Help! Choosing a domain for a European sub-brand when working as a partner in North America

[mkretsinger]

Background:

Let's say there's a European company ABC.com, they have some presence in the US already for a lot of product brands in a certain space (let's say they make widgets). ABC Co gets 1,600 searches a month and all of that volume centers around the widgets they are known for.

ABC Co purchases a company that makes gears, let's call it Gears Inc (gears.com). Gears Inc. was known for making gears in Europe, but their brand is not known in the US (search volume 0).

Ideally, I would keep the Gears Inc. brand and build up the presence in the US, separating it from ABC Co. ABC Co wants to maintain their brand and eliminate Gears Inc. But we've received permission to keep the Gears brand for bringing that product to the US ... we will have an uphill battle building up the brand recognition, but at least it won't get lost in what ABC Co is already known for in the US. (ie: we don't want calls for widgets).

Domain Situation:

ABC Co. has redirected gears.com (DA 1) to a subdomain: {gearmakers}.abcco.com (DA 66) ... they have agreed to place a landing page under that 301 that links to the regional domains (theirs in the EU and ours in the US/North America). They are unwilling to let us use or purchase gears.com OR 301 gears.com directly to our domain.

What we're trying to do:

• build Gears Inc. as a recognizable brand
• when someone searches "gears inc", this domain would rank first
• create a simple "brand domain" that a less-tech-savvy users could easily navigate to
• needs to have recognition in US, Canada and Mexico
  I don't know if this helps or provides anything more?

The question is what do we use as our domain name?

Any feedback is appreciated!

[DarinPirkey]

I'm sure I didn't quit follow everything you mentioned on here but honestly a subdirectory (aka abcco.com/gears) would be what I would do. They are already pointing the domain to a subdomain, can they change it to a subdirectory? That directory could utilize the domain authority of abcco.com and when people go there it could look different than the main abcco.com brand or have a little of the ABC co brand to give gears some credibility but be unique enough to be it's own thing.

If you have to use a unique domain name you'd need to do some research on the gears they sell and keywords surrounding.  I tend to look for domains with some brandability behind them (not sure brandability is a word).

GetGears.com or something like that.

Hope that helps.

[gfiorelli1]

Your question is quite convoluted, so I hope to answer it correctly :-).

My first thought when reading your question was: "Why do they want to associate two so different set of products?".

I mean, I fully understand that you are moved by SEO consideration, but - honestly - SEO should not enslave business considerations and logic.

Widget and Gears are two totally different kinds of products and, especially, they have very different kind of buyer personas. In other words: the buyer personas targeted by the widgets website not necessarily are interested in gears.

Plus, also on an entity level, there's no connection between widgets and gears, hence also for Google would be hard to start understanding for what entity set is relevant the website if it is not presenting itself as a broader ecommerce store.

So, strategically, I would not start with SEO (bear with me...) as the main channel for the new gear website, but on branding, creating a dedicated website in a dedicated unique domain name.

Hence, I'd create campaigns to support the launching of the new website and line of products, so to create a solid backlink profile from the start, which will obviously help in rankings.

Said that, I would take advantage of the visibility of the Widget website for announcing the new Gear one (I suppose the widget site has a news section and an About Us section, under which you can create a landing page explaining what other "companies/websites" are part of the "Businesses company owning the Widget website".