Selling in Ireland - Ie domain or .co.uk

[Fonzip72]

Hi Guys,

We have a .co.uk e-commerce that sells wood stoves and wood stove parts in the Uk. My boss wants us to push the business in Ireland and suggested that it might be a good idea to get an .ie domain.
I would love to get your opinions on this.
Do you think it would be beneficial to have a separate domain name for Ireland?
What are the SEO pros and Cons of this? I've read that unless the site has different content there could be an issue with duplicated content.

Any help would be much appreciated!
Thank you in advance!
Francisco

 

[antropy]

It's very hard to give a definitive answer here because it comes down to customer perception but my feeling would be that customers in Ireland would appreciate it and it would reassure them that shipping will be handled locally and that they're dealing with an Irish company. So I think it probably would be beneficial to your sales.

It might be possible for you to do a little test with AdWords - create 2 ads that are identical in every way promoting the same product on your site. AdWords allows you to enter a URL that isn't actually the one you go to, so on one of the ads change the URL to be .ie. Once you've got about 50 clicks the answer should be clear as to whether there's a difference or not.

 

[Alan]

I'm not sure Adwords will allow the TLD change to .ie ( last time I looked anyway ).

If your prices are remaining in GBP and your operations are totally UK based then you have no real choice but to stay .co.uk

But if you are going to price in Euro, have a notional Ireland operation and contact details, then rewrite all your content for the Irish market on go .ie

One of my clients for instance builds things in the UK but sell to UK, NZ, Australia, Dubai and the USA. He runs 5 different domains, with the same products but different content worded for each market. This takes effort of course and there are a few SEO things to do ( geo targeting and hreflang tags for instance ) even then its hard to make sure the local site dominates in the local region over the primary site (due to the primary sit's authority ). Takes ongoing work.

 

[antropy]

I'd agree with all the above about having to price in Euro's and have an Irish depot at least.

I'm not sure Adwords will allow the TLD change to .ie ( last time I looked anyway ).

Probably true but it might be possible to genuinely put one of the products on the .ie domain to test this, or make some other small change that makes it look like .ie just to test customer perception.

 

[Paul Norman]

You will need to have at least a notional presence in Ireland to register a .ie domain - they are quite tightly controlled.

 

[Digital Oriented]

While it is probably a good idea to register country code top-level domains, from SEO point of view, having multiple domains using same content is not.

Country code TLDs are important in international SEO, but in order to benefit from them each domain will need to build up their authority separately.

From business point of view, yes you will make website visitors think that you are an Irish business or have a presence in Ireland. However, if in fact all your operations are in UK, you may do more harm than good to your business.

 

[ecommerce84]

This is something that I have experience of and for me, it was a very good move.

It was 10 years ago now that I did this though, so things may have changed.

I had a mobile phone accessory website and always had a trickle of Irish orders (a couple a week maybe). There wasn't any real competition based in Ireland so I opened up a .ie website for the Irish market. The main difference between the uk and Irish websites were that I had to rewrite the content, I priced and charged in Euros (through worldpay) and I used an Irish VOIP number, but made it clear that I was still UK based.

At its peak, I was getting 6 or 7 orders a day through the Irish website - not huge granted but we'll up in the 1 or 2 a week.

Registering the domain name was fairly straightforward - other than being based in Ireland you could (and a quick bit of research suggests it's still the case) register a domain if you had a 'genuine connection with Ireland' - my hosting company (Blacknight) advised that invoices for past orders to Ireland would be enough to satisfy the criteria and it was, and the domain registration was successful.

As I said, this was 10 years ago now, but if you think there is a possible route to market and you are able to secure the domain name, it would be worth further investigation in my opinion.

 

[EC1 Solutions]

very useful advice @ecommerce84! And as he says its important rewrite your content to avoid duplicate content penalties for your new site.