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.