Dilema - Customer has US and UK Offices what to i do with website?!

[Malik999]

I have a customer (large) who has a building/offices in the US and the UK so are marketing to both countries.

My questions/dilema that springs to mind:

1) Do i use 1 website/domain or 2.
2) Which country is the site or sites best hosted in.

Any input would be really appreciated.

[mack]

I would suggest a separate website for each country, so long as you can provide enough unique content for each. You don't want to be entering the gray area of duplicate content.

Regarding hosting. I would try and host each site within the country it will be serving.

Mack.

[Malik999]

not sure on the unique content as all the services and details are the same so i will be chasing the same keywords.
the only difference would be the contact page.

[TXGodzilla]

You shouldn't have a problem with a "core" set of pages that each site uses. You'll be surprised at how easy it can be to rewrite a group of entry pages to better fit the country/division landing page. Then have those pages link to the core set of pages for the company.

While the services might be the same, the locale variations will influence how those services are discussed. Search phrases & syntax will vary greatly between countries, even English speaking countries.

If this is a big project, give it the research it deserves. Run some simple keyword search tests in each country's localized search engine. The results should help you draft a plan for the splitting up of the landing pages and their supporting content pages.

I agree with using the country specific domains for each entry site. The hosting might get tricky. There are many good reasons for hosting a site on servers in that division's country of origin. You can mirror the core site pages across multiple servers. The development list gets quite lengthy, that is for another thread.