Michael Jones has over 13 years of experience in search engine marketing, with a background in SEO, SEM, and analytics among other areas. He transitioned his travel website from a .com.au to a .com domain, resulting in a significant increase in international traffic, though it negatively impacted his ranking in Australia. The switch yielded valuable insights for future international website strategies, particularly emphasizing the importance of domain choice for targeting global audiences.

1. Michael Jones - Holidaypoint.com.au

2. 13 years of search engine marketing experience,
worked with many large organisations in Australia
(both in-house and agency side), in a broad range
of industries including: shopping, insurance,
classified and service websites.
Specialising in SEO, but have experience in:
- SEM - Analytics - Social
- Local - Reputation Management
- Email Marketing
A network of 11 travel websites; managing everything from:
- Search Engine Optimisation - Social Media Marketing
- Video & Image Creation - Content Editing
- Web Programming - Website Building
- Affiliate Marketing - AdSense
- Web Analytics - Keyword Research
Web Search Strategist

3. Kohsamuipoint.com.au

4. Where is my audience coming from?
During the keyword research phase, I identified that this
website did in fact have a large international appeal – not
just Australia - as for my other sites.
As we can see from the
country traffic share,
Australia is way too high,
and the other more
populated countries are too
low.

5. So why did I go with a .com.au domain?
As this was my first website with international
appeal, stupidly I stayed consistent with all of my
other websites and chose a .com.au domain name
– even though I knew better.
It is commonly known that having a ccTLD (country
code top-level domain) will help you rank better in
your chosen country – but what about in others?
Did having a .com.au domain impact my rankings in
other countries? Or was it simply more competitive?

6. What have I got to lose?
With both domestic and international traffic on the
decline – I thought it was about time to do the test!
To .com I go! Just remember to actually register the
right spelling of your domain or else you’ll scratch
your head why things aren’t working like they
should.

7. The Technical move to Kohsamuipoint.com

8. Taking the first steps
If you installed wordpress from within Cpanel, a lot
of the software installers have a very easy to use
clone tool.

9. Taking the first steps
Once the install has been cloned onto the new
website, all you need to do is a CTRL + F on both
the database and the raw files to update any
references to the old domain.
Once the new website is up and running (and
you’ve tested it extensively), go ahead and redirect
the old website to the new.
In my instance (because I didn’t change the URL
structure), I used a simply wildcard type redirect.

10. How to make Google notice
In order to improve the migration time in Google (ie
replacing the old site with the new), put through a
“Change of Address” request in Google Webmaster
Tools.

11. Select the right country to target
When you are using a ccTLD, Google automatically
assumes that this is the country your website is
most relevant to.
So with the new TLD at your disposal, make sure
you configure the “International Targeting” settings
with Google Webmaster Tools to “unlisted” –
meaning International.

12. So what happened next?

13. Things are on the up!
Not even 1 day after flicking the switch, I noticed
that traffic had increased – to the tune of 65% extra
visits WoW.
All countries
Ex Australia

14. Traffic from the other countries is up!
With a side-by-side comparison, you can see that
traffic from Thailand doubled WoW, along with the
others seeing similar growth.

15. The only downside…
Because I lost the ccTLD benefit in Google
Australia, I not only noticed that traffic and rankings
went down, it took Google longer to start displaying
the .com domain in the SERPs.

16. The migration in progress
As we can see from the search query reports in Google
Webmaster tools, as the new website starts to take its place
in the SERPs, the visibilty of the old domain starts to vanish.
The good this is there doesn’t appear to be an down-time in
the migration.
Kohsamuipoint.com.au
Kohsamuipoint.com

17. Ranking results: Google International
Unfortunately, I don’t have that great ranking data and my
tool isn’t the most user friendly to pull comparisons from, but
we can see below that as soon as the .com website
appeared in the SERPs, the improvements were
instantaneous. Remember this is a 100% brand new domain
with the exact same SEO, content and URLs.

18. So what has happened since?

19. Thanks Penguin!
Totally unrelated to what I’ve done, but it seems like
I saw another increase of traffic from the Penguin
refresh on Friday, with rankings and traffic from
Australia improving too – perhaps it might return to
where it was previously?

20. Rankings are pretty much par
With the ranking improvements over the weekend,
the rankings in Google Australia are pretty identical
now to that of Google International.
Google Australia
Google International

21. Some rankings are even better
As you can see from the below, with the .com website
replacing .com.au in Google Australia, rankings for this
keyword dropped from around #20 to anywhere down to
#30. With the improvement on the weekend, the .com
website is actually ranking better than better.

22. Similar with this keyword, rankings dropped when
the .com version was in the SERPs, but has since
overtaken previous ranking results.
Some rankings are even better

23. Did I learn anything?

24. Yes!
For my next international website, I went with the
.com – however, someone took the domain name I
wanted.

25. Things to Note:
• The .com website was exactly the same in every way as
the .com.au version.
• Rankings boost may have been a result of a new domain
– which could have meant that this didn’t have any past
algorithms / penalties applied to it. However, I thought a
new domain in itself would have been a negative.
You could also use a .com and create directories for each
country and geotarget them individually in GWT to maybe
see some kind of local boost for each coutry, but the setup /
maintenance of the content and also creating a complex
system around rel="alternate" hreflang="x” tags for each
would be a nightmare to code.

26. Follow Me
https://www.facebook.com/HolidayPointAU
https://twitter.com/HolidayPointAU
https://plus.google.com/+HolidaypointAu
http://www.flickr.com/photos/holidaypointau/
http://pinterest.com/holidaypointau/
http://www.youtube.com/user/HolidayPoint/
http://www.holidaypoint.com.au/