We have a site with a lot of international traffic, can we split the site some way?

[AllAboutGroup]

Hello,

We have a series of sites and one, in particular, has around 75,000 (20%) monthly users from the USA, but we don't currently offer them anything as our site is aimed at the UK market. The site is a .com and though we own the .co.uk the .com is the primary domain.

We have had a lot of success moving other sites to have the .co.uk as the primary domain for UK traffic. However, in this case, we want to keep both the UK traffic and the US traffic and if we split it into two sites, only one can win right?

What could do? It would be cool to have a US version of our site but without affecting traffic too much. On the other sites, we simply did 301 redirects from the .com page to the corresponding .co.uk page.

Any ideas?

[gfiorelli1]

If I understood well, your .com website has good traffic from the USA, albeit you’re targeting the UK as a market.

the solution I see it to create a mirror website under .com/is/ and geotarget that subfolder to United States in Google Search Console, while geotargeting the domain to UKz

Then, I’d implement the hreflang tags so to indicate to Google that it must show the UK URLs to people searching from UK (hreflang=“en-Gb”) anddto show the US ones to USA searchers.

However, being the 2 versions identical, I’d canonicalize the USA versions n toward the UK one. Be aware that this is not how Google suggests to implement the hreflang, but John Mueller himself confirmed to Glenn Gabe that this is the correct thing to do for avoiding Google to consolidate the duplicated content using a version which is not the one you prefer.

fianlly, if you still want to target also English speaking users not from UK or USA (I.e.: Canadians), you could add a third hreflang annotation like this: hreflang=“en“.