - TLD might give you an added benefit as search engines tend to show few TLDs on first page (from my observation). Also, if you think about it from user perspective, they prefer browsing a website that seems more local. Buying a product from company.uk might be much more appealing than buying it from company.com or whatever the global website is.

Now talking about having a global website, its not that bad at all if you optimise it well.

1. GEO TARGETING - You dont need to host the website on separate ip addresses since its just one website. In order to have it load fast in different countries, you could use CDNs. CDNs are really good and if you get a good subscription, it could give your website a good SEO benefit.

2. LOCALISED CONTENT - In order to talk to the users from different geographic region, you could have specific dedicated pages sitting within the subfolders such as company.com/uk, company.com/jp etc. This way you will be able to speak to the users by customising these dedicated pages.

3. USERS EXPECTATIONS/PREFERENCE - I mentioned above that users prefer to shop from TLDs more. If you have subfolders on the website, then you that good however, users can still see that you are a global website. This is something that you might wanna think about.

Hope this gives you a bit of idea on the thought process for understanding what will be best for the company.

Malika