Chee Chun (Cheech) Foo

Member Since November 2012

Victoria Park, WA, 6100

192 FOLLOWERS

Ignite Search is a high performance digital marketing agency, focusing primarily on the following services:

✔Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
✔Paid Search Optimisation
✔Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)
✔Analytics Optimisation

Based in Perth, our core competency is the delivery of effective services for businesses that want to significantly increase their search visibility, traffic, leads and sales, consistently.

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Chee Chun (Cheech) Foo answered this question

Shane Gold, Compliance Officer at First State Super

Website

Does either .com or .com.au domain have an advantage? ✅

This
is a common question and definitely an important one to clarify. I was involved
with a major re-brand and re-design project with a leading Apartment Hotel
operator in Australia and we were contemplating the exact same thing about 8
months ago.

A bit of history first. It
used to be that 10 years ago, Google uses the ccTLD or the country code Top
Level Domains to determine how relevant your site is to a particular country.

Now it has become much
more sophisticated and Google is now smarter. If you read up on the reference
links shown below, there are many ways in which Google can implicitly try to
define your target country without needing to get a ccTLD. These can include
your geotargeting settings in Google Webmaster Tools (GWT), your server
location, even your geotargeting redirects if you happen to have one or more
sites. (We implemented this on a site which was getting confused between two
identical sites and the moment we implemented the 302 geotargeting redirects,
the traffic and rankings bounced back).

Also, there are instances
where if you your site is authoritative and relevant enough you are able to
rank in the top spot even if you are a .com. look at the hotel industry where www.wotif.com is consistently ranking highly.
The hotels industry is a case where the market is global-based rather than just
local-based. Therefore these sites like Wotif have reason to invest in content
around hotels in Australia and also because it's a pay-now, experience later service;
pre-purchase persuasion is important.

Perhaps a reason why .com
(or general TLDs) in other verticals are not performing as well is because
there is no reason to. E.g. why would Bank of Canada create large content hubs
about Australia, given their limited presence? Also Australian sites won't link
to it as much as they would to the Big 4 banks.

In short, if your business is
primarily based in Australia, then I would personally lean
towards going for a .com.au domain with a server based in Australia (or if
you guys are very keen, go for a cloud-based solution such as Amazon Web
Services (AWS), Akamai or others.

Of
course in the end, SEO recommendations go hand in hand with business
considerations so you must always take that into account when making such a fundamental change to your site.

Cheers,

Cheech

References:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2712858 http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=62399&topic=2371325&ctx=topic

Chee Chun (Cheech) Foo answered this question

Kate Toon, Owner at katetooncopywriter

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Does anyone know which websites actually accept guest posts?

One phrase. Go Grouphigh and you'll never go dry. This is quite a under-the-radar service offering but they are rolling it out across the US and slowly in Australia.

It's a fantastic platform for not only discovering guest bloggers but managing workflow processes in the goal of getting that valuable link pointing to your site. I am currently using it for my clients and lovin' it. Let me know what you think of it!