.com and .co.uk

[totallybike]

Hi all,

I own:
http://www.totallybike.com
http://www.totallybike.co.uk

I am aiming at the UK only but built my shop on the .com domain as I thought it would be easier for customers to remember and better for advertising.

Will this hinder me in search engines if I'm just interested in UK only custom? If so does anyone know how to quickly and easily transfer everything I've done thus far to the .co.uk domain as I've spent a lot of time editing my shop and some of the code.

I know I could still advertise with the .com and just redirect to the .co.uk if someone types in a direct link.

I look forward to your responses and help.

Gary

[Dahl99]

Hi Gary,

I would also be interested in this.

I have a live .com site and a parked .co.uk for the same site. Would doing what Gary does at the moment make the site more visable and bring more traffic?

[rocky]

You can use the Google Webmaster tools to target your website for the UK market. On the Site Configuration > Settings page, set "Target users in" to "United Kingdom". I set mine to "Australia" and now I'm number 4 for "Prestashop" under "Pages in Australia". I'm not sure whether this will help you, but I thought it couldn't hurt to let you know.

[totallybike]

Hi Rocky

I've set that already but if I do a Google search for "totally bike" or "totallybike" it does not appears to be ranked on google. However if I then click on google.co.uk or select "pages from the uk" it does not appear to be ranked and I'm worried many of my customers might select this "show pages from the uk" radio button, thus eliminating me straight away!

Gary

[Dahl99]

Hi Gary,

did you get any more advice on this subject or find a solution?

Regards

Dahl

[totallybike]

Hi Dahl,

I rechecked what Rocky had said and I had not got it set up properly. It seems to be working better now after using Google Webmaster. I'm keeping everything on .com for the time being and am reading a book on SEO to see if that helps: SEO All-in-one for dummies by Bruce Clay and Susan Esparza. Hoping I can get results without paying an SEO company hundreds or thousands of pounds.

Hope this helps
Gary

[Dahl99]

Hi Gary,

it's a bit of a mystery this SEO thing to me. I think I've got most of the points covered, good website address, meta tags, content (need to work on that), creating backlinks (working on that too) etc etc but traffic to the site is not as good as I had hoped. Not sure what to do.

Dahl

[totallybike]

Hi Dahl,

you seem to be doing what I am doing. Do you use adwords? How many visitors do you get per day? We use Adwords and if you look on eBay you can usually buy a £75 Adword voucher for about £5, the only thing is you have to use it with a new adwords account. What we've been doing is opening new accounts each time the £75 expires, just settin gup a new email address at one of our domains to register the account.

We currently have on avg 150 new visitors per day, our conversion is usually 0-3 per day, but we sell relatively expensive items. What's your domain and I'll check it out.

Gary