Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
2 websites or one .ca and .com
-
Hi
I have a client with a lighting business in Canada but ship to all US- they have ecommerce web site .ca and .com the .ca has always brought more traffic. (they have a store in Canada)
they are now redoing the site and trying to decide should they have just one site and the other redirected to it or should they have two and which one the main one- they would like to sell to the us but are obviously stronger in Canada- don't want to lose on both sides..
Appreciate any help!
-
Hello Henya, this is a great strategic question and ultimately relies on your long term growth initiatives for the United States and beyond.
Having .ca as your country-code top-level domain can prove beneficial for local search queries. This could be a contributing factor as to why the .ca site has brought in more traffic. Using site analytics can provide you with your referring sources to confirm this.
Additionally, have .ca as your ccTLD will provide you with the ability to market to the French speaking provinces more authentically as you have the "home town" advantage of being a Canadian retailer rather than a U.S. domain.
If the U.S. marketplace is determined to be a growth opportunity I recommend maintaining the .com domain. Having the .com domain will serve U.S. and _should _ultimately convert your U.S. customers better than U.S. customers shopping your .ca site...again you can verify this using analytics. The lift in conversion should provide enough incremental revenue to support maintaining both domains. Also, if your client decides to open a brick and mortar store in the U.S. the .com site will become incredibly more valuable.
Hope this helps!
Matt
-
.com is king but if they are doing well with their .ca domain, I wouldn't mess with it.
Do they have the resources to manage two websites? Having a .com would help them rank in US better over a .ca - ideally the sites would be nearly identical (changing up small things like CAD vs USD, contact address/phone possibly, etc) and then linked up with hreflang markup.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is there a way to get a list of urls on the website?
For example, www.laskeimages.com Outside of Google Search Console, is there another way?
Local SEO | | SeobyKP0 -
Considering Switching Domain from .ca to .com for Service Area Business - What is the Risk / Reward?
Hello, Thank you to anyone who takes the time to share their thoughts on this. I will preface this by saying that I am very new to the community and have lots to learn, so please forgive any obvious errors on my part. That having been said am very happy to receive positive criticism and feedback 🙂 Quick Background: We are a high end mobile wellness business based in Toronto Canada offering in home/office servicing including: yoga, pilates, nutrition, meditation, chiropractors, etc... As we are expanding we are transitioning form new leads coming from business partners and word of mouth to driving new business online As such we have an new Squarespace site (which is the first site I ever built, so any feedback is welcome) and are venturing into social media, SEO, local citations etc... for the first time We have a significant content catalogue originally for client and instructor education that we are now repurposing for this new digital adventure but have not yet deployed While currently focused in Torotno, we have plans to expand to several other countries in the next two years. As the site is quite new and we have little content or incoming links I was thinking now is the time to switch to .com from .ca before we roll out Website: www.anahana.ca Risk Reward? & Other Issues? Both domains are currently verified with Squarespace, and it seems easy enough to switch. What could blow up by making this switch which I might not be aware of? Our emails and business card use the .ca, but I don't think this would matter too much 6-12 months out... is there something else I might be missing on this? .com and using subfolders or subdomains as opposed to country specific TLDs ? This is something I am still working on understanding, but from what I have learned thus far, if we are going to progressively roll out a large content library, is it not better from an SEO standpoint to have this all in one domain? Local SEO and legal considerations for TLDs when operating local Service Area Businesses. I am sure there are many other angles here that I am missing and am not really looking for any hard answer on much of this, but any general advice, suggested resources, and experienced insights would be extremely helpful. Thanks so much, cj
Local SEO | | CJ7770 -
Should you set an hreflang if the website is only in one language
We have a website, which is written in British English. There are no other versions of the site in different languages and the website only serves a UK audience. We have not set an hreflang tag up. Is this something we would still need to do and what would the benefits (if any) be?
