Let’s say you really want to try your hands with the local SEO in the land of the Danes. The arena is new and upcoming and the competition is relatively low. But how would you go about it? You already have a site that caters to the international audience, targeted mainly towards the mainland UK. And you do not want to create a new website from scratch. The answer? Different domain structures. Let’s take a peek.

The types of domain structures

You have three options. We’ll take a look at each in turn. We won’t delve into the pros and cons of each, that’s reserved for another reading. We’ll just go through them in short.

The sub-directory approach

Let’s say you have a site, xyz.com. It caters to the UK. You want to cater to the Danes. In such a case, you simply create a sub-directory, which you will then use to target the Danes. The directory looks something like this:

xyz.com/dk/ — Target: Denmark

This is what’s known as a subdirectory, and it follows the generic top level domain, be it ‘.com’, ‘.co’, ‘.net’, etc. 

Subdomain before the top level domain

Now, the sub-directory might be easy to implement, but, it can be difficult for people to comprehend the location targeting from just the URL. Which brings us to our second option, subdomains. Let’s go with the Danish example. A subdomain catered to the Danes would look something like the following:

dk.xyz.com — Target: Denmark

Neat right? Subdomains, like sub-directories, are easy to implement.

Top level domain approach

Instead of subdirectories and subdomains, you could opt for a country-specific top level domain. This is a little complex and can be expensive to implement as you’d need a domain for every country you’re targeting. The URL would look like the following:

xyz.dk — Target: Denmark