Website Migration and Making Sure You Get It Right for SEO
A company’s website has never been more important than in today’s consumer market, as consumer spending and confidence are at an all-time low. UK based companies are looking to foreign markets to expand their businesses due to a saturated British business market and the extra options available for the consumer. A key area that companies can use to move into a foreign market without incurring a large set up cost is to have a full international strategy in place using their website as the marketing tool to display their message to the international consumer.
Moving into the international market is not an easy task as many UK companies have a .co.uk website address that will be a disadvantage when moving into the international market place. The reason companies have the .co.uk for example is that Google gives more authority to companies that have targeted country URLs instead of a .com. Although the country targeted URLs are given a small advantage Google has made possible for companies to target .com URLs in webmaster tools. This has allowed companies to move away for their .co.uk website and convert to a .com address allowing them to attack the international market place.
The reason you would move your domain name to a .com URL instead of purchasing a number of country specific URLs for the countries in which you wish to operate for example .ie.fr.au is for Search Engine Optimisation reasons. The main reason for this is that country specific URLs are classed as different websites so that you will need to build up the authority of each website to have any presence in that country’s search engine. This is why moving your website to a .com domain with country extensions targeted in web master tools is the best approach when moving into the international market. This allows you to build the authority of one website which will be passed down across the different country domains such as .com/us or .com/fr.
After you have put your international strategy in place it is important that you do not lose any of the authority you have built up on your current website may it be .com or .co.uk. The best way to approach this is to create your website in staging area and ensure you map each URL to ensure you keep your authority. As your company’s website is so important for sales and your marketing message you need to make sure migration is done correctly and without errors as you do not want to lose rankings.
If you’re looking to set up a new site, a website design company can help you. If you’re looking to expand your existing site into other markets, companies offering SEO services can help you migrate your site without losing rankings.
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