SEO and International Domain Structures

Setting up different domains to display business to the global audience can be a great challenge. The practice mainly involves structuring of URLs and website content. The main purpose to do so is to bring the given business on the top of different SERPs being displayed in different countries.

There are different approaches to structure the website content and URLs. Every approach has its own set of advantages and disadvantages. In order to get a knowhow about those pros and cons, a brief summary of every approach is worth mentioning in this article.

International Subdomain Structure

International sites can get benefit from this approach as it helps the business in two ways; i.e. making the business centralized globally or let the national departments run on their own. However, each department of the business must support different languages in order to avoid any problem.

The major drawback with this approach is the risk of sub-domain cannibalization. It means that only one sub-domain from a site will be given preference by Google according to the terms and conditions.

Location Sub-Directories

This approach basically involves structuring of URLs into sub-directories to optimize the languages and locations. Theoretically, this approach should work well if the site is willing to show same data to the entire global audience. 

However, risk of internal cannibalization has its persistence in this scenario. It means that it’s not necessary that people in a specific area might not reach the sub-directory that would support their language or location.

Different Names/TLDS

You can register for separate domains if your business is not centralized. For this, you can either register URLs with different TLDS (e.g. amazon.com and amazon.co.uk), or you can register URLs with different names (garnier.com and garnierusa.com).

As for the drawbacks, setting different domains featuring the same name can be a difficult task. It mainly includes restructuring of entire web content for making it appropriate according to the user experience requirement of certain area. Moreover, Google doesn’t pay attention to all of the domains and promotes only one of them.

Different businesses have different requirements. Therefore, it is hard to rate any of above mentioned approaches better than the remaining ones. 

In fact, all approaches have their own benefits and pitfalls. Hence, it’s all up to the campaigns being run on the global platform.

SEO Firms – Which Firms Can Be Untrustworthy?

If you are a business owner, it’s a must that you will think of expanding your business in the online arena. The better way to get it done is to do better SEO of your business website and you might need to hire a SEO firm in this regard.

But finding a good SEO firm is itself a job that has to be done wisely, because internet marketing and SEO pretty much depend upon good quality marketing strategies rather than link bombardment techniques.

Here are some tips and tricks that will help you in avoiding the scam companies during your search for a suitable SEO firm.

The promises, made by most of the SEO firms, regarding getting your website to the search engine’s first page are mostly the sales tactics to win your website’s SEO project. The matter of fact is that reputable SEO companies do not make such promises because they are aware of fluctuations in the search engine’s rankings. They, however, will try to improve your website’s authority which would be good for your business in long term.

Quantity of backlinks doesn’t matter but quality does. Therefore, if you have found a company whose personnel promise you thousands of backlinks, avoid dealing with that firm. They will more likely use low quality websites for back-linking, eventually prompting your website to be declared as untrustworthy by search engines.

Bad firms usually do not have proofs of good works from the past. All they can do is that they try to convince people by posing themselves as the best chance of brining the business in search engine’s spotlight.

There is no one who doesn’t need the bulk of content. However, it doesn’t mean that you should try to find a cheap service for your content automation. In fact, you should stay away from the SEO firms which offer this kind of services in cheap prices because they will ignore the content quality as first thing.

Viewing SEO report is the best way to know how well your business is performing online. Another main attribute of untrustworthy SEO firms is that they most commonly hesitate to offer reports.

If you want your online business to prosper well, it is recommended that you should try to avoid companies which would have above mentioned characteristics and you can consider hiring reputable one if you are looking for local SEO firm.