CcTLD vs subfolder for international SEO

[MedicalSEOMarketing]

In what situations is subfolder better than ccTLD, and vice versa.

[Paddy_Moogan]

Hi there,

There are a bunch of ways to answer this question and things will change depending on your situation, but I'll give you an overview which will hopefully help your situation!

The first thing to say is that a ccTLD is only designed to help you target a location - not a language. For example, example.co.uk would naturally default to target users who are in the UK. Within this, you may target the English language or other languages, but it will generally only show to users in that location.

If you are looking to target multiple locations and want to use the ccTLD approach, then you will need a ccTLD for each location that you want to target. There can be advantages to this such as users being familiar with their "own" ccTLD and you can focus 100% on one domain and keep all of the content focused just on one location. There are disadvantages which include the maintenance, upkeep and marketing for several domains rather than one. Which leads into the subfolder question...

Subfolders are generally easier from a maintenance perspective because it's a single domain, often running off a single CMS and any equity or authority that you build up in one domain will help all subfolders for each country/language. Subfolders also make it easier to target variations of location + language.

For me, my advice is usually to go with a single domain + subfolders if you do not have the resources to build, maintain and promote several domains at once. If you have a team and expertise for each location and language who can each "own" a different domain, then ccTLDs or gTLDs make more sense.

It's also worth a read of this Moz post for more detail:

https://moz.com/blog/guide-to-international-seo

Hope that helps!

Paddy

[MedicalSEOMarketing]

Thank you for the helpful reply and the link.

I don't see anything info about whether a country specific IP address is a prerequisite for ranking in country specific search engines?

[Paddy_Moogan]

No problem, glad it was helpful.

Having a country specific IP isn't a deal breaker when it comes to ranking in specific countries. I've heard that it can have some effect i.e. if your website is hosted in the UK and your primary audience is the UK, then it may help a little. But I haven't seen this first hand.

I think the primary focus should be on getting solid hosting and uptime, regardless of where it's located. If I have a UK focused domain, I'd rather have a solid hosting company where my website is fast and based in the US, than a UK based IP address that is slow