International SEO - UK & US

[harrycox]

Hi!

I'm currently working with a brand that is well established in the UK and is looking to expand it's reach in US. The UK site has a solid link profile and I think that creating a sub-folder for the US site is by far the best solution.

My only concern is that the UK site uses a .co.uk domain. Would it therefore be counter-productive to use a subfolder that looks like this:

www.example.co.uk/us

In an ideal world I would advise the brand to acquire a location neutral domain (e.g. www.example.com) however the [brandname].com isn't available and options are otherwise very limited!

Steps would be taken to ensure all other technical bases are covered (hreflang tags etc) but I'm struggling to find any further insight on this issue.

Any feedback from the community would be greatly appreciated!

Many thanks,

Harrison

[R0bin_L0rd]

Hi Harrison, thanks for posting - good question!

I think the common understanding is that Google doesn't necessarily treat .co.uk as less relevant in the US per se but things like the domain can hurt clickthrough for example, which can end up having pretty much the same rankings impact anyway (I mean, we're making assumptions here, it would be hard to divorce the two).

I'd usually be all-for making decisions that are as future-proof as possible and you probably wouldn't want to have to go through a US migration in future so I'd lean towards getting one of those neutral ".com" domains you mention which you can use now and in the future.

That being said, you'd be starting from absolutely nothing in terms of trust signals to the new domain so if this business venture is reliant on getting quicker feedback about how you do if you optimise for the US, I think it's also legitimate to take the subfolder approach in the short term, it's just a bit less common and may force you in to a folder migration later if you think you are being limited by the domain.

What do you think?

[harrycox]

Thanks for this answer Robin!

I'm reassured that you think Google won't necessarily treat it as less relevant. At the same time I am definitely on-board with your thinking beyond that. I think I will definitely look to find a solution that's more future-proof (i.e. secure a .com domain).

Thanks again. Wish me luck

[R0bin_L0rd]

Glad to be of help, good luck!