Ranking high with non com domain, should I even bother?

[punisa]

Hello friends, I need a little bit of advice.

My site has a country domain (for example .hu), I serve articles in my language.
Now I have a section where I'm selling some services which might be interesting to global audience.

Here I write good optimized articles about my services and rank pretty good for my language.
Would I have any success if I added articles aboout my services in english language?

Competition for keywords I plan to target is not very high, but I can notice that all of the results are from .com domains.

Thus my question - should I even spend my time doing this? Is it worth the effort?

Or *must* I create a .com domain and start there from scratch?
Although I don't think I like that idea, it would take me a great deal of time to set it all up..

Any reccomendations and similar situations are welcomed : )

[tedster]

If you hope to rank well outside a specific country, then having an international TLD is a critical factor.

[punisa]

hmm, I thought so. Thank you for confirming this Tedster.
Google onyl very rarely shows country specific results, usually if there is no .com ones..

Seems like I have a "problem then".
Do you think I should leave my country-specific content right where it is?
www.example.hu/myservices

And open a new site at:
www.myservices.com ?

Yep it scares me : ) A couple of reasons why:
- will Google think I'm doing something wrong if I have the exact same design and etc?
- call me paranoid, but Google is getting more and more educated on foreign languages - could it somehow figure that I just translated my articles from my language to English and thus consider them to be dupes?
- my current services section relies heavily on my MYSQL database.. don't know how I'm gonna work it for a new site. I doubt I can pull data from same DB : (

[tedster]

It is common to show translated content in different languages but use the same template. And translated content is not considered duplicate - no worries there at all.

[HuskyPup]

Do you think I should leave my country-specific content right where it is?
www.example.hu/myservices

Yes

And open a new site at:
www.myservices.com ?

You could also go for .eu, these can also rank very well in Google.com

will Google think I'm doing something wrong if I have the exact same design and etc?

Not if it's in a different language. I have many sites using precisely the same company layout, template, colours, everything, the difference is that they all have unique language content for that domain.

Those that have the same content are translated for the target country, it's completely normal and is not seen as unusual, in fact I would think it quite strange not to have translated that content for the local audience.

Do ensure that the translator has local language and hopefully product knowledge otherwise it could be a bit of a mess!