Has anyone tried using .us domain name for USA website?
Discussion
Due to some previous decisions, I've made myself a small problem and I am wondering what to do.
When I setup my company I used the .com version of the domain name for our UK sales. I did also register the co.uk version at the time but that just redirects to our .com site.
When I was looking to start using adwords in other countries like Ireland, I decided I would create specific domains for each country e.g. .ie co.nz com.au etc.
This was so I could customise each specific version of the website and make it as dedicated to that country as possible and minimise the chance of customers getting confused between what we were offering between different countries. (The alternative would have been to use the .com version and place each different country into a sub-folder).
Over the last decade or so our .com domain has become heavily ingrained into our UK company with email, stationary, seo etc. So unpicking that and changing our UK version to a .co.uk would take quite a bit of time and effort.
Now I would like to start using Adwords in the USA and I'm not sure which domain extension to use. I think I have two options;
i) The simple option would be to use the .us version of the domain. However, I'm not sure if this domain name extension is as trusted by potential customers in America. This is quite important as I will be driving traffic to the site using Adwords and so each click will be relatively expensive.
ii) The alternative would be re-jig things and start using the .co.uk version of the domain for our UK business and give the .com version of the domain to be used in the US.
I'd be very interested to hear views on this, particularly if anyone has had a similar issue or if anyone has experience of using .us extensions and how they are regarded in America.
When I setup my company I used the .com version of the domain name for our UK sales. I did also register the co.uk version at the time but that just redirects to our .com site.
When I was looking to start using adwords in other countries like Ireland, I decided I would create specific domains for each country e.g. .ie co.nz com.au etc.
This was so I could customise each specific version of the website and make it as dedicated to that country as possible and minimise the chance of customers getting confused between what we were offering between different countries. (The alternative would have been to use the .com version and place each different country into a sub-folder).
Over the last decade or so our .com domain has become heavily ingrained into our UK company with email, stationary, seo etc. So unpicking that and changing our UK version to a .co.uk would take quite a bit of time and effort.
Now I would like to start using Adwords in the USA and I'm not sure which domain extension to use. I think I have two options;
i) The simple option would be to use the .us version of the domain. However, I'm not sure if this domain name extension is as trusted by potential customers in America. This is quite important as I will be driving traffic to the site using Adwords and so each click will be relatively expensive.
ii) The alternative would be re-jig things and start using the .co.uk version of the domain for our UK business and give the .com version of the domain to be used in the US.
I'd be very interested to hear views on this, particularly if anyone has had a similar issue or if anyone has experience of using .us extensions and how they are regarded in America.
illmonkey said:
Could you not use GEOIP to find their location then redirect them to domain.com/COUNTRYCODE say, /en /us etc?
I'd not use .us
Good question - if a customer visits for example our Ireland website from a UK IP address it displays a banner message offering them the option of transferring to the UK site. But they can choose to continue browsing the Ireland website if they wish.I'd not use .us
Rather than using country specific domains, I could use a county specific subfolder. I just haven't done that for the others I have setup, so it is a bit annoying. Hence my problem of what to do....
We're in a similar position to you (on a .com for a decade and looking to expand non-uk business).
Your third option, which we're going with, is a sub-domain - so us.whatever.com instead of whatever.us. Has the advantages that you can use the same directory structures below the domain name (e.g. us.whatever.com/widgets/ has US widgets, fr.whatever.com/widgets/ has French ones etc.).
It also should mean, from a search engine's POV, that you stay on your long-established (and hopefully trusted) domain and that link juice should flow into your new sub-domains.
Would that work for you?
Your third option, which we're going with, is a sub-domain - so us.whatever.com instead of whatever.us. Has the advantages that you can use the same directory structures below the domain name (e.g. us.whatever.com/widgets/ has US widgets, fr.whatever.com/widgets/ has French ones etc.).
It also should mean, from a search engine's POV, that you stay on your long-established (and hopefully trusted) domain and that link juice should flow into your new sub-domains.
Would that work for you?
Dave2P said:
We're in a similar position to you (on a .com for a decade and looking to expand non-uk business).
Your third option, which we're going with, is a sub-domain - so us.whatever.com instead of whatever.us. Has the advantages that you can use the same directory structures below the domain name (e.g. us.whatever.com/widgets/ has US widgets, fr.whatever.com/widgets/ has French ones etc.).
It also should mean, from a search engine's POV, that you stay on your long-established (and hopefully trusted) domain and that link juice should flow into your new sub-domains.
Would that work for you?
The more I think about it, the more I think that's quite an interesting suggestion. I hadn't thought of using a sub-domain.Your third option, which we're going with, is a sub-domain - so us.whatever.com instead of whatever.us. Has the advantages that you can use the same directory structures below the domain name (e.g. us.whatever.com/widgets/ has US widgets, fr.whatever.com/widgets/ has French ones etc.).
It also should mean, from a search engine's POV, that you stay on your long-established (and hopefully trusted) domain and that link juice should flow into your new sub-domains.
Would that work for you?
Have you gone live with it? I suppose it might be a little harder for people to remember the correct syntax, but on the other hand, it probably doesn't matter too much as most people will just search on google anyway if they want to revisit a site. The only other point which I just double checked and isn't an issue is that you can still set the google geo-targeting at a sub-domain level.
