E-Commerce - Country Domains versus 1 Domain?

[bjs2010]

Hi,

Just wanted to get some feedback and opinions re the idea of segmenting our ecommerce site languages under various domains, like .jp for japanese, .it for italian etc...

I do understand the geolocation benefits that this could bring us, but on the flipside, it would mean that we would need to grow our domain authority, link buiding per country domain, which is quite a bit of work.

Has anyone ever considered or implemented this and any thoughts?

Thanks!

[Ray-pp]

My thoughts are as follows:

• Do the country specific search engines add / have the potential to add a lot of value to your business?

• If no, then do not worry about the country specific domains

• If yes, identify the specific countries that can add more value

• Are you having trouble ranking in those country specific search engines?

• If no, then continue with the single domain and adjust your 1 website to be more friendly to all countries

• If yes, do a cost-benefit analysis about the work it would entail to get country specific websites and the value you can derive from the expected increase in rankings

[bjs2010]

Thank you for your answer.

It´s hard to estimate the value this one particular country would add - we work with a niche and getting estimates as to the volume of extra business it could yield is hard, SEMRush is helpful though.

[Ray-pp]

I'd agree, it's hard work! But, that's why we get paid a nice salary, to figure out those difficult problems. If you have an idea of the Customer Lifetime Value, for that country, you can get some decent estimates from the expected increase in traffic when targeting that country specifically.