![]() This is what happened to their visibility in the UK: So they triggered Article 50, left in May 2017, and moved their content to .uk. The growth they had got from the common European domain was not enough for them and they thought that all of the SEO budget they were contributing to the European website would be better invested in the NHS their own UK domain. The NFON UK team were unhappy with their situation. That’s because in 2017, an interesting little episode happened, that I would really like to share with you: You might have noticed that the above screenshot includes a shorter time frame after the domain migration than the Austrian one we looked at earlier. The real boost happened after the UK website version was migrated from to /gb/, with no other changes made at the same time: The redesign (the one that the Austrian website version had received at the same time it was migrated to ) happened several weeks before the domain switch in the UK, with no noticeable effect on the domain’s SEO visibility. Their UK content had been hosted on the domain, which is a gTLD itself (and not a ccTLD), but it included only the UK version of NFON’s website. NFON had only just entered the UK market recently (one of the toughest grounds for SEO in Europe), and they were struggling to grow their organic traffic in the country. The starting point for NFON in the UK at the time of the domain migration was very different from the one in Austria. Let’s have a look at the development in the UK, where the redesign happened several weeks before the domain migration, which makes it a bit easier to compare the impact of the different components. To be fair, it should be mentioned that the migration also included a redesign, which certainly had a positive impact on the performance, so the entire growth cannot be attributed to the domain switch alone. Organic traffic grew by 90% in the first five months after the migration, compared to the previous year, and their leads generated through organic search even grew by 100% in the same time frame, year over year ( source: my original case study in German – they were my client at the time, so I had access to their numbers when I wrote the original case study – with their permission). NFON’s visibility in Austria skyrocketed after the migration. Here’s what happened to their visibility when they switched from nfon.at to /at/: The company had been doing fine in Austria – there had been SEO activities conducted specifically for the Austrian domain and market and their SEO performance in Austria was good, compared to their national competitors. Austria – Growing higher than the AlpsĪustria was one of the first markets NFON was active in and their Austrian domain (nfon.at) had been online since 2010, before it was merged into the new international gTLD in early 2015. Here’s how their SEO performance in different markets benefitted from the switch. In 2014, they started moving their different country websites from separate domains into subdirectories on a shared international domain (). NFON is a provider of a cloud telephone system currently operating in 12 countries and they see themselves as the European market leader in their segment. To get started, let’s have a look at an example of a business that generated significant growth after migrating several country domains to one international gTLD. Case study: NFON’s international SEO growth after migrating to an international gTLD Please do make sure to always make your own project-based decisions and to not take anything in SEO as an absolute truth, even if there are lots of case studies and opinions pointing in one direction. This article argues for the SEO advantages of a global gTLD solution, but there are cases where switching from ccTLDs to a gTLD will not generate any growth or might even do harm. ![]() Let it be clear that in SEO, there is never a one-size-fits-all solution. > In a rush? Jump straight to the TL DR summary. If you decide to migrate your own international website from ccTLDs to a gTLD, you will also find some technical advice for the migration itself in this article. ![]() This article highlights when and why it might make sense to move from a multi-ccTLD approach to a single-gTLD strategy, by looking at a case study and the SEO theory behind the topic. When it comes to choosing a domain strategy, the two most common options for international websites are: Using several country-level domains ( ccTLDs – country code top-level domains) or grouping all international versions on one global domain ( gTLD – generic top-level domains).
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