Domain Name Issues

Choice of domain name is the first issue. It is usually quite easy to find the .ie domain name due to the difficult and expense of registering an Irish domain name. Irish domain names are much easier to get to the top of Google's search engine results in Ireland, they are though almost impossible to get to the top of search engine results in the UK or elsewhere.

As Irish businesses expand they often look towards the UK as their first export market and at that point they run into the .ie problem. Often the decision is made to purchase the .co.uk extension of their business name. UK domains are more in demand and not as often available – even company names. Additionally companies are then starting in the UK search results with a new domain name – this in competitive areas will take at least a year to start ranking for their key search terms.

When buying the original domain it is wise to buy the .com and .co.uk name at the same time. This is a good long term strategy, which looks towards expansion in the future. When these other domains names are bought it is useful to put up one page about their company. If this is done then Google will see the name as older and more established if the company ever need to market on this domain name – a huge help for getting good rankings in Google.

Web Hosting

When companies combine a .ie domain name with Irish located web hosting it is another barrier to entering the UK market, however it is great for Irish search results.

Web site hosting is ideally within the country that is being targeted. Moving a .com name hosted in Ireland to a web hosting in the UK is a good idea if the target market is outside of Ireland and predominately the UK.

It is easier to rank a UK domain name in Google's Irish search results than it is to rank an Irish domain in Google's UK search results; this can of course change at any time. It is fairly obvious though that the Irish search results are not being competed for by Irish companies, many of whom are not performing the basics of on page optimisation – which could have them ranking in the first page for some of their key search terms.

Link Building

This is the last major barrier to enter the UK search market. If an Irish company is using a .ie domain name it is much harder to build links within the UK. UK IP addresses are required to get listed in the UK for non-UK domain names. It is harder to list in a country if your domain name is specific to another country.

UK web directories will often not accept Irish domain names. There are ways to help over come this. It is a good idea if an Irish company has a UK address and phone number on their web site, this makes building links slightly easier. This is often done using virtual offices, a very cheap option to establishing a UK presence.

Leslie Gilmour owns and runs Cube Online Marketing and writes an Irish Search Engine Optimisation blog.