Have you considered your domain name strategy?
A common pitfall with an e-commerce site-build can be to focus solely on the site you need now, rather than the site you need next year. This can lead to difficulties or less than ideal workarounds from an SEO perspective in order to retro-fit a feature.
By Nichola Stott from theMediaFlow
If you’ve written a three-year business plan that talks about international expansion has your choice of domain and intended international SEO strategy taken heed of this? Let’s examine some of the core developmental considerations for a growing online shop, with food for thought on:
• Domain strategy – is it optimal for your launch market(s)
• Internationalisation – how best to approach multi-market expansion
Domain Strategy
When considering your initial domain strategy if your business is designed to be primarily online, or led by online you have more freedom in choosing your domain as there are not so many offline considerations. Ideally you may be able to decide your business name according to the best domain available with key considerations being:
• Trust – is this a business/domain name that has the right sound and feeling to it
• Brandable – gone are the days of exact-match domains for a sustainable business model
• Availability – will you be able to dominate your brand-SERP with matching social media handles
• Meaning – check there’s no double entendre in both your home market and markets you would love to expand to
• Readability – If you sell pens, don’t be the next penisisland.net
• History – if you’re buying a “used” domain, check out what it was in the past, avoid former adult domains and check the legacy backlinks using a tool like Majestic SEO
• TLD – the TLD (top level domain) that you choose will affect your potential to rank and user trust
More on choice of TLD
As an online shop you need potential customers to trust you to handle a payment process and truth is that older more widely established TLDs are more recognizable and trustworthy. In terms of authority afforded by search engines it’s almost always easier to progress a .com than say a .biz. If you are launching in the UK only then a .co.uk is preferable and that logic applies to any country-specific site launch going forward.
Whilst each business case has its’ own specific needs, if you plan to be a UK business with dreams of US expansion; in most cases you can’t go far wrong with buying your .co.uk and .com domain at the outset. Publish your site to .co.uk and 301 your .com domain until such a time as you can develop it out to a US-facing website.
Internationalisation
If you have hard and fast plans to expand to other markets then this must be baked-in. Even if additional-market expansion is more a dream at the outset, it’s better to plan in hope than fix in haste.
Ideally, purchase your ccTLD (country code top level domain) at the outset, for each market you plan to expand to, and for any others you can secure or afford (for brand protection reasons.)
It is best practise to develop and publish a natural-language website for each market in which you operate; which should have some content bespoke to that market. I.e. if my business plan is to launch in the UK, then expand to France and Germany, I would buy .co.uk, .fr and .de versions of my domain.
Do be aware that it’s not always easy or assured that you can buy a domain for every country by yourself as local laws may mean you need to use an in-market broker or even show physical presence and operating capital held in the market you wish to purchase a domain for.
If you come across issues that make the above approach business-prohibitive you can always geo-target different markets on the same domain, by using a country-specific sub-domain e.g. de.domain.com fr.domain.com uk.domain.com. In such cases you can give additional signal to search engines by using location-specific XML sitemaps; the process of which is case-studied here.
Pro Tip: If you find yourself launching country-specific versions of your shop you can now use the hreflang attribute. Similar to the canonical link directive, though not to be confused; by expressing (on the original page) that rel=”alternate” hreflang=”X” where X is the other language/country version you can really take the horse to water, by explaining to Google which page is meant for which search engine.
At this point in time there’s a couple of ways of doing this either in code or using Sitemaps.
Resources
Google explains rel=”alternate” hreflang=”X”
Implementing hreflang Sitemaps – Case Study
Hreflang Sitemap Generator
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