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I have an ecommerce website in Australia with a *.com.au ccTLD. I now want to also target customers in New Zealand however I think because of by ccTLD I currently get very low traffic from New Zealand (or anywhere else).

I don't want to accidentally destroy my rankings in Australia so I want to know the best way forward.

Options I've thought of so far:

1) Move my current site to a gTLD like *.net following googles guidelines.

2) As per (1) but also have sub-directories for each country. eg) .net/au/products and .net/nz/products

3) Create two websites with one domain for .com.nz and existing .com.au . That would mean duplicating content though. I will not be extending to other countries because of international shipping issues.

I have complete control over the website code and hosting and own potential ccTLD domains for New Zealand and also gTLD.

Edit 2016-11-10 Duplicate Shopping site catering to 2 countries where *most* content is same, except pricing. Duplicate content? I hope they are not my competition :)

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2 Answers 2

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You can't target another country with same ccTLD.

When you add your website(for example .com.au) in search console then by default in targeting option you will see that is targeting australia country, you can't change that location because it is ccTLD. Google is stickt about ccTLD for targeting only one country.

I will suggest go with another ccTLD for New Zealand. Just by adding little different content on that site, you will not get any duplicate issue. Many of websites using different ccTLD for their eCommerce website, and they only change the currency price on their website, and rest of most content are same, and still they did not face any duplicate content issue, and it is because they don't have similar content for same location. They have similar content by targeting different geo.

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Concerning your edit: use hreflang tags to get around duplicate content issues for the same content across different sister TLDs.

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