According to Kevin Indig, "Times Of India" has grown a lot in the US in the past 12 months with many of its ccTLDs ranking in the USA. Many other domains belonging to the Indian-based news site are also going to be ranked in the US as Google is trying out the country labels next to the website domains on Google search. Google is also working on expanding its translated results which will enable a website to automatically translate its title link and meta description along with all the website content into the language of the region the user is searching from.
Google wants as many foreign domains on US search as possible. It is because international or foreign domains are most relevant when there is no requirement for location. But if a user is searching for e-commerce websites, it is important that the user gets the results of websites which are operating from the same country as them.
To evaluate if more ccTLDs rank in the USA, 1000 random keywords from different travel, e-commerce, publishing, finance, SaaS services etc. were taken and 4,5388 domains surfaced in organic results. 71.8% of the top 5 domains were .com domains, followed by org (8.4%) and .google (4.1%). Out of all the domains, only 52 were from the UK, 11 were from Canada and only 3 were from India.
The data from 1,000 keywords show that TLD matters a bit and can impact rankings. ccTLDs can rank better in their respective countries. The data also showed that .net TLDs rarely show in the top 2 searches, .us doesn't rank well, .gov has a greater chance of ranking in top positions while .uk has lower chance of ranking in top positions. Even though .com domains rank in high positions, their backlinks, content, brand and user experience also matters.
Having better slugs in the URL also matters a little because the data shows that websites that ranked in the top eight had slugs in their URLs. It is good if you want to add keywords in your URL or meta title to increase your chances of ranking. Lastly, non-www subdomains do not show up in top results as often as www subdomains. Subdomains with www shows three times more in top five results than non-www domains.
H/T: Kevin Indig.
Read next: Ransomware Costs Surge: Local Governments Pay Most, IT Firms Pay Least, Says Sophos
Google wants as many foreign domains on US search as possible. It is because international or foreign domains are most relevant when there is no requirement for location. But if a user is searching for e-commerce websites, it is important that the user gets the results of websites which are operating from the same country as them.
To evaluate if more ccTLDs rank in the USA, 1000 random keywords from different travel, e-commerce, publishing, finance, SaaS services etc. were taken and 4,5388 domains surfaced in organic results. 71.8% of the top 5 domains were .com domains, followed by org (8.4%) and .google (4.1%). Out of all the domains, only 52 were from the UK, 11 were from Canada and only 3 were from India.
The data from 1,000 keywords show that TLD matters a bit and can impact rankings. ccTLDs can rank better in their respective countries. The data also showed that .net TLDs rarely show in the top 2 searches, .us doesn't rank well, .gov has a greater chance of ranking in top positions while .uk has lower chance of ranking in top positions. Even though .com domains rank in high positions, their backlinks, content, brand and user experience also matters.
Having better slugs in the URL also matters a little because the data shows that websites that ranked in the top eight had slugs in their URLs. It is good if you want to add keywords in your URL or meta title to increase your chances of ranking. Lastly, non-www subdomains do not show up in top results as often as www subdomains. Subdomains with www shows three times more in top five results than non-www domains.
H/T: Kevin Indig.
Read next: Ransomware Costs Surge: Local Governments Pay Most, IT Firms Pay Least, Says Sophos
