Choosing an International Web Structure (ccTLDs, Subdomains, Subdirectories) for International SEO

Crawling Mondays. In today's Crawling Mondays, I will be going back to my international SEO roots to answer one of the most common questions I get again and again and again. And even if I have actually written a post in the past that I'm going to share in a bit. And also, this is one of the main topics that I usually cover in my international SEO presentations. I think it is still relevant, still important to clarify even further and also show you how to do it in a rather easy way to be able to actually refer to anybody else who asks me about this because it's still a question that I get. We can better target international markets? Is it with ccTLDs? Is it with gTLDs? Is it with subdirectories in these gTLDs? Is it with subdomains under the gTLDs, right? It's like, what is the web structure, the ideal web structure that you can use for international markets? And as with everything in SEO, is it depends. The answer is, well, it depends actually in your own strength, in your own characteristics, in the target market and your competitor in the industry that you are actually trying to rank for, right? And again, last week I was at YoastCon talking, speaking about web migrations and one of the scenarios that I discussed and you can see here, the slide in particular is a migration that happened from ccTLD to integrate that international web version in a bigger domain in a gTLD as a subdirectory, right? And you can see here in the screen how it started to grow massively. And realistically, this is not the first time that I see this happen, right? In their particular scenario, in this particular scenario, it was something positive to migrate from a specific ccTLD towards a subdirectory under a gTLD. However, it might not necessarily always be the situation, right? There are always pros and cons and a few factors to take into consideration. And today I would like to share with you which are these so you are able to do this assessment too. Let's take a look. Let's start by taking a look at the 3 main types of web structures that we can use for international targeting. The ones that are actually SEO-friendly or supported much more easily, right? ccTLDs that are, I have to say, like the default way to target international countries, right, because they are already geolocated. .es for Spain, .de for Germany, .fr for France. It's very straightforward. They are by default geolocated. And I have to say, it's like the ideal default geolocated way to target international countries, other countries internationally. Then we have gTLDs alongside directories, right? Sometimes we don't have that many resources to use ccTLDs. Sometimes we will need to start right away in an international market where we see that there's tons of competition and we are sort of afraid to start in a very competitive market with a new domain, a new ccTLD from scratch with zero links, zero backlinks, zero authority, zero history. And it might be much more straightforward for us to start competing right away with an already existing very authoritative gTLD to which we can enable a subdirectory that we will geolocate with Google Search Console. So we will have a .com, uh, /es for Spain, /fr for France, /de for Germany. And it's doable and it's feasible and we can do it. And again, it might not be as stream geolocated by default as ccTLDs, but we can and it's completely feasible to use, uh, gTLDs like .com, .info, .org and then enable subdirectories that we can geolocate specifically each one of them through the Google Search Console to provide that geolocation signals for Google. And then like this we'll be able to consolidate all of the link popularity and strength and authority and leverage the already existing authority of this old domain or gTLD that we may have. What is important to take into consideration in this particular case though is that this is doable with a gTLD but not with an already existing ccTLD. So So for example, let's say that we are by default a British company and we have started with a .co.uk ccTLD to target our own country, right? And we want to start targeting the US. The US is our international market. Unfortunately, doing it so with a .co.uk ccTLD, well, in the first place we cannot enable a subdirectory and geolocate it to the US. The Google Search Console won't allow us to geolocate anything under a ccTLD or a ccTLD itself is by default geolocated to its own country. And so it will be very, very hard for us to do that if we are not providing the right signals that that subdirectory is actually targeted towards our specific country, the country that we want to use, especially if it is a very competitive country that has already tons of content targeting towards it and competing very well. Very well optimized to compete well, right? So realistically, it is ccTLDs, subdirectories under gTLDs, or also subdomains under gTLDs. There is this, has been for a while, this big discussion if Google will treat subdirectories the same way that subdomains. Realistically, we can go back to a few months ago when John Mueller was at SearchLove with Will Critchlow in a really good conversation and he confirmed that Google does sometimes treat subdomains differently. Sometimes they try to sort out and identify if they can include subdomains as something that belongs to a website. Sometimes that doesn't happen, right? So as far as I can see, like I really want to make sure to, if I really want to profit from the already existing authority and to make sure that my new version, international version, is considered as part of this bigger entity that already exists with my website. I would prefer to use a subdirectory if that is doable. Also, it is very likely that for us it will be easier to manage a subdirectory. So you can see that all of these options have pros and cons. ccTLDs might be the ideal alternative to geolocate if competition is not too high, right? But if there's tons of competition and our ccTLD is starting from scratch with zero link popularity, we may want to leverage our already existing gTLD to be able to compete in a much more faster way and there are so many versions that we somehow need to target, that we need to use to target internationally. If we are targeting 30 countries, 50 countries, that might be a lot to manage independently what specific detail it is, we may want to do it like this. Yes, these pros and cons that I am sharing before are also taken into consideration from Google and they are actually documented by Google in their Search Console Help, the international documentation here using locale-specific URLs. So they discuss every option that I mentioned before with their pros and cons. Be aware that you may also want at some point to use URL parameters or to facilitate this or use even cookies or scripts to show even different countries, different content targeted towards different countries through the same specific URLs, right, like by geolocating the user through their IPs. This is not recommended. It is important that each piece that you create that is targeted, meant to be targeted to a specific independent country, is shown, is featured through their