Local SEO | | HubMDP0 -
One website or multiple websites
Im going round in circles with the best way to go about marketting my business from an SEO and usability stand point. My company specialise in self adhesive films and vinyls which give us quite a varied niche. Our main areas are: Window films and interior vinyls such as printed wallpaper, wall coverings, furniture wraps etc for homes and businesses - For this area we cover nationwide Automotive films such as car window tinting, car and van wraps and paint protection films - for this we need the vehicles bringing to us so this is a more local are (around 20 miles of us max) Signs and graphics - anything from office signs, pavement signs to printed banners - these are all commercial and we go to the customer. For this its a new side to the business and Id say wed look to go withing 50 miles of our base. My dilemma is, firstly when pushing social media etc we have a real divide for who we target as we have the home owers and business owners on one hand and then car enthusiasts on the other. Also from an SEO point of view theres the local vs nationwide aspect. A few people I have spoken to have said trying to target local for some services and national for others may be a little problematic. I have some people saying have all services under one domain as the links back to the site and content will all help the site to rank better. This sounds logical to me. But then Ive had other people saying split the site into 2/3 sites. Definitely split the automotive which is local from the other national areas as these are also going to be a different audience 9car enthusiasts vs home/business owners). It will mean doing two lots of SEO but the sites will be more focused on the target audience and we can have one tagret local search and the other national. This too seems very logical. My gut feeling is that both options are sort of right but doesn anyone have any advice that could help me figure this out. Also to make things a little more complicated we have an ecommerce side were we supply goods direct to the public. Woudl I be better to have a fresh domain which is simply an ecommerce platform or have a seperate shop section on my main domain were people can go to buy the products if they dont want us to fit them?
Local SEO | | paulfoz16091 -
Should I Split Into Two Websites?
I'm creating a website for a new company that offers several related services. They want to have a main corporate website that has pages for all their services. However, they want to have a second website that only features a subset of those services. So they would have the same company name, same website template, but the smaller site would have a different domain name, different text/photos on the home page and be missing some pages from the main corporate site so that site would make them look more specialized. They would have separate marketing materials (brochures, business cards) that would have the website address and email address using the different domain name. They also want the smaller second site to come up on search results related to the services for that site and not the main site. Can this be pulled off without having a significant negative effect on ranking potential for either of the two site and also not risk a duplicate content penalty? It would seem you would have to add a robots.txt file that excludes indexing of the pages on the main site that are duplicating on the smaller site. However there is a potential big issue. The company is a local business. Nowadays the local results (Map + 3-pack) are as important if not more important, than the traditional organic results below the 3-pack (although I acknowledge they are related). For their Google Business Places, since they have two websites for the same company, they can only list one of the website. So if they list the corporate site, their not going to get in the local 3-pack for their specialized site for search terms. They may be able to live with this though since the main site will show ALL services. Comments? Ideas? Issues? Strategies?
Local SEO | | DJ10270 -
Benefits of Several Backlinks from same Web 2.0?
If I get several backlinks from same web 2.0 (wordpress, tumblr or so on) will it be beneficial as 1 ? or each backlink will equal? if you say, "will count as 1 cause from same domain" then why don't google give you credit for getting link from 96 DA site? (wordpress)
Local SEO | | Jubaer961 -
How to find best local websites?
For example, I'd like to type in a zipcode and get the highest ranking websites by DA/whatever metric the software uses, within a 25 mile radius? Does that type of service exist? I'm looking to build up our local links, but most of the websites have extremely low authority. I'm trying to find some good ones without having to manually check each one. Thanks, Ruben
Local SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
How to remove countries viewing my website
Hi All, I operate from the UK only. How can I exclude select countries from viewing both my organic website and Google Adwords listing. Organic Website
Local SEO | | Mark_Ch
Are the any free online services that give you a simple click + download/view script to cut & paste into a .htaccess file. Google Adwords
Ditto as above with the exception to paste the IP list into Campaign | Setting Tab | Advanced settings - IP exclusions Thanks Mark0