What’s in a domain? A case study of travel companies’ international SEO set-ups
The question of how best to reach users in different countries online is one that causes headaches for all businesses above a certain size. The key aim is to offer users in each country you’re targeting localised content that provides a good user experience, but if you’re targeting a large number of countries that can be very difficult to achieve.
Even household names have been tripped up, with Clarks being the latest casualty. In January 2020 the footwear retailer reverted from having individual domains to target the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, France and the Netherlands (some of which were over 20 years old) to directing all European traffic to a .eu site.
As Sistrix reported recently, this had disastrous consequences. Clarks suffered a dramatic drop in visibility and several of their Spanish keywords dropped all the way from rank 1 to not ranking at all.
Transitioning from one international set-up to another can be incredibly difficult and risky, especially for big companies with a network of domains and millions of URLs to consider, which is why it’s important to choose the correct set-up in the first place.
There were multiple reasons why Clarks’ transition went wrong, but fundamentally they all come down to one principle: you want to make it clear to users and search engines alike where traffic from each country should be going.
Here I’ll look at the international SEO set-ups used by four of the big travel industry sites — Tripadvisor, Trivago, Expedia and Kayak — to analyse how the set-ups used differ even within the same niche, and why this is.
The three main international set-ups available to companies are:
CCTLDs
Standing for Country Code Top Level Domains, this refers to domains that are targeted at one country, using that country’s domain extension. This is the strategy that Twinkl uses — for example, twinkl.ca is Twinkl’s domain for Canada.
Each country is afforded its own website, allowing for that website to be fully customised to customers in the country it is targeting, whether that involves language or cultural considerations. Generally speaking, most users are more likely to click a search result with their country’s domain extension (for example, Swedish users clicking a .se result) because they perceive it to be more relevant and trustworthy than a generalized .com, and all things being equal, a CCTLD will outrank a .com in the country it’s meant for. In 2018 Pinterest switched from a subdomain system (see below) to CCTLDs and saw a boost to rankings in each country they were targeting.
Pinterest growth engineer Christian Miranda also points out that having separate domains means each has its own crawl budget — the amount of pages search engines are able to crawl from each site per month — meaning content is indexed and recached quicker than when using subdomains which all share the same crawl budget of a central .com site.
However, it means you are essentially starting from scratch rankings-wise in each country when the domain is launched, rather than benefiting from the ranking power of an established domain. In addition, backlinks are dispersed among multiple domains rather than concentrated centrally, making it harder to grow Domain Authority. There are also registration and hosting costs to consider; some domain extensions can cost over £1,000 per year just to register a name, and some require local contacts or trademarks to be registered in that country.
Subdomains
The weaknesses of the separate domains approach are the strengths of subdomains. This is where websites for different countries are hosted within the main website. For example, no.tripadvisor.com is Tripadvisor’s site for Norway, but rather than being a separate domain it benefits from the existing Domain Authority and links built to tripadvisor.com, giving it a head start in ranking in Norway.
However, there is a glass ceiling here where ultimately it will never be able to rank as well as an identical website with a .no domain extension. While a .no would take longer to rank well, it will eventually be able to rank higher. There is also an argument that users are less likely to make the connection in the SERPs that a subdomain is tailored to their country if they see the ‘.com’ suffix before the ‘no.’ that precedes it.
Subdirectories/subfolders
Mainly used for differentiating content by language rather than region, subdirectories or subfolders also work from a central domain but usually append their localisation to the end of the URL — for example skype.com/en/ is Skype’s English-language subdirectory, and skype.com/hi/ is its site in Hindi. Trivago takes this one step further, offering an Arabic subdirectory for its UAE site and thus combining two strategies: trivago.ae/ar.
The pros and cons are practically identical to using subdomains, and this method also avoids hosting and registration costs compared to CCTLDs.
Other approaches
There are also more unorthodox — and even more complicated — options. Enligne, a jobs website, had subdomains for each town of the UK within its UK site, while the Pokémon forum offers the same content in multiple languages all on the same page.
Expedia operates a bizarre microsite system for some of the countries it targets; its site for Colombia is located at expedia.com/?siteid=4405. The reasons behind this URL protocol are hard to discern as it seems unlikely Chilean users would realise that microsite was intended for them from the URL.
Generally, though, most international approaches fall under one of the main three aforementioned.
Regardless of which method you opt for, you need to tell search engines about the set-up you’re using so they know where to send traffic from each country, and something called hreflangs are key to this.
Hreflangs
Hreflangs are links in the code of your website that tell search engines where to find the same content for different languages or regions by listing all your international domains, subdomains and subfolders. Assuming it has been set up correctly, you can view any website’s hreflangs by right-clicking anywhere on the page and then selecting ‘View source code’.
This is also a quick way of checking which international set-up a company is using. As an example, here are Kayak’s hreflangs.
From this quick glance we can see that Kayak generally uses CCTLDs, with the occasional subdomain. These lines of code are crucially important regardless of which set-up you use, as marking up a website as being in the wrong language, or not referencing one of your websites at all, can cause dramatic drops in visibility.
