A Beginner

[salmak]

Hi

I'm still very new to online marketing and i'm in the process of researching how it works, what are the best systems etc..

What I was hoping somebody can help me with is if I have a co.uk domain, can I effectively target other countries such as the US and Australia? I am presuming there will be a higher number of internet users than in the UK in places like this.

If I bought the correct software to generate keywords and used adsense/adwords to target USA, would users click on my link if it ended in co.uk rather than .com, .net etc?

Any advice would be great and if anyone has any other advice please feel free, I am going to look through other posts on this site aswell to see what I can find out, loks like there should be plenty to read up on.

Thanks
Salma

[seodude16]

Since we are talking about adwords on this thread, the fact that your domain is a co.uk domain would have no bearing whatsoever. Furthermore, since you can decide what to show as the display domain in the ad text, you could effectively hide the fact that it is co.uk if you wish. Naturally the link would send them to your co.uk domain but the display url could be anything.
But if you hid the domain, then you would lose the exposure on all the impressions. Normally you wouldn't want to have a display url different from the real domain except in rare instances (e.g. using www.website.com/sale is a good trick even if there is no "sale" page or category on your website. The /sale on the end of the display url can lead to higher CTR in many cases)

I think the bigger question you need to ask is whether targeting markets outside the UK is going to be cost efficient. I am not sure I would market outside your country if any shipping is involved unless that product is only available in your country. The key is bringing in qualified leads or visitors. If foreign visitors can buy or join with no additional cost or issues then marketing worldwide is fine. If not, then you may wish to limit yourself to UK searchers in which case displaying the fact you are a co.uk domain would actually be a benefit.

[n vijayanand]

See your domain name is not at all a issue. If you have shipping options to other countries then you can go ahead provided it should not be a lose for you because both the sides should get benifit i mean customer as well as you.

As for as the keywords are concerned in your adwords account itself you can see the keyword suggestion tool you can make use of it otherwise you can go for wordtracker which is number keyword suggesting tool

[leftoverjoe]

You've got a good idea where to start already...keyphrase research. The one downside to the free tools available, at least the ones I know of, is that they won't show you competition data, or calculate out what you can expect as a solid estimate of monthly traffic across all of the engines. If you really want to do yourself a favor, get a Wordtracker subscription. You can get access to it for 24 hours, a week, a month...etc., so if you only need to work on one main project, then go for a week-long subscription.

Once you've established a solid, realistic list of keywords, then you can start to think about geo-targeting, and where you'd like to position your products in the marketplace. Is your product virtual? Is it hard goods? Do you really offer it in those other countries? What is your main goal in advertising to the US? Can you compete with the companies in the US that offer your same product? Does anyone else have the same product you do? These are all things to consider before you reach out to the international market.

n_vijay and seodude have already spoken eloquently about the issues with your domain extension and the display URL capabilities of Google. So no worries there. Also, I agree with seodude that you should take advantage of the .com/sale option in your display URL as well, if it is appropriate.

Let us know if you have any other questions. We're here to help. Good luck!

[AussieWebmaster]

You can also get a free keyword suggestion tool at seobook.com in the tools section.

Don't worry about the domain extension... few if any people look or care... though I must say I like the use of sale or discount at the end....