Here’s how to choose a domain extension for SEO and users

Like most online businesses around Asia, inevitably, your website needs to be focused on an audience larger than just one country. As a result, you probably have (or should have) spent some time thinking about the best ways to organize and optimize your site for different countries.

One of the first and most important decisions most people need to make when expanding their horizons to an international audience is determining which domain structure should be used for additional languages and countries.

Below, we’ll dive into your domain structure options, explain which ones you should think about choosing from an SEO-standpoint, and cover some original research one which types of structures users actually prefer.

Domain Architecture Options

There are essentially three choices for setting up your international domain architecture:

1. Create a separate folder on your existing root domain for the new country and language.

For example, if your domain is domain.com, you would add a folder called domain.com/vietnamese/ to target Vietnamese language speakers or domain.com/sg/ to target Singaporean users.

One thing to note on any targeting that you are doing in URLs: You must use each country’s vernacular in order for the search engines to understand the meaning of the string. For example, “South Korea,” “Republic of Korea,” “KO” and “KR.” are all acceptable while “SoKorea” or “SoKr” would not be.

While a subdirectory implementation can be an easy and inexpensive option, it can be difficult for people to understand the location targeting from the URL alone.

2. Create subdomains for each country or language.

For example, a Indonesian targeted subdomain might be id.domain.com while an English language subdomain would be en.domain.com. (This would only apply when English is not your primary website language. If English is your primary language the default of www.domain.com or http://domain.com should just be English without any redirection to en.domain.com)

Subdomains are usually fairly easy to implement, but, like subdirectories, can make it difficult for people to understand what content will appear at that URL. They also can be more expensive to implement when compared to a folder structure.

3. Create individual country-targeted websites on Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLD).