International Pages: Example DACH Region

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Most companies in Germany use a .de domain. If you are only or mainly active in Germany, this is also a good choice. However, if you want to address target groups in different countries with your website, you should think about your international web strategy. Because the simplest solution - such as a .de website with different country or language versions - is not always the best.
Which solution is the best for you depends on the specific circumstances: Who do you want to reach? How important are individual local markets for your business? How important is visibility via search engines for you in these markets? How much effort do you want and can you put into designing and maintaining different versions and how much freedom do you give your country branches?

For the sake of simplicity, let's malta phone data assume that you only want to address German-speaking customers in the DACH region. This means that you don't need any complex localization and can get by with a single language version. However, you should then bear in mind that not every top-level domain is equally suitable for every target country. German companies, for example, often try to address customers in Austria or Switzerland with their .de domain. This sometimes works well, but sometimes not.

It is important to remember that search engines prefer country-specific top-level domains (ccTLDs) in the countries they are intended for. This is because they always want to find the most relevant content for the respective users (whose location they know). In doing so, they initially assume that content under ccTLDs is relevant for residents of the respective country.

As a result, in other countries this content performs worse than the local competition and visibility may decrease. Google.de therefore prefers pages under .de domains, and the same applies to .ch and .at. The only exceptions are a few ccTLDs that are not used as such, such as .io, .me or .tv. In addition, your own ccTLD usually enjoys a particularly high level of trust among users compared to other ccTLDs (more on this here ). For these reasons, if you want to be found on the web, you should also refrain from misusing ccTLDs for "creative" domain names such as "lecker.li" or "lecker.es".

Generic TLDs for international websites
Now you might conclude that it would be better to offer different country versions with their own ccTLDs instead of a single .de website - especially if this also involves different language versions, for example a German section under example.de and a French section under example.fr. But that's only true if you are very active in the relevant markets and are also willing to invest marketing and SEO effort for each language version and thus generate enough backlinks. Otherwise, poor linking would negate the SEO advantage of the ccTLD.

It is therefore often the better solution to use a generic TLD such as .com or .net or the European TLD .eu. The awareness of such TLDs and the associated trust are also high, and they potentially perform equally well in different countries. The same applies to new gTLDs such as .software or .fashion. With these domain endings, you can highlight the thematic focus of your website better than with local endings, for example. DomainFactory offers you a large sel