SEO Optimization and Country Coded Domains

Question

I have a sight hosted on .ie domain but it is near the NI(Northern Ireland) border and the business has a lot of NI traffic. So when someone searches in NI with certain key words I would like the site to appear in the results, it currently doesn't.

I have seen this post

Does Google penalize sites on "commercial" country code domains such as .me or .tv?

But was wondering the best way around this. Would it be to create a .co.uk version that redirects to the .ie site? Or would I have to create a separate .co.uk site?

Any help appreciated thanks.

Answer 1

Most country code sites won't rank in Google outside their respective country. Google provides absolutely no mechanism to expand .ie domain to rank outside of Ireland.

You have two options:

1. Move your website to a generic top level domain such as .com
2. Duplicate your website on a .co.uk domain name.