(Entry was posted by David Gaski on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 04/16/2020).

Expanding the traffic source beyond the province

Hey SEO dudes, I`m wondering how you might take a .ca domain that gets a lot of traffic in the province it`s located in, and expand its traffic source beyond the province and, ideally, go into the US and beyond. The .com domain is already registered, to who I`m not sure yet, but I`m sure that would do a lot to help. I also wonder if providing my business address on Google and on my website is a good idea. In retrospect, I suppose it worked in driving traffic from my home province to my website, but my goal has changed, so I imagine I will be removing it from the site and changing it in my Google my Business settings. Is there anything else that you think I`m missing here? Thanks a lot!

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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

Jim Munro: Country-specific .tlds are automatically-targeted to their specific country, David. You cannot change it. You will never dislodge the .com domain from appearing in US results although sometimes the .ca domain will appear seemingly randomly in results called from the US. More so if you geographically locate the .ca site`s hosting in the US. Generally, it is usually cost-effective to acquire the .com in any way you can and step out from there.
Richard Hearne: You haven`t given us much information about your site, so take all advice as given in something of a vacuum.

First the TLD - it`s not that the .CA cant get global traffic, but it`s unlikely to do as well from search as a gTLD like .COM. cTLD like .CA are likely to do well in their "home" country, and it`s rare that they`ll do well outside that territory (except edge cases where a site has extremely limited competition). If you change your site to .COM you may not get the same traffic in your home province as previously, and all domain migrations carry risk.

You could run 2 sites - keep content related to CA on .CA, and then you could use a gTLD like .COM to publish content for other countries.

You could also move to .COM, and then set up different folders or subdomains for different countries. This can work, but again it`s not really advice I`d given without looking at your site.

There are lots of ways to do this, but which one might work best is far from trivial to advise.

I would not remove the address from your site. It`s likely used as a quality indicator by Google, and can also impact your performance in Local search. Again, without knowing more about what you do, it`s not possible to know if this advice is appropriate.

What type of content do you offer, and what type of business do you have? Don`t need to be too specific, but something like transactional/informational, product-related/general etc might help us.
David Gaskin: Thanks guys. I run a web services company. Maybe using a different global domain and doing a 301 to my original would also have an effect?
Richard Hearne: No, none whatsoever.
Richard Hearne: "Web services" - are you selling a product?

View original question in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 04/16/2020).

Expanding the traffic source beyond the province

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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