Starting a .co.uk site to attract UK customers?

[midnighttiger]

I have a US site and was curious if starting a .co.uk version of it would increase visibility to UK visitors/customers (assuming the product/service was viable as equally to UK visitors as to my US visitors)?

Thanks.

[SpacePhoenix]

Welcome to SitePoint midnighttiger! I suspect that a .co.uk version would get you more traffic from UK, especially from the .co.uk version of the major search engines, which give you the option of specifying UK only sites.

[fullahimhard]

Hi I was actually wondering the same thing, I was considering pointing a .co.uk domain to my current webstore. Will google consider this to be duplicate content though?

[jambo99]

Well if you already have a .com address I don't see much point in buying a .co.uk, unless you're referring to a .us domain then from my experience (as a UK resident) I have always just assumed these sites were not intended for me and not visited them!

[fullahimhard]

Not neccessarily, the .co.uk extension is much more relevant to uk search than a .com when somebody uses google.co.uk.

[rcj662]

If you make a unique site and host it in the uk i think it could help. Some people say hosting it in that country helps and others say it does nothing. The domain name with a unique site should help if your other sites is not doing well in the uk. You could target new keywords with new site and should get more traffic.

[fullahimhard]

So is the general consensus to create a 2nd unique website for the .co.uk extension?

[asprookie]

So is the general consensus to create a 2nd unique website for the .co.uk extension?

Not totally unique but separate with UK specific content, put pounds instead of dollars, correct the words I.E. specialise/specialise, colors/colours, etc.

Have a UK flag on your dot come to direct UK visitors to the UK version, if you can afford it, implement a geo IP detection. A more economical way would be to detect the time on the user's browser so that if it is greater to +5 compared to your own .dot come server then redirect, something like that.