Choosing a URL structure for a new market: three worked examples

Choosing how a new market sits in your URLs is the part of international SEO that is hardest to undo. Copy can be rewritten and hreflang can be fixed in a release, but moving a market from one structure to another is a site migration. Google's documentation sets out the pros and cons of each option, and the international SEO guide summarises them. What the documentation cannot tell you is which one fits your business. This post works through three example businesses whose situations point to different answers.

The documented trade-offs are plain. A country-code domain gives clear geotargeting but is expensive, needs more infrastructure and can only target a single country. A subdomain is easy to set up and allows different server locations. A subdirectory is easy to set up and low maintenance, with a single server location and sites that are harder to separate. URL parameters are not recommended.¹ Shopify's help centre points merchants setting up international selling for the first time to subfolders, as the simplest option, and says a separate top-level domain takes the most time and effort to build up SEO.² I find the choice usually comes down to four practical questions.

• Who runs the market? One central team, or a separate local business with its own budget and decisions.
• Does the market need its own platform or hosting? A local partner's CMS, a separate checkout, or data that has to be stored in the country.
• Is it one country or a language that spans several? A country-code domain can only target one country,¹ so it is a poor home for a language version meant for every Spanish speaker.
• What domain do you have now? Some country codes are treated as generic by Google, including .io, .co and .ai, and regional domains such as .eu and .asia.¹ A business on one of those already has a domain that works for every market.

One thing does not decide it: the words in the URL. The language-specific parts of URLs, such as en-gb in a subdomain, are not used to determine the target audience, so the audience has to be mapped explicitly with hreflang.³ Whatever structure you choose, hreflang does the targeting.

A UK online homeware retailer sells from one ecommerce platform, run by a small central team. It wants to sell into Ireland and Germany. Ireland will see the same English copy with prices in euros and different delivery terms. Germany needs translated copy, euro prices and German returns information. Nobody is being hired in either country.

I would use subfolders. The complication is the current domain. A .co.uk address is a country code for the UK, so if the shop is on .co.uk today, the cleaner long-term answer is to move to a generic .com with /en-gb/, /en-ie/ and /de-de/ folders, and that move is a migration in its own right. If it is already on .com, the folders can be added without touching the UK URLs at all. Either way, one platform, one team and one domain means every market shares the same links, templates and release process.

Ireland is the market most likely to be mishandled. It shares a language with the UK, so the en-IE page will look almost identical to the en-GB page. What separates them is commercial: price, currency, delivery and returns. When a product is sold in more than one currency, each currency should have a distinct URL.⁴ A setup that converts sterling to euros in the browser on a single URL fails that, so the Irish folder needs its own URLs with euro prices in the HTML.

Reporting stays simple. A URL-prefix property in Search Console includes only URLs under the prefix you give it, and the prefix can include a path, so https://example.com/pets/ covers the pages beneath it.⁵ Each market folder can be its own property for whoever looks after that market.

A B2B software company sells the same product worldwide from a .io domain. It wants a German version of its marketing site and a Japanese one. The German site will be translated and run by the central team. The Japanese site will be built and run by a local reseller on its own CMS, with Japanese pricing and a local sales contact.

The domain is already generic, since .io is treated as a generic top-level domain,¹ so there is no reason to buy country domains for targeting. German is a language version. The product and price are the same for German speakers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, so a single /de/ folder annotated with the language-only code de serves all three. Splitting it into de-DE, de-AT and de-CH would create near-duplicates with nothing to tell them apart. It would also go against the W3C's advice to add a region subtag only when it is needed to distinguish one version from another.⁶

Japan is different because the platform is different. A subfolder needs every market on the same host, which means the reseller's CMS would have to sit behind the main site through a reverse proxy. That is possible, but it ties two organisations' infrastructure together. Easy setup, different server locations and easy separation of sites are the documented advantages of a subdomain,¹ and those describe this situation well. I would put Japan on jp.example.io, annotate it ja-JP, and keep the hreflang set on the main site and the subdomain in step. Alternate URLs do not need to be on the same domain,³ so the cluster works across hosts.

A specialist insurance broker based in the UK is opening in Australia through a new Australian company, with its own licence, staff, product wording and complaints process. Almost nothing on the Australian site will match the UK site, and the Australian business will run its own marketing.

This is where a country-code domain makes sense. The market is a separate business, it targets exactly one country, and a local domain matches how it presents itself to customers. A ccTLD is a clear geotargeting signal,¹ and Australian searchers notice it. In Nielsen Norman Group's 2011 usability studies in Australia, participants strongly preferred local sites, and when scanning search results they showed a strong preference for URLs ending in .au.⁷ Bing's older guidance went further: a 2011 post on its webmaster blog said only ccTLDs influence document location, and that .com, .net and .org do not.⁸ Eligibility is the first thing to check. The .au rules require an Australian presence, and the list of qualifying registrants includes companies registered under the Corporations Act 2001 and entities with an Australian Business Number.⁹ A UK parent with no Australian entity may not qualify, which in this example is not an issue.

The costs are real. A new domain starts with none of the parent site's links, and it is another site to host, secure and maintain. Cost and extra infrastructure are among the documented cons.¹ hreflang between the UK and Australian sites is worth adding only where pages are true equivalents, such as the about page or a product that exists in both markets. Where the product is different, leave the pair out.

Each of these can be changed, at a price. Redirects should stay in place for as long as possible, generally at least a year. On a medium-sized site it can take a few weeks or more before Google starts showing the new URLs, with temporary ranking fluctuation along the way, and the hreflang annotations need updating to the new URLs.¹⁰

Some moves get less help than others. Search Console's Change of Address tool works on domain-level properties, and path-level moves within a domain need only redirects and do not use the tool.¹¹ So reorganising markets between folders on one domain is done with redirects and hreflang alone, and for any other move it is worth checking its requirements before relying on it. After any of these moves, I would run a full hreflang audit, because old annotations pointing at redirected URLs are easy to leave behind.

My default for a business entering its first new market is subfolders on a generic domain. I would move away from that only when one of the questions above gives a clear reason: a separate platform, a separate business, or a registry or regulator that expects a local domain.