How can I rank my .co.uk using content on my .com?

[benjmoz]

Hi,

We currently have a .com site ranking second for our brand term in the .co.uk SERP. This is mainly because we don't own the exact match brand term which comes from not having a clue what we were doing when we set up the company.

Would it be possible to out rank this term considering we the weighing that google puts towards exact matches in the URL?

N.B - There are a few updates we could do to the homepage to make the on-page optimisation better and we have not actively done any link building yet which will obviously help.

competitor SERP rank 1 - MOZ PA38   DA26

Our Site SERP rank 2 - MOZ PA43 DA32

Thanks

Ben

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi Ben,

If coming up with a dedicated CCTLD (yourdomain.co.uk) is not possible in this case, you can go with a CC sub-domain like.. uk.yourdomain.com for the purpose. Personally, except for geo-targeting in a multi-regional setup, I stick to and prefer sub-directories to sub-domains.

Here you go for what Google has to say regarding this issue of yours:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en

If you look at the table, the sub-domain strategy has only one con compared to others.

Hope it helps. Good Luck my friend.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

[Devanur-Rafi]

Forgot to include the disclaimer : ) ..With all things mentioned in that article from Google webmaster support, your chances to rank in .co.uk SERPs definitely become higher while there no guarantee though.

[JaneCopland]

Hi Ben,

It's absolutely possible to out-rank the exact match domain, although without seeing the actual examples, it's tough to say what will be needed. Even the DA / PA numbers don't tell me much, unfortunately.

Exact match domains have an advantage of sorts, simply because their content tends to be highly relevant to the query / subject matter. You will find, however, that if there are better options available for Google to rank, Google is not married to the idea of always ranking exact match domains first. Far from it. It used to be pretty easy to spam using this tactic, but that clearly didn't provide a good user experience for anyone. For example, if I owned carinsurance.co.uk because I bought it in 1999 and threw up a thin affiliate website on it in 2008, it's not going to rank well for [car insurance]. As it turns out, no domains like this do rank well for [car insurance]. (I don't know who is behind http://www.carinsurance.co.uk/ and I used it as an example before looking at it, I promise.)

Better overall SEO - link development, branding, content, social media work (if applicable to your industry and done correctly), etc. all contribute to out-ranking an exact-match domain, no matter how long that domain has ranked well for the query in question.