I'm perhaps thinking I should post on an American forum and perhaps test out your suggestion vs the .us domain name
EddieSteadyGo said:
Have you gone live with it?
Not yet - but should do late next month.EddieSteadyGo said:
The only other point which I just double checked and isn't an issue is that you can still set the google geo-targeting at a sub-domain level
Yes, that was key for us too. Another plus for a sub-domain is that it's very easy to split it off to a "local" server if the level of business justifies it - so us.whatever.com can be hosted in the US, etc.You may have seen it, but Google has a summary of the options here https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/18219...
Do the subdomain or use geo-location and send them to https://domain.com/uk/resource or https://domain.com/us/resource etc.
Dave2P said:
Yes, that was key for us too. Another plus for a sub-domain is that it's very easy to split it off to a "local" server if the level of business justifies it - so us.whatever.com can be hosted in the US, etc.
That is a very good point and is something I believe many overlook. I've gone ahead posted the question including your subdomain suggestion on a US business forum, so will see if I can get any US focused customer feedback. Will post back if I get anything interesting.
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hstewie said:
hstewie said: Do the subdomain or use geo-location and send them to https://domain.com/uk/resource or https://domain.com/us/resource etc.
That's a good suggestion. The "problem" is that I decided originally a few years ago I would go to the trouble of creating separate country specific domains (as well as using the geo-location detection) in order to make each version of the website very specific to the target country and keeping subfolder use to a mininmum to make it slightly clearer for the user. Now I've done that for some countries, I didn't really want to revert to using subfolders for the US. But maybe that is the best option. Not sure
CardinalBlue said:
the core reason for this advice is that it keeps all authority within one place.
I think that's sound advice where the proposed subdomain/ccTLD content is closely related to, and targeting the same market, as the content on the main domain.But in our case, and I think possibly that of the OP's here, there are distinct differences in terminology, culture and approach of our likely audiences in the UK, US, Australia, etc.
It's not logical to think that "domain authority" (or trust rank, authoritativeness, whatever you want to call it) should extend across geographic and/or language segments, so there's nothing to lose in going for the flexibility and logical separation of a subdomain. On the other hand, each subdomain can specialize in a specific market and be undiluted by signals (whether links or key phrases) irrelevant to that market.
That's our thinking; YMMV but the right answer will always be "it depends" on the specifics of the content and the audience.
Dave2P said:
I think that's sound advice where the proposed subdomain/ccTLD content is closely related to, and targeting the same market, as the content on the main domain.
But in our case, and I think possibly that of the OP's here, there are distinct differences in terminology, culture and approach of our likely audiences in the UK, US, Australia, etc.
It's not logical to think that "domain authority" (or trust rank, authoritativeness, whatever you want to call it) should extend across geographic and/or language segments, so there's nothing to lose in going for the flexibility and logical separation of a subdomain. On the other hand, each subdomain can specialize in a specific market and be undiluted by signals (whether links or key phrases) irrelevant to that market.
That's our thinking; YMMV but the right answer will always be "it depends" on the specifics of the content and the audience.
Pretty much agree with all this reasoning. In terms of seo considerations, I accept it is a factor but I find it far less important now than it used to be back in the day. This is because of how google (and social media) is pushing more and more traffic via PPC. But in our case, and I think possibly that of the OP's here, there are distinct differences in terminology, culture and approach of our likely audiences in the UK, US, Australia, etc.
It's not logical to think that "domain authority" (or trust rank, authoritativeness, whatever you want to call it) should extend across geographic and/or language segments, so there's nothing to lose in going for the flexibility and logical separation of a subdomain. On the other hand, each subdomain can specialize in a specific market and be undiluted by signals (whether links or key phrases) irrelevant to that market.
That's our thinking; YMMV but the right answer will always be "it depends" on the specifics of the content and the audience.
Dave2P said:
I think that's sound advice where the proposed subdomain/ccTLD content is closely related to, and targeting the same market, as the content on the main domain.
But in our case, and I think possibly that of the OP's here, there are distinct differences in terminology, culture and approach of our likely audiences in the UK, US, Australia, etc.
It's not logical to think that "domain authority" (or trust rank, authoritativeness, whatever you want to call it) should extend across geographic and/or language segments, so there's nothing to lose in going for the flexibility and logical separation of a subdomain. On the other hand, each subdomain can specialize in a specific market and be undiluted by signals (whether links or key phrases) irrelevant to that market.
That's our thinking; YMMV but the right answer will always be "it depends" on the specifics of the content and the audience.
That is true, which is why you use hreflang to geo-target different language variations targeting different markets. en-GB and en-US and any other lanaguges you have can absolutely love in harmony on the same TLD. But in our case, and I think possibly that of the OP's here, there are distinct differences in terminology, culture and approach of our likely audiences in the UK, US, Australia, etc.
It's not logical to think that "domain authority" (or trust rank, authoritativeness, whatever you want to call it) should extend across geographic and/or language segments, so there's nothing to lose in going for the flexibility and logical separation of a subdomain. On the other hand, each subdomain can specialize in a specific market and be undiluted by signals (whether links or key phrases) irrelevant to that market.
That's our thinking; YMMV but the right answer will always be "it depends" on the specifics of the content and the audience.
But like you say, every case is different.
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