Growing a business takes time, effort, sweat and dedication, where crossing the much-mentioned two-year survival line that the vast majority of newly created SMEs face is, perhaps, the first achievement.
After some time has passed, it may occur to you to look beyond where your business originated and expand your operations or reach to new countries.
Whether you're looking at countries that speak your language or a completely new one, registering an international domain to expand your operations can be a vital step to consider.
Here are 4 important points to consider if you plan to register an international domain:
1. Understand the local search and TLD game: Google is incredibly clever. For some time now, it has been giving more and more weight to local search in order to provide the best response to its users' queries.
Try it one day: if you search for “pasta restaurants,” you’ll find restaurants pakistan business email list that are close to your current location on Google Maps, and online businesses that are specific to a region on the search engine.
Travel to a different city, do the same search, and chances are the results will be completely different.
This applies on a larger scale to global top-level domains (TLDs). A .mx domain will primarily compete in Google Mexico search results, a .ar domain in Argentina or a .com.co domain in Colombia.
While you can “steal” traffic from other countries thanks to the content you are creating, the likelihood of you ranking higher increases if you have country-specific content with its own domain.
In the specific case of Spanish this is very important, and here is another example: you can use tire, rim or rubber to refer to the same thing in different Latin American countries.
Have you ever thought about how something like this would affect your keyword and SEO strategy in the country you decide to expand operations in? Remember to check this list of ICANN-registered TLDs to plan which domain to buy.
2. Define the expansion strategy: many times the way your company will expand affects how you should plan your web strategy.
Opening operations in a new country, creating offices, jobs and trademark registration, is not the same as simply sending your products to other countries.
The same goes for websites: just because a good portion of your visitors come from other countries doesn't mean you should open a specific website with a completely new domain.
Some of the larger companies, which tend to structure themselves by regions and countries where the market potential is important to them, pay special attention and start operating and opening a website.
In some other cases, when their expansion into the country is small, they prefer to manage it from a tactical location at a geographic level, either due to proximity or language issues.
Let's take a fictional example that might give you an idea of how several global companies work. Catsy, the world's leading cat litter brand, has the following structure for its product catalog and e-commerce websites:
1 global site that has links to regional sites and country selector.
7 regional sites to capture traffic from different business regions and redirect to individual countries: North America, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, Latin America South, Europe and the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific, and Africa.
Individual sites for the countries where it operates. Some countries are responsible for others within the region.
3. Take each visitor to the domain that is useful to them: If you have already decided to buy different domains, you can also take advantage of a very useful tactic so that, in case customers enter a site that is not from their country, they are automatically redirected to the one that corresponds to them.
