Our brand is expanding to other countries, which domain location

[bwnbwn]

My 1st time doing this so unsure best practice. We are based in US. Very soon we are expanding in Canada and Australia due to shipping cost.
I have purchased our domain (Company Trademark) in country specific names. example.ca and example.com.au
Content pictures are basically going to be the same.
I will have control of domains for many reasons.

My question should I have these country specific domains hosted in their respective country. I have a host and cart I have been using for 20 years and would like to keep everything with them but understand the site might have a better chance if hosted in the domains country.

Thanks for any advice especially if you been there and done that.

[edited by: not2easy at 12:57 pm (utc) on May 12, 2020]
[edit reason] exemplified domains [/edit]

[jediviper]

I would choose subdirectories, not different tld.
So i would go with domain.com as the main site and then
- domain.com/ca/ for canada
- domain.com/au/ for australia

respecting of course any hreflang attributes for languages etc.

[bwnbwn]

that is a very interesting thought I will contact the cart company about this on calculating shipping per country.
I know each will have to have there own shopping cart due to currency difference but I like that idea.
Thanks

[tangor]

My question should I have these country specific domains hosted in their respective country.

Probably not necessary. Only reason I can think of why that MIGHT be a consideration is paying taxes, or proof of location. (Business office)

[RedBar]

I agree with jediviper.

Until about 10 years ago we used to have many tlds and hosted in their respective countries but if became too unmanageable and it actually was not so good for SEO purposes.

This is the route we use now and it seems to work well, we use identical page layouts for each country with its own language and unique images, same size different image, specific language. I have absolutely no idea how it would work with all English language pages across different countries.

Most of the tlds we have kept with a single splash page with navigation to the main site for their language, they are used very, very little.

[bwnbwn]

rebar how do you manage the different shipping charges. The main reason on this is to reduce the cost of our product. Average shopping is 46.00 to Canada for a 1 lb package.

[rainborick]

If you have a Country Code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) name, that determines the site's geo-location and so it doesn't matter where the site is hosted. See Google's advice on multi-region/multi-language sites [support.google.com].

[RedBar]

how do you manage the different shipping charges.

We only sell by the Full Container Load (FCL) direct from the producing factory, that's usually 24-27 tonnes.

Occasionally. for a very high value or urgent order we may ship LCL (Less Than Container Load) however that is very rare, maybe once or twice a year.

We are 100% B2B export and fortunately English is the trade's default language therefore we do ensure our language-specific pages are widget trade proof read and not machine translated, that can be embarrassing!