Should I Install Subdomain?

[KevinOH]

Hi good people,

While doing KW research for my niche site, I've come across some keywords that are targeted for the UK market. My site is a .com (generally aimed at a US audience). Some of the keywords I've found look like this: best product UK, best product for X UK, etc.

I want to go after these KWs and I know, generally having a .co.uk domain would be ideal. However, I don't want to start a UK-specific site so I wanted to target the KWs in my .com site. How should I go about this? I'm thinking on two fronts:

i) Install a subdomain on my site (something like uk.mydomain.com or mydomain.com/uk and then post the articles in the subdomain

ii) Just target the KWs with the -UK extension. e.g. mydomain.com/best-product-uk, mydomain.com/best-product-for-x-uk

How would you approach this?

 

[Calamari]

Do you live in the UK?

 

[KevinOH]

Nah

 

[Calamari]

Nah

I misread your original post and thought you wanted to register a UK extension. I honestly don't have an answer to your question, I only have guesses as to what I think would work best.

 

[GNews]

For me, i found getting posts from international site, boosted international orders.

 

[RomesFall]

If you set your site up correctly you can dupe the site but for the UK audience.

You'll see sites doing this when they have;
site.com/en-gb/ etc

To achieve this you'll need to understand hreflang. There is a little more to it than that. But here's a moz link (sry lol) to get you started.

Hope it at least starts you in the right direction.

 

[KevinOH]

Thank you all for the responses.

I'm running a WP site, so I'll be converting it to a multisite to create a UK. Since this is a long term project, I figured having a subdomain early on would be beneficial rather than going for the KW route of adding the -uk in the URL structure.

And thank you @RomesFall for dropping hreflang in the response. Had no clue about it. Been reading lots about it over the past hour.

 

[Steve]

If it's all properly interlinked with href lang tags, it makes no difference if you go subdomain or subfolder. Subfolder is generally easier to maintain though - install polylang and you are good to go.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Subfolders are going to share the "domain wide" metrics of the main domain too. Subdomains are like a brand new site, even if you interlink to them it's not quite the same.

 

[KevinOH]

If it's all properly interlinked with href lang tags, it makes no difference if you go subdomain or subfolder.

It actually does matter, in terms of SEO. Plus, subdomains are generally recommended if the content you intend to create will be significantly different from your other content. In my case, the content is similar, only that some products are targeted for the UK market, but they are in the same overall niche.

Subfolders are going to share the "domain wide" metrics of the main domain too. Subdomains are like a brand new site, even if you interlink to them it's not quite the same.

I actually installed the new section as a subfolder even though the site I'm working on has nothing in terms of authority. But since subfolders share the domain authority of the root domain, I figured it would be better for the long term SEO benefits rather than installing a subdomain.