Internationalise my UK Magento site

[james_pegler]

Hi,

First time poster here - my apologies if I've posted in the wrong area!

I currently run a reasonably successful UK eCommerce fashion website (Mag. 1.9.3.1) with a .co.uk domain extension, let's call it fashion.co.uk.  What I want to do is launch the site in other countries, starting with the US, then on to other European countries (once our politicians have sorted themselves out!!).  I can see that there are two routes we can take in terms of how to set up our domain internationally, so I would be very grateful if I can get some opinions on these two scenarios: -

Option 1. We continue with our www.fashion.co.uk domain (successful UK site) to cater for the UK market and introduce www.fashion.com for the US market.  As a side note we have also registered top level domains for other countries (fashion.de, fashion.it, fashion.es, fashion.fr, fashion.be etc.) so I guess we could use these in the future for various territories worldwide.

Option 2. We exclusively use fashion.com to cater for all territories.  My thoughts here are to change our UK site to www.fashion.com/GB/en-gb and redirect the current .co.uk pages to this new address.  Then for the US site we would use www.fashion.com/US/en-us.  For all future territories we decide to go for we could simply use the relevant domain extensions.

In both the above scenarios we would use the same Magento back-end but use different store views for the different countries.

It would be great to get peoples' opinion on the two options above, taking into consideration the short and long terms effects each scenario may have on our existing UK site and planned US site in terms of SEO, and duplicate content.  Also, in terms of scalability (roll out to further countries in future).  It seems to me that option 2 could be the best scenario long term, but I do not want to negatively affect our current UK site - temporarily or otherwise - as this is very important to us financially.

If there any other factors that you believe we should consider then I would be grateful to hear your thoughts. Thanks in advance :-)

James

[Tarandeep Singh · Accepted solution]

@james_peglerHey,

I guess you must be asking this questions to an SEO/SEM expert in your company. As you are a successful merchant in UK you must be having an in-house. If not you must be working with an agency for the same.

In my opinion if you have a working website with .co.uk URL and things are good with it then do not touch it. For rest of the website countries, territories etc .com/us/en_us would be perfect. You can geo target as well as language and currency.  Another benefit would be you may not have to write more and more different rewrite rule as well as you do not need to buy all those domain and keep record of them.

Problem solved? Please give 'Kudos' and accept 'Answer as Solution'.

[james_pegler]

Hi Tarandeep,

Yes, leaving our .co.uk site as is, then .com for the rest of the world could be a sensible way forward.  

Thanks a lot for your comment.

Kind regards,

James

[michaelgeo6998]

Hi there! If you want to run site for your UK and US markets, it is better you run multiple sites serving different domains, like fashion.co.uk for UK market, and fashion.com for US market, instead of using subdomains. In this way, it gives you the best flexibility to control differences of products, prices, currencies, inventories, stores views among different markets.

Among multiple domains, you can auto direct visitors to correct URLs and increase customer conversion rates, for example, use Geo Redirect.

Regarding SEO issue, multi-site setting incorporate multiple versions of the same page with slight content variations, which contains a large amount of duplicate. Generally, duplicate content impacts search engine rankings. In this case, as long as you set hreflang tag correctly and let google search crawlers understand the purpose of these content variants, it will avoid severe penalties for duplicate content. SEO will work just well. If you are interested for more details, you may look at the post: https://geotargetly.com/hreflang-seo-guide-for-multilingual-regional-websites