Clarks’ (mis)use of hreflangs has caused them problems as their individual European domains, while still live, do not reference the existence of any other domains in the code, while the .eu domain only references the different language options available on that domain. This has caused search engines to be confused about which Clarks site to send traffic to — this graph shows the split of Italian traffic between clarks.it and clarks.eu, causing a situation where they’re essentially competing with each other.
A study of travel companies’ international set-ups
At Twinkl our SEO efforts are increasingly focusing on international markets, as there’s huge potential to help teachers and children in many more countries with our teaching resources.
Travel comparison sites made for an interesting case study of how to go about international SEO, as the implementation they’ve chosen is generally similar to ours, and they are also in the position of marketing the same (or nearly the same) product to each country.
Firstly, I looked at which countries each of the four sites examined — Tripadvisor, Trivago, Expedia and Kayak — had custom user experiences set up to target (either CCTLD, subdomain, subfolder, or another bespoke website offering). Despite each company’s product offering being very similar, were there significant differences in which countries they believed needed their own domains?
Within that, I looked at whether the implementation was the same in each country, or whether they had different strategies depending on the market size or cultural considerations. Interestingly, all four companies have chosen to use a mixture of international set-ups rather than sticking with one strategy. While this seems unnecessarily complicated on the surface, perhaps there is a sound logic behind it.
We can see that for travel comparison sites there are basically three tiers of countries when it comes to deciding which merit their own domains:
- Tier 1 — All four companies thought it essential to have a localised offering in place
- Tier 2 — Less essential but at least half of the companies have a custom site
- Tier 3 — Optional and unorthodox choices; only used by 1 out of the 4
While the majority of the countries in this tier are to be expected, there are some surprising inclusions such as Peru, Thailand, Finland and Indonesia. Generally, the four companies unanimously agreed that the best way to target Tier 1 countries was with a CCTLD, though as we’ll see later, China was the exception to this.
Interestingly, all four sites used an identical site layout across all countries (only tweaking the featured deals/venues) even in regions such as Japan where you might expect them to opt for a different design.
The Arabic subdomains — used by Tripadvisor and Trivago — are the really interesting ones in Tier 2. This appears to work very well for Saudi Arabian traffic in both cases, which overwhelmingly lands on the Arabic subdomains as opposed to their main .com sites, but for other Arabic-speaking countries, the majority of traffic still ends up at their .coms, so the overall results seem mixed.
Expedia’s Europe subdomain and Kayak’s Catalan domain are both unorthodox choices in Tier 3. As we’ve seen with Clarks, Europe domains pop up occasionally, but in Expedia’s case I couldn’t see much justification for it, as it ranks for fewer than 10 keywords in any one country.
What can we learn from this?
Firstly, there are some countries — such as China — that all four companies agree require a different approach from the one they use for other countries. In China, Expedia use the unusual microsite system outlined above, Tripadvisor and Kayak use a subdomain rather than their usual CCTLDs, and Trivago even operated under a completely different name (though their Chinese site is now defunct).
Each company also often deviated from their usual approach when targeting countries in the Middle East. Tripadvisor opts to combine all Arabic traffic in a single subdomain, while Trivago uses both a catch-all subdomain for Arabic traffic and separate domains for some Middle Eastern countries like the UAE, and Kayak only has a domain for the UAE of those countries. Expedia use microsites for all Middle East and also South American countries.
The reasons for these deviations are difficult to assess, but it’s likely to be partly commercial — they won’t launch a full domain for countries where they don’t see as much opportunity — and it’s also possible the companies have researched which countries’ users have less confidence in their local domain extension. For example, they may feel users in, say, Bulgaria, would perceive a .com site to be more reputable than a .bg one.
Surprisingly, apart from the China and Middle East examples above, the only time Kayak deviated from their usual set-up was for Canada, New Zealand and South Africa, for which they operate subdomains on kayak.com. This is possibly because they feel the countries are linguistically and culturally similar enough to the US not to require separate domains.
Tripadvisor’s strategy is perhaps the most interesting. While it generally sticks to a CCTLD set-up in each country, there are a small number of countries that it operates as subdomains on .com, such as Norway and Poland.
My guess would be that this approach is used for countries which are exploratory markets, so they test out a subdomain to assess whether there’s enough traffic from that country to justify its own domain before moving to a CCTLD if the test is successful. For example, until 2010 Tripadvisor operated a subdomain for the Netherlands, before converting it to a CCTLD. This method avoids the initial registration and hosting costs on domains for countries they’re not yet sure about.
This kind of flexibility is worth considering for other companies’ international strategies, particularly those where SEO budgets are tight and domain registration fees represent expensive outlays. While choosing the best ‘one size fits all’ approach allows you to effectively target the majority of countries you operate in, perhaps it makes sense to deviate from that in some cases and judge each country on a case-by-case basis.
