International Website Marketing
Irish
Internet Marketing
Companies
based in Ireland have particular problems when it comes to optimising and
marketing their web site. These problems
are different and additional to companies based in the United Kingdom or the
United States.
Domain Name
Issues
Choice of
domain name is the first issue. It is usually
quite easy to find the .ie domain name due to the difficult and expense of
registering an Irish domain name. Irish
domain names are much easier to get to the top of Google’s search engine results
in Ireland, they are though almost impossible to get to the top of search
engine results in the UK or elsewhere.
As Irish
businesses expand they often look towards the UK as their first export market
and at that point they run into the .ie problem. Often the decision is made to purchase the
.co.uk extension of their business name.
UK domains are more in demand and not as often available – even company
names. Additionally companies are then
starting in the UK search results with a new domain name – this in competitive
areas will take at least a year to start ranking for their key search terms.
When buying
the original domain it is wise to buy the .com and .co.uk name at the same
time. This is a good long term strategy,
which looks towards expansion in the future.
When these other domains names are bought it is useful to put up one
page about their company. If this is
done then Google will see the name as older and more established if the company
ever need to market on this domain name – a huge help for getting good rankings
in Google.
Web Hosting
When
companies combine a .ie domain name with Irish located web hosting it is
another barrier to entering the UK market, however it is great for Irish search
results.
Web site
hosting is ideally within the country that is being targeted. Moving a .com name hosted in Ireland to a web
hosting in the UK is a good idea if the target market is outside of Ireland and
predominately the UK.
It is
easier to rank a UK domain name in Google’s Irish search results than it is to
rank an Irish domain in Google’s UK search results; this can of course change
at any time. It is fairly obvious though
that the Irish search results are not being competed for by Irish companies,
many of whom are not performing the basics of on page optimisation – which
could have them ranking in the first page for some of their key search terms.
Link
Building
This is the
last major barrier to enter the UK search market. If an Irish company is using a .ie domain
name it is much harder to build links within the UK. UK IP addresses are required to get listed in
the UK for non-UK domain names. It is
harder to list in a country if your domain name is specific to another country.
UK web
directories will often not accept Irish domain names. There are ways
to help over come this. It is a good idea if an Irish company has a
UK address and phone number on their web site, this makes building
links
slightly easier. This is often done
using virtual offices, a very cheap option to establishing a UK
presence.
