Web3.ca moving into U.S Market
-
I run an agency called Web3 Marketing Inc. in beautiful Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. We have been very busy over the past few years, but now, with the lower price of oil, there is less work in our province. We are still busy, but are looking for new opportunities in the U.S.
We currently use the domain Web3.ca
The domain performs very well in Edmonton and has exceptional reviews (about 22 with a 5 star rating). Unfortunately, I am aware that a .ca will not rank well on Google.com for U.S. viewers. This leaves us with two options:
-
Re-brand Web3.ca completely (eg. brickwebdesign.com) and 301 redirect the .ca to a .com domain. This should give us a head start in the states.. last time I checked, this should redirect 90% of the authority to the new domain. However, theoretically, we would be risking our organic position for "Edmonton web design."
-
We start with a brand new domain. Considering how competitive the market for "web design," is in cities like Portland, San Fransisco and San Diago, this seems like a fairly daunting task. We will likely have to do a LOT of citation development and supplement it with paid advertising for a couple of years.
Outside of local address and phone number, do you guys have any comments about my options / strategy?
-
-
hreflang is basically a way to tell search engines that you have a version of a website per country (or, actually per spoken language).
Read here on what it is and how to use it: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
In your case, since you gonna have US and Canada website you gonna have something like this:
in your header.
-
Thank you for your answer Dmitrii,
I was thinking more-less the same thing regarding a new brand. That being said, can you expand on crossdomain hreflang?
I haven't explored this concept before.. how would web3.ca tie into this?
Thanks,Anton
-
Dmitri is right, you are going to have to do a good amount of work regardless of the path you choose.
First, you need to start with looking toward the future. Are you going to want to always market to US cities? Will that grow? Are you looking to expand in 10 years to another country? These are questions that need to be answered before you choose what to do next.
Let me know what your plans are there, and then I'll expand on recommendations on what to do next. But I have a feeling that transitioning to a .com or other gTLD is going to work out best for you in the future.
-
Hi there.
-
True about redirect and risk for rankings.
-
You would have to do it no matter which way you choose to go due to high competition.
Now, the question - are you actually moving or expanding? I got the impression that you are expanding. If so - first idea is really bad. You will lose rankings in canada and it will take time to start ranking because you'd be new and because of the domain move.
My recommendation would be to get new domain, either create new brand for us market or simply have unique content and use crossdomain hreflang to let search engines know that you are the same company. And you will have to do advertising, marketing, link building for US website no matter how you decide to "move". So, get crrranking
Hope this helps
-
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Hi all, we recently started to claim Apple Maps listings on behalf of our agency's clients, is it possible to transfer ownership of an Apple Maps listing from one Apple ID account to another Apple ID account?
We'd like to claim and complete our clients' Apple Maps listings with our agency Apple ID, then once we're finished completing and verifying each listing, transfer to the client's Apple ID. Is it possible to transfer ownership of an Apple Maps listing from one Apple ID to another? Thanks
Local Listings | | NOUS-Australia0 -
What do I need to do for SEO when moving a business out of state?
Hello! So I have a business that I run out of a single location for the last 3 years. I am unfortunately having to move here in the next few weeks My question is what do I need to do in order to have the best chance at SEO for the new location? When should I make the changes? Does it take a long time for me to stop showing up in the previous location? and is there something I need to do to remove those? Also, is there an app or a website where I can find and update all listings at once or at least a bulk of them? I know that there are some weird sites that have my business info in them that I did not put there. Obviously these would have the wrong address. Some do not have a contact info or a way for me to log into them. What would I do with these sites? Thank you!
Local Listings | | Rmarkjr810 -
This page should be ranking but it's not even in top 50
Please help! Ive been trying to rank this page https://www.visitmanchester.com/where-to-stay/hotels It appeared on age 2 for a day and disappeared again. It's like it's being algorithmically kicked out. Can anyone see why?
