International Geotargeting with a dot.ie site. Can it be done?

[Barney1]

Hi There,
Pardon my ignorance on this but truth be told I'm a bit of a novice when it comes to google webmaster tools and geo targetting.
I got an online shop. Site about 3 years old and revamped to a wordpress site about 15 months ago.

Doing pretty good all things considered from a google.ie organic ranking point of view. Site is a PR4 (Not sure if that means anything anymore?) and is Number 1 on google.ie for a number of search terms I would want to be ranked for and indeed number 1 for some things that do nothing for me at all:shame:
The thing is the site is a dot.ie even though I sell worldwide.
Organic traffic is on a slow upward curve all the time perhaps much of this is down to more content being added but I reckon much of it is down to optimising the pages well.

A few figures
2011 80% site visitors were based in Ireland
So far 2012 its 65% for Ireland
2011 90% sales were Ireland
So far 2012 it is 80% for Ireland

Currently in webmaster tools geo-targetting is set to Ireland but as I'm ultimately after a worldwide market so I guess really I got 2 questions

1: Because its a dot.ie can it be changed to worldwide targeting at all or can something be done with it to achieve more international traction?

2: If changes can be made come it have a negative impact on google.ie rankings?

Would really appreciate some input!

 

[paul]

You can't geo-target .IE's domains in google webmaster console. This doesn't mean that you won't rank for GOOGLE.COM queries. Ranking for something on GOOGLE.IE doesn't automatically mean you will be at the same position for GOOGLE.COM / .FR . etc. and if you were able to target the domain, it doesn't mean that the position would transfer one to one.

 

[Barney1]

You can't geo-target .IE's domains in google webmaster console. This doesn't mean that you won't rank for GOOGLE.COM queries. Ranking for something on GOOGLE.IE doesn't automatically mean you will be at the same position for GOOGLE.COM / .FR . etc. and if you were able to target the domain, it doesn't mean that the position would transfer one to one.

Thanks for feedback Paul. I guess I will just keep doing what I'm doing.

 

[brianbaru]

Geo Targeting

Thanks for feedback Paul. I guess I will just keep doing what I'm doing.

By having a .ie domain you will automatically target the Irish market. If you wish to target a world wide market, adjust your webmaster profile to do so, but make sure links to your site come from from a variety of IP's outside the Irish jurisdiction. Ranking well well with a .ie domain in Ireland is not hard to do with a competitive keyword but doing the same thing against all the .com's is fantasy unless you know exactly what you are doing and are prepared to invest a lot of money.

 

[link8r]

By having a .ie domain you will automatically target the Irish market. If you wish to target a world wide market, adjust your webmaster profile to do so, but make sure links to your site come from from a variety of IP's outside the Irish jurisdiction. Ranking well well with a .ie domain in Ireland is not hard to do with a competitive keyword but doing the same thing against all the .com's is fantasy unless you know exactly what you are doing and are prepared to invest a lot of money.

Hi Brian - I'm sure this is good advice but you might want to re-word it. To clarify: You can't change a .ie (or sub-folders) to a worldwide audience. If you did have a TLD and wanted to target a global audience, you would want to make sure YOU didn't a) use a ccTLD like .IE and b) don't change the webmaster settings - leave it unset as you can only target one country

While you can't change a .ie or a folder on one (I just tried, I couldn't so I'm assuming its not possible) but however you can make a .IE relevant in UK search and they can come up in UK search but its probably going to be very very difficult. Multi-domains, one per region is normally my rule of thumb.

 

[paul]

You can't geotarget on google webmaster for .IEs directly, but if you have a .IE domain and have a good amount of German links & have German content, you can be sure it will rank on G.de. That's how you could internationalise it. Just because you rank on G.ie doesn't mean G.FR or C.COM will reflect the same.

 

[brianbaru]

Hi Brian - I'm sure this is good advice but you might want to re-word it. To clarify: You can't change a .ie (or sub-folders) to a worldwide audience. If you did have a TLD and wanted to target a global audience, you would want to make sure YOU didn't a) use a ccTLD like .IE and b) don't change the webmaster settings - leave it unset as you can only target one country

While you can't change a .ie or a folder on one (I just tried, I couldn't so I'm assuming its not possible) but however you can make a .IE relevant in UK search and they can come up in UK search but its probably going to be very very difficult. Multi-domains, one per region is normally my rule of thumb.

You are quite correct but from what I read he already has the .ie domain for a few years so unless he wants to start from scratch his only option would be to add a subdomain to the website and geo-target that through webmaster tools. The .ie TLD is visible world wide but comes way down the list in results unless it has a lot of inbound links from IP's of what ever country he is targeting. Personally I would set up a subdomain.

 

[paul]

I suggest you take a read of Folders vs Subdomains vs ccTLD in International SEO - An Overview - YouMoz | SEOmoz
and Multi-regional and multilingual sites - Webmaster Tools Help