One site for multiple regions with a twist?

[ICMI]

Hi there. I'm hoping to tap into the collective wisdom of this great community. I've just become involved in a business that spans two countries Australia and New Zealand. Currently we have one site in Australia "AAAA.com.au" and a similar site in New Zealand which is a joint venture with another company so for some reason they chose to merge the names to get "BBAAAA.co.nz". The Australian site is hosted in Australia and ranks #1 for targeted keywords in a competitive industry. The New Zealand site is hosted in NZ and has been live for nearly 2 years but ranks very poorly with targeted keywords i.e. not in the top 50! The content on sites is similar but not the same and phone numbers and location details are different etc. The NZ site has not been link building which is likely the main issue. What I want to do is now change the BBAAAA.co.nz site to AAAA.co.nz (the other company has agreed the name change is warranted) and service New Zealand from Australia using our well performing site. Any thoughts on the best way to achieve this to maximise the good ranking of the Australian site? The Australian site has a lot of back links from a range of sites. I've taken into account the following info at Google but I'm still stuck for the best answer given our tricky situation. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=182192#2 Would love to hear your thoughts on how to approach this one. Cheers in advance.

[ICMI]

Thanks for the reply mate.

It's going to be tricky to run two separate site because our CRM is also storing info used by the front end (sorry I should of mentioned this before!).

Really hoping we can find a good way to service both regions from the single site.

[Daylan]

Hey there,

I had to deal with something similar for Au and NZ in the past as well. Difference was that we shared a .com url and had ?site=au and ?site=nz queries. Nightmare! Au (for similar reasons you're looking at overcoming) was cannibalising NZ results. We then changed it all to seperate .com.au and .co.nz domains which ultimately turned them into two sites independant of each other.

This is kind of what you'll be doing. They will be seen as two individual sites which need individual attention to gain search ground. Problem we faced was that our market in Au was larger than NZ and as such had and got more 'internet love' (back links). Au also had the benefit of being around for a long time so it's domain authority was a lot more than the newly formed NZ url.

You could interlink between the two and give the new NZ site a bit of link juice from the established AU kudos but it sounds like you're gonna have to do a bit of leg work to get the new site similar attention the older and established AU site's been getting.

Most importantly would be to ensure that the old NZ domain is 301'd and canonical tagged to the new site. Update and add the new sitemaps. Perhaps media releases and blog/forum posts with the new url to promote it and get that url out into the world.

The other aspect is that it's a localised site (AU and NZ), so your best bet for success for NZ results is to get NZ-centric links. Last thing you want is for your NZ and AU results to get mixed up in the search engines due to an overwhelming amount of AU backlinks to and NZ site. Sorry to be the bearer of kinda bad news, but if my experience (albeit early on) is anything to go by you got to put in the hard yards to get the new NZ site some links and build its NZ kudos.

Good luck mate.