Hi all,
Continuing from where we let off last week, if you have an idea of targeting users in both Australia and New Zealand, then there are a couple of ways you can go about it depending on the circumstances.

If you have a .com domain as in www.site.com, then you can create sub-folders and target New Zealand as in www.site.com/nz and target Australia as in www.site.com/au

Being a .com domain, you can let Google know that you are targeting Australia and New Zealand by creating Google Webmaster profiles for each country specifically and then under Settings in the Webmasters console, set the Geographic target to Australia for the www.site.com/au profile. Similarly, set the geographic target to New Zealand for the www.site.com/nz profile.

The general belief in the SEO community on this issue as on date is that Google does not give too much significance to the geographic setting. But Will Critchlow at Distilled in an interview with Rand Fishkin on geotargeting issues says that the disparity between the results appearing on Google.com and Google.co.uk is coming down.

To put the above statement in proper perspective, when a user from within UK searches for Apple using the option Search the Web, she gets a set of results which are US specific  and apple.com is result # 1. When the same user does a search for Apple using the option Search pages from UK, the first result that appears is www.apple.co.uk which incidentally Apple does not own. The UK results for apple appear under www.apple.com/uk

There is no sign of www.apple.com in the first 2 pages of results. The country specific search results clearly give more importance to the physical location of the hosting and the IP address. The sites hosted in a geographical location within UK are at a distinct advantage.

The approach of Amazon is quite different in that they have region specific tlds as in amazon.com and amazon.co.uk This approach works well for them because they are a famous brand worldwide and even their country specific domains gain trust and authority quite comfortably compared to others.

If you have a company that is based in New Zealand but the product you sell has good appeal in Australia as well, then you can get a .com domain and create folders for NZ and AU. The advantage is that when you add content to your www.site.com domain and build links to it, the sub-folders au and nz gain the authority and trust of the parent site. You can distribute link juice accumulated at the .com level to your sub-folders.

Alternatively, if you decide to go ahead with distinct www.site.co.nz and www.site.com.au sites to target the users in both countries, then you have the problem of content duplication if you upload the same content to both sites. Although Google and Yahoo confirmed that it is not the case for sites spread across the English speaking region, there could still be issues arising out of it.

There is an additional workload in building links to both sites. You do not have the advantage of passing link juice from one top level domain to the sub-folders.

Please note that nz.site.com and au.site.com are also good candidates for sub-domains of www.site.com but sub-folders seem to be more powerful than sub-domains according to Rand Fishkin’s article on why sub-folders are better than sub-domains

Two most important factors that help Google identify the geographic nature of your site’s target audience are:

• The physical location where your site is hosted

• Your site’s external linking profile

Coming back to our specific case in question, if you want to rank well for searches in New Zealand (when users search using the Search pages from New Zealand option), you have to build links to your www.site.com/nz site from other New Zealand based sites (as in .co.nz sites) or sites with a focus on New Zealand topics. The same goes for your www.site.com/au site faring well in searches from within Australia.

The advantages and disadvantages of international targeting have been laid out in this article. You have enough information to make an informed decision on what your site needs to do based on circumstances specific to your site.

If you have problems in optimising your site for top organic rankings on the major search engines, you can always give us a call at Netconcepts on 64-9-476 4601.

We stay abreast of the latest developments in the dynamic and exciting field of search engine optimisation. We have carved a niche for ourselves as a top flight New Zealand search engine consulting company and we provide practical solutions for any search marketing problem that you may possibly have.