Hi Mike.
I am in the process of building a webshop for our company. We currently have physical shops in several countries in Europe, and the webshop will also be made available in several countries in Europe. We currently have a "brandsite", which we most likely will continue running when the shop is online. This, because we work with fashion, and our marketing team needs a "playground" for all their crazy ideas, whereas I will focus hard on the money and customer aspect. So in the future, at least to begin with, we will have both a brandsite and a webshop. We might eventually melt those 2 sites together.
The question is, which is the right way to go about the domain strategy. My gut feeling tells me I should use country specific domains like www.brand.se over for instance shop.brand.com/se/ or brand.com/se/shop, because it seems that Google would give country specific URL's the most value. I know that going by this strategy I would have extras costs with SSL certificates in the check out flow, but still the SERP value from using country specific domains, would make it the best solution. On the other hand, it seems that using for instance www.brand.com/se/shop could make sense as well since we thereby can transfer PR to the shop directory from the main domain.
What's your take on this?
Subdirectory, subdomain or country specific domain
Hi Mike.
I am in the process of building a webshop for our company. We currently have physical shops in several countries in Europe, and the webshop will also be made available in several countries in Europe. We currently have a "brandsite", which we most likely will continue running when the shop is online. This, because we work with fashion, and our marketing team needs a "playground" for all their crazy ideas, whereas I will focus hard on the money and customer aspect. So in the future, at least to begin with, we will have both a brandsite and a webshop. We might eventually melt those 2 sites together.
The question is, which is the right way to go about the domain strategy. My gut feeling tells me I should use country specific domains like www.brand.se over for instance shop.brand.com/se/ or brand.com/se/shop, because it seems that Google would give country specific URL's the most value. I know that going by this strategy I would have extras costs with SSL certificates in the check out flow, but still the SERP value from using country specific domains, would make it the best solution. On the other hand, it seems that using for instance www.brand.com/se/shop could make sense as well since we thereby can transfer PR to the shop directory from the main domain.
What's your take on this?