Domains – the forgotten art of SEO, indexability and good navigation
If you are a company that carries multiple established brands, and works in multiple regions, a good domain strategy is critical. Getting it wrong can carry serious SEO penalties and perhaps worse still, a confusing message to your visitors.
As always, there is no ‘right way’ and domain strategy is a thesis in itself, but I wanted to try and pick up some key points, some of which I believe are easy wins and some that may require a more extensive overhaul. All of which should give clarity to your visitors, and crank up the rankings.
Multi-brand sites
Most international companies carry a number of brands or services in their group portfolio. A common question I am asked is how that should be reflected in the domain/URL strategy. The very simple answer to that is “How strong is your group presence versus how strong is your brand/service identity.”
From a URL perspective you have four main options:
https://<brand> (leading with the brand)
https://<group url>/<brand> (using the brand in the sub-directory or sub-folder)
https://<brand>.<group url>/ (using the brand as the sub-domain)
https://<group-brand> or https://<brand-group> (concatenating the group with the brand in a single unique URL)
Brand First
To give you an example; while Unilever is a fairly well known company, it is actually its brands that are household names. While you can go to the group site here: https://www.unilever.com/ its personal care range, Dove, sits on its own domain: https://www.dove.com with only a reference in the footer to the group.
Group First
Conversely, Four Seasons leads with its global name, https://www.fourseasons.com/ then presents its hotels as sub-directories (sub-folders), for example; https://www.fourseasons.com/orlando . Clearly Four Seasons is an international, recognized brand that travellers relate to and expect consistency in quality across all the hotels, worldwide. This strategy can be difficult to implement elegantly when multiple regions and languages are involved (see below).
Sub-domain
The subdomain strategy, <brand>.<group url>, is one that is also used to associate brands with the main group. It does create a separate ‘entity’ that google will index. However, although Google claims that it treats subdomains and sub-directories equally (meaning that their contribution to the website’s ranking should be the same), SEO-specialists, such as MOZ and Semrush, state that in reality “the content (and its valuable assets, such as backlinks) hosted on a subdomain isn’t being taken into account by Google’s algorithm when ranking the main domain”.
Weirdly this seems to be a strategy often used for investor sites (e,g, https://investors.orkla.com/) and careers (e,g, https://careers.g4s.com/ ) but this is probably because these are often hosted in different platforms.
Concatenation
In terms of visual and index association choosing a unique domain by concatenating the brand and group (https://<group-brand> or https://<brand-group>) in a new domain may be a better approach where there is a more balanced weight between the group brand identity and the brand or service. This may also be a useful tactic in companies that have recently or regularly acquire new companies into their portfolio and want to create a new strong association between the parent and daughter company, while still retaining some brand-independence.
Its worth remembering that like the ‘brand first’ strategy, each domain will need to build its own ranking ‘value’ and won’t benefit from a centralized ‘indexing value’ that a group-first strategy will create.
Interestingly, many companies use this structure for their internal emails, e.g. <name>@<company-division>.com but it is not used in their websites. Watch the inconsistency there as contacts quite often ‘guess’ your website from your email.
Languages and Region Tags
Dealing with languages is always a gnarly subject and often the motivation for companies to assess their overarching domain strategy.
From an Intellectual Property (IP) perspective it is important for a company to own the country top level domain (cTLD) for both the group and the brand. For example, if you operate in France, then you should definitely register the ‘.fr’ domain for both. So, do that, but only use the cTLD domain if the site is wholly dedicated to that region and stands alone from the other regions. This is rarely the case. It is always better to use the language identifier in the main site URL and forward (or CNAME) the cTLD to this. In other words:
https://<brand>.fr --> https://<brand>/fr (French represented by the 2 letter ISO 639-1 code)
Now, as we know, French is not only spoken in France, and the codes for countries that are used in URL’s will happily accommodate this, for example:
https://<brand>/fr-FR for French in France
https://<brand>/fr-CA for French in Canada
Here a choice needs to be made. If you’re running a single brand site that has multiple languages, then it should suffice to simply use the two letter code. If you are operational in a specific country and there is a variation in products, services or brands that are available in that country (so the overall content is different) then use the 4 letter codes.
This is a list of common language codes:
There are some caveats here:
Avoiding duplication: : noindex
It is very common for a company to operate in both the US (en-US) and the united Kingdom (en-GB) and very often the content may be very similar in these regions. Google does penalise duplicate content, so on all the pages where the content is identical, then it is important to use the noindex and nofollow code in the header. This shouldn’t be blanket-applied to the site though, as your service descriptions may differ in those regions so make sure both the GB and US version (or other language equivalents) of your services are indexed.
Some companies will also make English available on the country site – for example in Switzerland where they are very much polyglots, so remember to use the correct local code there too – for example: en-CH
Informing of alternatives: hreflang
To deal with a degree of the duplication, its important that Google is informed of the other alternative languages available. This is done with the hreflang tag. This ameliorates the language duplication problem across, for example fr-FR and fr-CA or en-US and en GB to a large degree (which version actually gets served will depend on other factors like backlinks, etc).
Make sure that the hreflang code in the header represents the language on the page and the alternatives available, e.g.:
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-gb" href="https://www.g4s.com/en-gb" />
(and don't put an hreflang and a noindex on the same page!
