Marketing to Europe players from USA (Questions)

[Online18Casino]

Okay, I am in the USA and to date all my sites have been focused on USA friendly casinos.

I want to branch out, and I am asking this in SEO because the questions are for SEO purposes.

1. What is the best domain name extension to get if I wanted to market to Europe players? Is .com okay? or should it be .EU?

1.b. Should i register the domain name from a domain register in europe or is it fine to get it from a US one? or does it matter?

I know I should host the website on a server in europe, for best seo results. So mostly I need to know about the domain name... It seems like it is harder to market to a different country then the one your in.

Any tips or info welcome!

 

[Christoff]

.com is fine - if you are targetting the UK for example, I would recommend the .co.uk extension.

.eu is not used that much from what I've seen

 

[xecutable]

I am in the U.S, hosted from the U.S, but most of my traffic comes from the UK, since most of my keywords are UK oriented anyways.

I have also used Geo-targeting in Google Webmasters set to United Kingdom. This way when someone uses Google.co.uk, and uses the option Search Pages only in the UK thus omitting some of the competition, you show up higher.

That is of course if you are solely looking for UK traffic, and not European in general. I have heard for best results to go with UK hosting + .co.uk domain if you hope for mostly UK traffic, but I am not sure if that's a myth or reality.

I don't feel underprivileged having a .org domain hosted in the US, as I rank well among the other UK sites.

I'd say let one site bet on your existing host with the current domain name, and let one be transferred in the UK and see the difference for yourself. If it's not worth it, no need to go through the hassle of transferring to new hosts, buying new domains etc.

 

[michael26a]

I don't really think the domain extension matters too much, or the IP address. Google works by matching users with the keywords they are looking for, so as long as you have an exact match or similar domain name, the extension shouldn't matter too much.

Is it necessary to target European players? Every website i've developed gets lots of traffic from different countries automatically. My opinion is just to go for popular and well known keywords, and put multi-language text/banners on that website. I'd rather target both markets in one go, rather than have one website for each target market.

That's just my 2 cents, good luck

 

[Vladi]

You can't legally acquire an .eu domain without being an EU citizen or EU registered company.