own specific URL to be independently crawled and indexed, and you can specify with our property signals that this is actually geolocated and meant to rank in this particular country and is in this particular language, right? And URL parameters are also not the best possible way to do it because if at some point you want to geolocate using URL parameters and you are showing the country through URL parameters, there's no way to specifically create a new Google Search Console profile for each one of them that will be geolocated as you can do with subdirectories. So knowing the different type of options, web structure options to target internationally, to international country markets, Whenever I am asked to help to decide which is the best possible option for that particular business, knowing the, the different alternatives and their pros and cons and also the, the characteristic of the business, uh, what I usually do is I do an analysis. I, I, I, I, and I always love to start by taking a look, uh, which are the type of properties, the type of domains that are actually ranking in the targeted countries, in the new potentially to be targeted countries with the new website versions, right? Which are this type of websites that are already ranking there to which I will need to start competing with, right? And to take a look at if really it's all ccTLDs Are there like enough GTLDs out there? Is it Google somehow? It looks like— what is the role that link popularity is having in these searches? Is it more about the relevance of the content, link popularity, everything, geolocation of these domains, or only ccTLDs, the ones that are being rendered? Oh my God, let's— well, let's analyze. Let's take a look, right? So for example, compare car insurance, that I will say that It's a very competitive type of keyword out there. We can see how, for example, in the US in this case, yeah, of course, it's only mainly .com and I wanted to check if that was also the case in the UK, right? If how many of these were actually gTLDs or if there were also potentially .co.uk. CCDLs and we can see there's a .com here, another .com, .com, .com. So most of this I can see are GTLDs until here, money.co.uk. It is a ccDL. So realistically, I see that of course a very competitive term is also English. So it's very likely that these huge players over there are not necessarily only UK-focused, or if they are, they selected right away .com to target the UK market. So we can see that, hmm, no, there are GTLDs ranking there very well. The link popularity metrics, right, so car insurance quotes in the UK, and I come here and check again these players ranking the best positions. How much is their authority and link popularity? How many links do they have as a whole domain and specifically links going to that particular page? Is it a lot? Is it not? Is it more than the ones that I already have with my gTLD or is it very little and I will be able to start competing right away with a new domain with a CCTLD that will provide me all the, like, this ideal geolocation type of thing, right? I will be able then to start answering these questions by doing this type of analysis. To facilitate the decision-making process, once that you have been able to see all of these different metrics and assess them, taking into consideration the initial criteria that I mentioned, is to come and do this type of decision-making process that I am showing and for which I did this flowchart, right? Like what is the international target? If it is a country target, it's about having the ccTLDs, subdirectories, subdomains. So of course the best possible scenario, if all of our competitors are using ccTLDs and we can see that their domain authority link popularity is very little. So yeah, to be able to compete right away and be able to be in the same terms, I will say, we can use ideally ccTLDs because we can see that all of them are having ccTLDs and their link popularity is very low, so we don't need maybe to do much even to be able to be at their same link authority level. On the other hand, if we see that the market that we are looking to target Yeah, there's a mix. Our gTLD is ranking very well with subdirectories or subdomains. Not all of them are ccTLDs. And so it doesn't seem that there's an extra incentive there. And it is completely doable to do it with a gTLD to geolocate it toward that particular market. And then on the other hand, we see that the players already ranking for this market are very authoritative, have have already tons of links. So if we want to be able to compete with them right away in a very much more straightforward way right from the start, maybe we will choose in this case a geolocalized subdirectory under a gTLD that hopefully has already a stronger position, has much more link authority, link popularity that will allow us to compete in a much more straightforward way. And then of course we have this other scenario with language targeting, right? And I didn't discuss it because it's not even as complex I will say with country targeting, but a few of the rules of course still apply, in this case without the geolocation complexity. And of course if you want to target Spanish, French, English, different languages, not country, different languages, Each one of these versions should have their own specific URLs again, as in the other country targeting case. And in this case, we have only 2 options, which is to use subdirectories or subdomains. You know already the comment that I did before regarding subdirectories, that being a much more straightforward and very likely easier way to provide a signal that these are part all of the same entity and simplify the whole process to make the search engine understand that you want to really be seen as part of the same entity and profit from its authority in a much more straightforward way. So I will say let's use subdirectories if possible, if not, then because maybe again there are technical reasons, there are legal reasons, whatever, and you need to differentiate more, or you need to assign a different IP, or you want to, etc., etc. You have specific needs, or you, you, you, you want a simpler URL structure. I don't know, there are some restrictions and constraints, and then you need to use a subdomain. Then you use a subdomain for, for in that particular case. So I hope that with this explanation it is much more straightforward for you and we can start performing and competing there in a much more straightforward way, in a faster time and see results fast because at the end of the day remember that this is all about results, better rankings for more traffic, more conversions and a higher profit and this is what international SEO also should be about, expanding and targeting international markets. I hope that this has helped to clarify any remaining international web structure doubts. And if you still have doubts, just let me know. I'll be happy to answer your doubts in the comments. Also, if you have any other question that you would like me to address with a new Crawling Mondays, just let me know in the comments or send me a tweet @CrawlingMondays too. I'll be happy to do an episode about that. Thank you very much and have a great week. Chronic Mondays.