What is your advice for geotargeting sites with ccTLDs?

Today's question is about geotargeting.

Web. Seo Analytics asks.

At the moment, geotargeting from Webmaster console is available only for generic TLDs.

What is your advice for Webmasters with country specific domains who want to geotarget different segments of their sites for different countries?

Oh, boy.

Okay.

So that's a really tricky one, right?

And I have to admit, you're swimming upstream here, becauseif you have a JP domain and you want to target Finland, you're really going against a lot of expectations and conventions that people use on the Net.

So one thing to think about is whether it's possible to get a generic TLD that you could then use for other countries.

Certainly, you can try to segment stuff into different subdomains or subdirectories, but in general, if we see something like JP, we're typically going to assume that that's relevant to Japan and not as relevant to Norway or Sweden or Finland or something like that.

We do have some domain, some TLDs that can be targeted to different countries, even if they're not specifically generic.

So if you look at the metadata for this video will include a link to a Webmaster Help Center documentation page.

And the way to think of it is that there's about 20 different TLDs that can be sufficiently generic that you can target them to different countries.

So.

Com.

Net.

Org even name a bunch of stuff like that.

Now, some of those TLDs like Mill, you might not be able to get domain names, but several of them might be worth investigation.

There's also about 20 or so country code domains that are still generic enough that we allow people to target them to different countries.

So, for example, Me is Montenegro, I believe.

And yet enough people like there's a company called AboutMe. They will do different sorts of things.

So there are some of those like T TV that are supposed to be country level domains.

Practice are used by a bunch of different people around the world. And so we do allow those to be targeted as well.

So if you click through to the link that's on this video, there's about 40 total different domains that you can investigate.

So if you have a very specific country level domain and you're trying to target a whole bunch of other countries, you might think about looking for something from that list where you can sort of expand and go a little bit more generic and then target the parts of your sites to those specific countries.