Finbarr McCarthy

With increased globalisation, many companies which have typically operated in a single geography are now concentrating on extending their local web presence into other countries.  This creates several issues from a general web presence perspective and in particular from a Search Engine Optimisation point of view.

The challenge is how to provide a seamless, localised user experience to your website visitors while ensuring that you can compete favourably in local search engine results pages of the target countries?  In reality there is no “one fits all” solution to the problem.

The two broadest paths taken are either a single domain, such as .com which has broad user acceptance across the world, or a multiple country code TLD solution (eg .ie, .co.uk, .fr, etc). There are some very obvious benefits and drawbacks to each solution.

Firstly if localised content is required, the single domain approach can be cumbersome for your end users if they need to select the country or language they prefer.  Once selected your users preference can be stored in a cookie and will be retained for future visits (assuming the same computer is used). Unfortunately, search engines won’t accept the cookie and may have difficulty accessing the localised content as a result.  A subtle variant on this approach is to use a service called Geo IP Location, this service checks the IP address of each visitor and determines what country and city each visitor is coming from, with this information a localised session can then be served to the website visitor.  This mechanism has many benefits but can be less than ideal from a search engine indexing perspective.  The difficulty results from your lack of control of the country of origin of the search engine spiders that index your site.

Choosing a ccTLD for each country may seem like a daunting prospect at first, based principally on the fact that that you will be managing several different websites but there are some significant benefits to this approach.

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