URL translation
And finally remember to translate the actual URL into the local language as Google will promote this behaviour. Most Content Management Systems (CMS) will allow for a local version of the page name/display name so use that in the URL, e.g.:
In English: https://www.garnier.co.uk/hair-colour/black
In French: https://www.garnier.fr/colorations/coloration-noire
Note: I actually really struggled to find a company that was doing this properly! Translate your URL – it helps your ranking!
Language switching and fall-back
In researching this section, I found that on so many of the sites I looked at, when I switched between regions or languages the majority of companies ‘lost’ the page I was on, so I had to navigate again to the same page in the new language. This is very frustrating! Map your equivalent pages in each language so you can switch smoothly between them some CMS systems do this better than others
Fall-back language is also very important. There is a good chance you don’t have all pages translated on your site, so if a page doesn’t exist in the local language, don’t present a 404 (page not found) – simply offer the visitor the page in your fall-back language (usually English). But don’t let them lose their ‘place’ on the site so if they navigate ‘back’ they will stay with their preferred language. If there's a fall back language used then don't use hreflang on the page with fall back content.
Note: Language translation and workflows will be a topic of another future article!
Using IP or WhoIs look-up to recognise the geography.
If you do run a multi-lingual, multi-region site, then offer assistance to your visitor. Its very simple to use IP lookup technology to recognise the location of your visitor, so if they enter your main domain, for example: http://<brand> ttell them where they are on the site:
“You are viewing the global page”
And then offer to change the locality:
“It looks like you’re in France, would you like to switch to the French website in French/English” (preferably written in French of course!)
You can use that for currencies on a commerce site too:
“You are viewing prices in GBP (£), would you like to switch to EUR (€)?”
Spelling variations
There are many websites dedicated to explaining how to protect your domain intellectual property, and as explained, its definitely worth securing your country Top Level Domains (cTLDs) for brands and companies. Its also worth looking at your analytics to see what visitors actually typed or searched before they found your site. For example, people looking for my old company Nemetos often typed nementos into the search. So, we simply registered the domain ‘nementos.com’ and redirected that to Nemetos.com to save the potential client the trouble.
Take a look at your brand portfolio, and find out what people actually try (Google Analytics will help here), and then send them to the site of page they’re probably looking for.
Moving to a new domain
Once you’ve crafted your domain policy, the next wonderful piece is around mapping what the old page URL used to be and then what it will become under the new regime. Its important to inform search engines what that mapping is, and that’s where 301 & 302 redirects come in:
A 301 redirect means that the page has permanently moved to a new location
A 302 redirect means that the move is only temporary.
(There are other 3xx redirects, but these are the two most used)
There are quite a few tools to map websites, so if you have thousands of old pages, you can automatically extract the full URL’s for these into your spreadsheet, and then pair them with what will be the new page. Some Content Management systems will handle 301’s, but it can also be done with a bit of programming.
If you have an overwhelming number of pages and you need to do it manually, focus the redirects on those pages that have the most traffic.
Its worth noting that if external sites are pointing to/referencing your old pages these links won’t break if you implement the correct 301 policy, so you maintain your in-linking ranking.
Note: While your browser can understand domains with or without 'www', in indexing terms 'www' counts as a sub-domain. Put your money on the domain without the 'www' and then forward all entries starting with 'www' to the main domain i.e.:
https://www.<brand> --> https://<brand> (Web or CNAME forwarding)
Domain Management
In companies where there is no central policy on domains it is common for marketing managers all over the regions and divisions to simply register the domain in the system they’re familiar with. The result is the domains, which by the way are part of the Intellectual Property of the company, are scattered across the Go-Daddy, one.com, speednames, etc. universe with no central management.
The main problem with this is speed – if you want to change anything on the domain (e.g. DNS settings), you might spend days trying to locate the system and then more time requesting the changes (especially as the person who registered the domain may have moved on).
Centralise all the domains into one system and make sure one person or team has access to this. There are a few around, BrandShelter is one we use. Also, while this may be the remit of legal or procurement in the sense of ownership, make sure a systems person has access, because they’re the ones that know what a DNS zone file is!
Going big – register you own Top Level Domain
If you really want to impress your audience, it may be worth considering your own domain. Through ICANN you can apply to obtain your brand or company name as a generic Top Level Domain (gTLD). Companies like .ericsson, .bmw & .sky have done this at company level, and some like General Motors have done it for their brand, .cadillac
Interestingly, many of the companies that have registered these domains are still redirecting traffic back to their ‘classic’ TLDs, for example if you enter “q.sky” in your browser, which I imagined would promote their “Q-box” products, but instead just redirects to sky.com.
Also, if the domain you really need, for example <brand>.com is being cyber-squatted and it might take thousands to recover the name, then .<brand> might be a cheaper alternative.
Note: a bit of promotion here – we’ve successfully used Thomsen Trampedach on a number of occasions for both domain recovery and the creation of brand TLD services. They will also help you manage your domain portfolio.
In summary
There are no hard and fast ‘rules’ and no guarantees around domain strategy in terms of perfect indexing and ranking results. However, it is safe to say that most companies, especially those that have grown through acquisition, have incredibly messy domain policies and this creates confusion both with visitors and search engines.
Pick a strategy that suits your brand or service portfolio and then build consistency across all your brands, regions and languages.
Centralise your domain portfolio and make sure it is configured correctly and managed.
Understand your regional and language strategy and implement the right ISO codes into the domain structure.
When you introduce the new domain strategy, make sure you 301-map the old to the new, so you lose no ‘equity’ in your previous ranking.
Of course, if you’d like help with this process, you are welcome to contact me.