Foreign positioning, better domain in national domain or subdomain in Polish domain?
More than once on industry forums, we have encountered inquiries about which domain name is better to create a website intended for the foreign market.
With the expansion of its services by one of our clients to the south of Poland, and the specific situation regarding domains, we were able to simultaneously conduct some analysis, which quite clearly indicated which solution is more advantageous.
Who: A Polish company gaining more and more foreign markets. For the purpose of this blog post, I will use the domain: example22.pl
Industry: construction, heavy equipment
Where: the Slovak and Czech markets, and by extension, Google.sk and Google.cz
Tools: stat4seo (position monitoring), Google Search Console, MajesticSEO
Both versions of the site, both:
– Slovak – example22.sk
– Czech – cz.przyklad22.pl
contain a landing page – script identical (based on WordPress). They differ, of course, in language version and meta/alt descriptions.
Both pages identically optimized, headers, metatags, as well as any other elements – exactly the same. The sites have not yet been linked in any way, both have no inbound links, as indicated by reports from MajesticSEO and GSC. All the actions that were carried out for one site, exactly the same were implemented in the other.
The visible difference, however, is in the domain itself. in the Slovak version it is the national domain przyklad22.sk, while in the case of the Czech version it is a subdomain on the Polish domain cz.przyklad22.pl (the Czech national domain occupied).
After getting the pages indexed (recall that this is a landing page, so it doesn’t matter the number of indexed subpages), we checked the results in phrase monitoring. There are 40 of the same phrases monitored for each domain, analogous language versions.
Here is a snippet from stat4seo monitoring:
Slovak version: example22.sk
Czech version: cz.przyklad22.pl
The results, as you can see, are unambiguous. Of course, for full authoritativeness one would still need to track the competitiveness of the phrases in the respective countries. However, in this case, the disproportion of competition in both countries is not so great as to explain such a significant discrepancy in the results of indexing and ranking of both sites for particular phrases.
For those who did not want to read this example in full 🙂 here I give the answer:
A separate domain in the national domain, rather than a subdomain in the native domain, will definitely be a better solution when it comes to positioning for a foreign market.
