What's the point of an EU site?

[Nightwing]

Buongiorno from 18 degrees C Wetherby UK

On this site http://www.milwaukeetool.eu/ the client wants to hold on to the EU site despite there being multiple standalone country sittes e.g. http://www.milwaukeetool.fr & http://www.milwaukeetool.co.uk

Why would you ever need an EU site? I mean who ever searches for an EU site? If the client holds on to the eu site despite my position it's a waiste of time from a search perspective is the folowing the best appeasment?

When a user enters the eu url or redirects to country the detected, eg I'm in Paris I enter www.milwaukeetool.eu it redirects to http://www.milwaukeetool.fr. My felling this would be the most pragmatic thing to do?

Any ideas please,
Cioa,
David

[AymanH]

Hello

I got the same situation with customers recently. The best I've found was to tell them:

"You're definitely right we cannot loose the .eu. So we gonna redirect it to the BESTDOMAINE.com as main website. So people will still find you and you'll get more customers and will keep the .eu."

Then you can provide some technical arguments explaining that if he sticks to this position he will loose business.

In my case it worked out

From 50° in Dubai

[Rubix]

I had that argument with a client once and i manage to persuade them not to go ahead with it as they had .com and .co.uk .

.com is international so i think it did make sense not to use .eu but in your case, if you don't have .com then probably you need to look at which countries you want to target. If your client is UK based and if they target client from all around EU, then it might make sense to use .eu as you have very little chance to target someone in Italy with co.uk or .com.fr domains. If you are targeting only UK and FR then, you don't need .eu. It will just duplicate your work.

[gfiorelli1]

The .eu domain termination is a generic, hence it is not bound to geo-targeting on Google Webmaster Tool. In that sense, it is an alternative to the .com domain termination, if the .com is not available.

It was created by the European Union has a way to "communicate" that the business owning the domain has an European nature and that it is based on a nation of E(uropean) U(nion) and that is primary market is the EU.

From an SEO point of view, it doesn't offer any really advantage with respect any other generic domain name:

1. you can't geo-target more countries with a single domain name

2. you can't geo-target political regions (or continents).

Hence, it is good to have it for defending your brand, and to use it if .com (or .net) have been already taken. But if you have a .com, then it is better to redirect the .eu to it.