Blame it on Duplicate Content

Granted, there’s a legitimate business reason for having these country-specific websites, and it’s not like you’re trying to “spam” the search engines. You’re trying to target customers who live in five different countries, where most of the residents happen to speak the same primary language. The problem lies in competition: If you have five websites, all with substantially duplicated content, all of those websites are going to be competing for top rankings on the same keyword phrases and nearly identical page content. The global search landscape is competitive enough these days without the added hurdle of internal rivalry. In a search engine showdown, the website that existed first likely has the most established link popularity, and therefore is almost always going to be awarded the greatest visibility and authority over the younger country-specific sites.

I recommend: Learn more about International Search Engine Optimization.

Overcoming the Challenege

Getting around this challenge isn’t very difficult, but will require some thought and effort. The key is differentiation. It’s not enough to color your U.S. content with colourful spelling changes, or to convert all standard unit measurements to the metric system. To truly differentiate same-language websites, and truly target the audience in each country, content for a website should ideally be built from the ground up. English speakers in the U.S. use different terminology to talk about (or search for) something than those in the U.K., just as an English speaker in Canada uses different words than someone in Australia.

I recommend: Learn more about Content Enhancement.

Localizing Your Content

Consider every facet of the country your website is targeting, from local measurement systems, to idiomatic language differences, to general marketing concepts. This kind of differentiation need not affect the overall look and feel of your company’s messaging, but it will help prevent duplication across websites. And even if you can’t put the kind of time and energy needed into extensive market research in order to build content from scratch, there are plenty of ways to make each website distinctive: • Make sure all meta data is absolutely unique for each of the different country websites; don’t just copy and paste the U.S. meta tags on all of your other English-language sites. • Take every opportunity to include the site’s country name as a differentiator. For instance, all occurrences of WidgetCorp on the Australia website should be WidgetCorp Australia. While this shouldn’t be the sole means of making each country site different, it is a significant part of it.

I recommend: Learn more about Search Engine Marketing.