I run an e-commerce site based in the UK, we manufacture products for the UK and Europe. A lot of our business comes from Europe; around 60% of our total sales. And so we are looking to expand on our SERPs in those EU countries. What do you think would be the best way to go about doing this? I am thinking of creating custom landing pages for the different languages and serving them up based on ip address, do you think this would be a good idea? Also we currently have a high ranking .co.uk domain would it be more beneficial to register the .EU and start promoting that domain instead?
Expanding websites to target other countries is one of the best way to reach your audience. I would suggest for every website that targets particular country has different content but much related to your product and services.
Registering a new domain will only work if you will put a link to it in your old domain where customers from EU should be directed to the new site. Otherwise you will need time to manage, rank and drive traffic to the new site. If your uk site is ranking well and it gets you the sales from Europe too, then what's the issue? Use the same domain.
If you want to cater to both, the UK audience and the Europe audience, then it is a great idea to create customized web pages in different languages. Provide an option to the website users whether they want to view the website in English or in some other language.
It would be great if you: 1) You can create sub-domain or sub-folder for any language you want to target. 2) Put all those link on each page of your main language page or current pages. 3) Domain for each country and language would be costly and most important that you need to start creating good link, article, and etc. from "n/a" PR (SERP) to higher PR (SERP).
I agree with everyone else here. Set up your EU sites in the language you want to target for that country. You can do it by sub domains and use a script that will deliver them to the correct page automatically or a completely separate web site for each country. Also remember that you would not have to make new content as translating your site in to a different langue is not viewed as duplicate content by Google. Google say it best " Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries. While we strongly recommend that you provide unique content for each different group of users, we understand that this might not always be possible. There is generally no need to "hide" the duplicates by disallowing crawling in a robots.txt file or by using a "noindex" robots meta tag. However, if you're providing the same content to the same users on different URLs (for instance, if both example.de/ and example.com/de/ show German language content for users in Germany), you should pick a preferred version and redirect (or use the rel=canonical link element) appropriately. In addition, you should follow the guidelines on rel-alternate-hreflang to make sure that the correct language or regional URL is served to searchers." Full article can be found here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en[/I]
I think you can reg. a C level domain, and set as a indivdual site, like .fr .de for each lang it will help your ranking in local