6 reasons why in regional promotion domains in regional zones are better than in international ones

Today, the topic of the regional location of the server was re-touched on Serce. At the same time I decided to publish an article that answers the frequent questions: “which domains are better for the foreign version of the site?”, “Do I need to host the site at the regional host?”.

A little bit earlier we already published the article “Defense and attack: 10 basic rules for local advancement”, and today we will continue to develop it.

I leave the question of hosting as a topic for my future article. Today we will try to deal with domains, in this article I will try to describe 6 reasons why domains in regional zones have an advantage over international ones .

Also, I’ll tell you why newcomers optimizers in the promotion of foreign sites prefer dot-com'y, mistakenly believing that they have more authority, respectively, and the sites under them will rank higher.

But before we start discussing our main topic, I want to tell you how and why I came to such conclusions.

I made my very first site back in 1996 , it was targeted at audiences from all over Western Europe. It contained good content, had a regional domain and advanced on keywords in the language of the audience (did not translate them into English) from this site began my acquaintance with SEO, although at that time I was a senior marketer in the company and my task was only to promote my employer's product to the markets of Western Europe.

And now, after 13 years, the site is still hanging in the TOP by promoted keywords, as time went on, competitors appeared and disappeared, ranking algorithms changed, but nothing affected the position of this site, it remains where it was.

Over the past year, my work has focused on promoting many international projects for small, medium, large and very large companies. Recently, "foreign" more and more crowded out "domestic" projects. Therefore, in my article, I can rely solely on my experience in promoting foreign websites.

1. Clear, unambiguous geo-targeting.

In order to become the owner of a ccTLD domain (in this article I call such domains regional or country domains), you need to register it according to the rules that are established by regional domain centers.

Therefore, search engines consider domains to be the most reliable and reliable way to identify a site by geo-referencing to a particular country. Naturally, like in all other rules, there is also an exception, for example, the regional domain of the small island republic of Tuvalu - .tv has become very popular among all sorts of companies that are related to television and can geographically be located at the other end of the globe. This small country has been greatly enriched by the sale of domains in its regional zone.

Several times I had to meet with programmers who work for search services. In a private conversation, they confirmed that when geo-targeting sites, search engines first of all rely on domain zones , as the most authoritative source, and only then on all the other secondary signs of site ownership.

We have already repeatedly seen this in practice. We have a huge number of small sites that have regional domains, and this strategy almost always works.

If your site works under a regional domain - you can be sure, almost certainly, that in the search it will "pop up" exactly where it should be. What would be more understandable to bring an example.

If you have a French website under a domain in the .fr zone , then within a few hours after it is indexed by search robots it will pop up in the French search results Google (called "Pages de France" or Pages from France). Even if the site is hosted on US servers and uses content in Chinese.

2. Good structure (architecture) of the site.

The main argument used by supporters of international domains to their opponents is that moving to another domain, especially large sites, is associated with huge financial costs, because you have to completely change the whole architecture of URLs, and if the site has several foreign versions, then costs increase by several times, because each of them must be under its own individual, regional domain.

And it’s hard not to agree with this, except that such a "relocation" event is not cheap, it requires being extremely careful not to make mistakes. But as practice shows, when large organizations calculate the level of expenses for moving a website to another domain (regional) and the profit they receive from such an SEO event, it becomes obvious that this is really profitable. Even if the costs add regional hosting.

In any case, I do not claim that moving to another domain is a difficult task and troublesome for everyone, however there is a certain category of companies for which this is a serious obstacle. But even they have to be "localized" in order to successfully conduct their business in regional areas, especially if they are planning a long-term business. We should not forget that in this case the whole site or any separate part of it will be subject to change.

Many reputable SEO experts have repeatedly stated in their speeches and reports how important it is to have a good website structure. I will add to this that the transition to a new, regional domain is a good start for subsequent changes in the site architecture.

3. People prefer to buy locally.

Fighters for SEO cleanliness discard all conversion factors, stating that this is the concern of Internet marketers (SEM), and the task of optimizers is to bring the site to the first positions in the search results for the right keywords, so to speak a technical task. I do not quite agree with this, after all, optimizers should also take into account conversion factors in their work.

When a visitor searches for a desired product or service with a search engine, in the list of found sites, if not in the first place, then in the second he will pay attention to the "regional affiliation" of the site before clicking on his link.

For example, some Internet user from Germany is searching for used cars through Google, in SERP he sees a long list of sites, what do you think he will prefer: "secondhandcar .com " or "secondhandcar .de "?

Naturally, first of all he will pay attention to the domain that will fit him on a regional basis, i.e. the second, since it becomes quite obvious in the domain zone that this is a German website.

Even outside SERP, regional domains have a large psychological impact on users. Since they give preference to domestic sites when surfing the Internet.

4. Attractive to get links.

Also, another important fact in favor of regional domains is that they are attractive when increasing the reference mass.

Webmasters prefer to receive links and link to sites that belong to the same country or region as their own. Also, you need links from "domestic" sites. Many directories host links only to the sites of some specific domain zones.

5. Internal linking is even stronger.

If we talk about the transfer of reference weight within the site, then in my subjective view, links within one site from its different language subcategories will transmit less weight than links from individual sites , foreign "clones" of the company's main site.

Naturally, no linking can replace the good structure and content of the site.

6. Resistance to changes in search engine algorithms.

I can say this with a great degree of confidence , relying on my more than a decade of experience.

Sites with domains in regional zones are much more stable in SERP than those located in international zones. Influenced by even small changes in the ranking algorithms, they "jump" in search results.

Have you ever wondered why so many young and talented SEO specialists when they start working with foreign projects prefer to use international domains for them (.com, .net, .org, etc.) instead of regional (.us, .de, .ru, and t .d.)

The first reason is that most of them consider the promotion of foreign sites in the light of the promotion of the British sites.

I want to note that this is fundamentally wrong, in general, the situation with the promotion of British sites is very strange, often in the British SERP, US sites are included in the TOP and sometimes vice versa.

Therefore, when promoting foreign websites you should not rely on your previous experience in promoting British websites, because The method of promotion may vary significantly.

Secondly , the structure of the site’s geo-selector (the way in which the country and language is chosen) plays an important role in the distribution of the site’s reference weight.

In this case, international domains have some advantage, because it is more difficult to tune a geo-selector for regional domains. But if this is done after all, then you will get a very tangible advantage from the use of regional domains.

The third reason is that all optimizers are curious enough individuals and constantly conduct some kind of SEO research with subsequent analysis of the information received.

Therefore, quite often it happens that when optimizing some search queries, the optimizers find that the sickle is full of sites with international domains, so there is an erroneous view that regional domains lose to them when ranking.

In fact, if you investigate this problem more deeply, and more thoroughly, a completely different picture emerges. In highly competitive segments, in national languages, sites with domains in regional zones lead by popular search queries.

If on the contrary, then sites with international domains prevail.