International SEO in the UK, France and Spain – Advice needed

[rontizzle]

I’m working on an international SEO program for a US company and I’m seeing potential geolocation issues given the structure of our site for our subscription service. I’ve read many of your posts on ranking internationally, but need further advice given our situation:

We are a domestic based company with presence in the UK, France and Spain, and own the associated TLDs within each country. We currently do not have entire microsites for each country, but instead, homepages in each market with respective TLDs, which ultimately lead back to the international branch of the domestic site in our sign-up funnel.

Here is an example:
http://www.companyabc.co.uk/ leads to
http://home.companyabc.com/s/r/signup-uk (domestic)
http://home.companyabc.com/s/r/billing
http://home.companyabc.com/s/r/confirmation


This said, we can really only try to rank the homepage, as well as search and display landing pages, but not the content of the site itself.

I realize we can use Google Webmaster tools to direct traffic to .com, but can anyone recommend other options for using the TLDs? Perhaps regional authority pages? Are microsites the best option?

Thank you in advance! I love this forum!

[activeco]

As far as the content is devoted to the country specific location, there is no difference in using cctld or any other tld.
E.g. Microsoft resolves the countries in this way:

http://www.microsoft.com/es/es/default.aspx

Página de inicio de Microsoft Ibérica. Spain

http://www.microsoft.com/it/it/default.aspx

Microsoft Italia Italy

http://www.microsoft.com/nl/nl/default.aspx

Microsoft Nederland Netherlands
...etc

Anyone looking for Microsoft from e.g. italy will get the corresponding results.

Now, targeting Italy with the home page in English is not the best idea, regardless of tld.

[Petre.Nicoara]

i think it totally depends on the amount on content you have for your website and what plans you have.
For example, UK customers might prefer a different layout then France customers, then you will have to use both fr, co.uk TLD.
If you follow the same line for all the languages you can use the .com extension, and go for one of the following 2 options, or at least this is what I recommend to our customers
main:
company.com

regional options:
option 1. country.company.com
option 2. company.com/countryshot/

I think that for most of the language keywords you can get higher ranking by using .com domain, instead of countryTLD's

[rontizzle]

You guys rock! I'll let you know how I proceed and thanks again.