Website GEO Targeting same language getting it right

Scenario I want to target both the UK and US markets from the same website.  The issues are:

1. How do I target two markets from one website
2. How do I avoid being penalised for duplicate content

The options seem, at first, to host a .co.uk in the UK and a .com in the US.  This will work provided you have unique content for each website.  This causes problems of maintaining two website’s with twice the workload.  So in the long term managing two website’s becomes messy and expensive.

The right way to do this is to consolidate everything into one website.  Using a non geographic TLD such as .com or .org you can create country versions.  I.e. mywebsite.com/uk/ or mywebsite.com/usa/.  Using Google webmaster tools you can use their geo targeting option to specify where you want to target specific url’s.  You may decide to make mywebsite.com, main site, to target the USA and then use mywebsite.com/uk/ to target the UK.  You add both URL’s to Google webmaster tools and specify the target for each.

Pretty simple really.

So maintaining the website and avoid duplicated content.  You MUST localise key pages such as the home page and any other important pages.  But for universal pages you can duplicate the content to reduce administration.  But you must add link rel=”canonical” tag to those pages so that Google understands what you are doing. More info..