The Benefits of having a co.uk domain

Since starting some new sites on UK servers, I have been surprised at the % of traffic from google.co.uk, rather than google.com.

In the UK, like other countries, there are 3 ways of searching google.

1. www.google.com
2. www.google.co.uk
3. www.google.co.uk – pages in UK

Quite often, google.co.uk is different to google.com. Searching only pages in UK, can give very different results.

The % of people searching pages in UK is quite low, as a % of total search traffic. However, it rises for UK specific searches. For example, if you are searching mortgages in the UK, there are many advantages to limiting your search to just UK web pages.

The implications of this are that:

• There are advantages of having a site hosted either, in your country, or having a suffix like co.uk
• It is easier to rank for country specific sites, because you have less competition. This is important if you are trying to enter a very competitive keyword market. For example, my site Mortgage Guide UK is getting most of its traffic from co.uk. It is very hard to enter the .com mortgage search results
• If you have a .com site and host it in America, you will lose the chance to get country specific traffic.

The same theory applies for co.nz .de, .com.au e.t.c

The good news is that having a co.uk suffix will be liked by google.com

For a big site, it is advisable to set up domain mapping and redirects. For example, bbc.com redirects to bbc.co.uk