.com VS .co.uk dilemma

[MSFB]

Hi guys, im in a bit of a pickle at the moment.

Registered 2 domains for my product. 1 is perfect for my majority UK market- footballproduct.co.uk

The other is perfect for american canadian and australian customers, who make up a large portion of my ebay sales- soccerproduct.com

Now I'm having the site developed and am at a loss as to which one I should choose to develop the site on.

Most of my orders have come from the UK, but I feel the prouct has lost some steam here and may be more popular overseas. Also, as its apparently getting colder in Australia, 90% of my orders over last 2 weeks have been from there.

The ideal scenario: My domain ranks no.1 in google CO.UK and .COM for the terms 'footbal product' and 'soccer product'

I don't particularly care which domain I use, but I don't want to go for .co.uk if it will harm my international ranking and sales.

I don't want to go for .com if it will harm my UK search rankings and sales.

So what the hell should I do?

Everything I read assumes you're either targetting UK customers or customers from somewhere else. What if I want to target everyone?

Any advice appreciated.

Cheers guys

[scott g]

You could always develop both sites exactly the same b/c Google DOES take into consideration international extensions.

Just tweak the content to be a tad bit different... Duplicate content hurting you is a load of crap in my opinion... That's along the same premise as being penalized for building backlinks too fast...

If you want to stick to ONE, then the obvious answer is the .COM because it is globally recognized.

I would develop both and make the article/body/reading content just a little teeny tiny bit different. That is all

CHEERS!

[jacked]

Ya listen to scott's advice it is spot on. Either build out two sites or take the .com since it is making you the most money from sales.

[MSFB]

thanks for the advice guys.

Ive always heard bad things about duplicate content, so bit cautious about that....

The problem with the .com is it doesnt contain my exact keyword... and from an SEO point of view it would seem stupid to ignore the chance of having an exact match domain..

but then again I need to rank internationally!

blurgh cant decide

[bermuda]

You can work on both websites and of course that is going to increase your work load because you would be working in two fronts, establishing links and contents for two websites that need to get high ranks in two different Google portals. Of course everything is possible and I too believe that if you are going to have to make one single decision in this case, go with the .com version of your domain.

there is no need to worry that much about lack or presence of main targeted keywords inside your domains because nowadays links are playing the biggest roles online and if you add fresh contents to your site, links added, your ranks would get improved. By the way, through copy writing you would be able to create a lot of content pages for your two websites, completely different from each other.

[ghanistha]

Thanks for sharing this information with us i am not aware of these before.