International Website: Localized TLD or Generic TLD?

[shaownhasan]

When a company decides to enter one or more foreign markets with its own website , the choice of the domain extension to adopt is one of those aspects that can tend to seem like a marginal issue and to pass into the background. In reality, it is absolutely not an element to be underestimated, indeed, it is one of the main factors underlying the success of a good international SEO strategy .

In this case more than in others, a “one size fits all” solution does not seem to be a viable option, since a series of factors come into play in the evaluation, ranging from the basic structure of the site, to the brand awareness, to the company's resources, to the sector and markets in which it operates.

Let's start by describing the two most popular top-level domain (TLD) structures:

ccTLDs (Country Code Top-Level Domains), or top-level domains referring to a usages of car owner database nation (for example, .it for Italy, . co.uk for the United Kingdom);

Generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs ) , or top-level domains with a generic extension, are not associated with specific geographic areas (for example, .com for commercial organizations).

gTLDs can be followed by:

a subdirectory with a language code (or language+country): for example mysite.com/en, or mysite.com/en-uk, if we want to target users who speak English and live in England;

a subdomain with a language or country code: for example, eg.mysite.com.

MORE INFO: In addition to these, there are other types of top-level domains. For more information on the various TLDs, see the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) website .

We have said that there are various considerations to be made when choosing the web structure best suited to our international expansion objectives.

Let's analyze them point by point.