Google has put great emphasis on Geo-Location in it’s search rankings, so if you have a business based in the UK, with a UK Postal address, I would suggest buying the .co.uk domain name and making that your main site. I’d also suggest buying the .com domain name as well and maybe building a different kind of site on there too. Maybe make one a blog and the other a static site for example.
To me it makes no sense to have a .co.uk domain name for a business that is not based in the UK, just because the site is written in English, I’d personally keep the .co.uk domain names for UK based businesses.
So really there is no hard and fast rules, but I would follow this:
- If you have a site written in English choose a .com domain name
- If you have a site written in English for a UK business choose a .co.uk domain name
I recently did some SEO work for a Anglo/French ski school in Serre Chevalier. They have 2 sites a .com one for the French and a .co.uk one for the English site. I would have probably advised against the use of a .co.uk domain for a business with a French address, but in this case it does seem to have worked well. I built a few hundred backlinks over the space of a few months, which seems to have secured excellent front page rankings on Google, so maybe it does work? I do however have my suspicion that it would have worked just as well being a .com. It’s quite interesting that their french site which is on the .com domain is also ranking at number 3 even though I was looking on Google.com for an english phrase, “serre chevalier ski school”. As I say there are no hard and fast rules.