Local Listings | | Andrew-SEO0 -
Business Name Not Showing Up in Google's Maps
I have a client whose name in not currently showing up on Google maps. Their business location only shows once their name or related keywords are searched, but their business name does not show when you only look for it on the map regardless of how far zoomed in you are to the actual location. I am wondering if anyone else has experienced this, or knows of a way to fix this. I have already contacted Google multiple times, and they told me that “business’ names are just randomly pulled”. The client is an HVAC store front business with good rankings and a fully optimized Google profile, so these reasons did not answer the issue. Client’s GMB profile: https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome-psyapi2&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8&q=rothheating oak creeek&oq=rothheating oak creeek&rlz=1C1JPGB_enUS685US685&aqs=chrome..69i57j0.5919j0j4 DBZfF
Local Listings | | JohnWeb120 -
Should I move to EMD
Hi, I have been reading a lot of moz posts and the forums and gathered a lot relevant information, but I want to check if I have grasped the best practice. I have a company in the UK with an extremely basic 2 page website which is basically just a contact details website. The domain name is the company name which is long contains 2 words seperated by a hyphen and one of the words is hard to spell, it is a .CO.UK. The domain only appear in google search results under a company name search, not via any relevant keyword. The company has recently undergone a change and now competes in a very niche market, with only a handful of UK competitors. I have created a new website which targets this niche market, with much improved content, the site has not gone live yet. My question is should I move the domain? I have bough 2 new .CO.UK domains which are EMD and are in my opinion the target keywords, much shorter then the existing domain, contains no hypens and easier to remember. I know google is not supposed to be as weighted to EMD as previously. We don't expect much traffic, but should we stick with our existing domain (company name) or move to the EMDs and use 301 redirects? Any help appreciated, I'm happy to share URLs, not sure if this is normal practice or frowned upon?
Local Listings | | charliedev0 -
Do You Know What's Triggering Your Local Packs?
Hey To All My Local Pals, Here 🙂 Recently, I watched a totally fascinating LocalU video in which Mike Blumenthal introduced a hypothesis that there may be a way to analyze what, specifically, is triggering a specific local pack. Now, Mike is stating that correlation is not causation in explaining this, but basically what he starts talking about at around 4:40 in the video is that what you are seeing rank well in the local packs may be demonstrably caused by what you see ranking organically beneath the pack, or may be caused by totally different signals. Mike says, _"If you're seeing the top 10 results are all IYP industry sites, and there's a pack showing, and the highest local site is 24 or something in organic, it's unlikely that that's what's triggering the pack. And so then you want to look at third-party triggers and see if that's what's actually triggering the pack." _ Obviously, all of us who do Local are familiar with the idea that a tremendous variety of elements contribute to pack rankings, but I am particularly intrigued by the idea of looking at the organic result beneath a pack and determining that there is little or no correlation between them, and this then driving one to look elsewhere for contributing factors. In a recent response to another thread here on Q&A, I discussed some common local pack ranking failure causes when organic rank is high. What I'd love to see is whether, if you look at some of your clients' desired packs, can you tell if organic signals are driving them, or can you see that it's not organic signals driving the pack, as Mike suggests. What, in those cases, does appear to be driving the packs? I'd be so interested in a discussion on this. What do you see? What do you think of Mike's suggestions?
Local Listings | | MiriamEllis9 -
Do Citations help will all local rankings/Pages on my website or just the page it's linked to
Hi All, My ecommerce site has different category/landing pages for each of my branches . I'm currently getting some more citations done as wondered the following Is it a general rule to say, that the more citations you have the better as long as they are consistent and free? Given that I have different categories /landing pages showing the NAP of my individual branches along with unique content, should all these extra citations help with local rankings across my whole site or is it usually just helping the specific localized webpage it's pointing to ? I can get a company to help me do my citations but to do all the branches, it is going to be quite expensive. Is citations quite a big individual SEO factor in local search as opposed to on page seo factors etc etc. Any advice greatly appreciated. thanks Peter
Local Listings | | PeteC120 -
Targeting both Dutch countries .NL & .BE --> 2 ccTLD's using rel-alternate or just one TLD?
We want to target both Dutch countries .NL & .BE (Belgium & Netherlands).
Local Listings | | Brainlane
Should we go for the 2 ccTLD's using rel-alternate, or go for one TLD, .EU or similar? We currently have an SEO project going on where DNS.be & DNS.nl are equally important. Currently we are using the rel-alternate meta data. The .be website is doing fantastic, the .nl one seems stagnant and not really getting to target. For a similar project, we are now wondering whether we should go for the same approach, or just pick one TLD (.EU or similar). Note: we cannot create content that is regionally specific, since the content is just what it is and cannot be altered.0