Subdomains & Local Markets

Subdomains & Local Markets

Subdomains are best to use if you have a small amount of content about each market. If you have significant content for each market, it may make more sense to create a site for each market.

If your site is in an exceptionally competitive category and you have many links that would be hard to replicate, then you might want to use folders (or possibly subdomains) on your main site for each language instead of trying to build up the link popularity of many different sites.

U.K. English is much different than English in the United States. Even within the same language you may need multiple versions to cater to different dialects, customs, and tastes.

Subdomains in General

If your main site is a thin e-commerce site, or if it lacks authority, it might make sense to keep most of your authoritative content together with the low authority content. But if your site has great authority, then using a subdomain for some of your content should allow you to get more listings in the search results.

An advantage of placing some of your content on a subdomain is that if you have a strong brand and the subdomain is also authoritative, then when people search for your brand some search engines will feature both your domain and the subdomain at the top of the search results, and searchers will have to scroll a long way down to find competing sites or sites that are critical of your brand.