How to Develop Country Specific Websites
So, you’ve decided you’re ready for a new website but your audience spans multiple countries; what’s the best approach to reaching them effectively?
As a UK-based marketing agency, we’re experienced in designing and developing websites for clients with audiences that are based in the UK. However, we often find clients with audience demand in other territories, who look to us for advice on the best way to reach them. There are a couple of ways that we’d advise reaching audiences in different countries, and each approach will depend on how you want to be perceived and interact with that website visitor and potential customer.
In this blog we’ll explore the options for creating a website that speaks to audiences across different countries, recognising that it requires more than just translation. To properly connect and communicate with your audience, you need to consider culture, behaviour, expectations, and technical aspects relating to how that audience searches and receives information.
Why should you tailor your website to different audiences?
Taking a one-size-fits-all approach to your website visitors might make your team’s job a little easier, but it won’t give you the best engagement and conversion rates. Each visitor on your website wants to be spoken to in their own language, with their own message – personalisation is an excellent way to boost engagement and show the visitor that you understand their challenges and needs.
If you have identified a target market in a particular geographical location, providing content tailored to this audience will help to build their trust. It’s important that the website considers local preferences and behaviours, which differ from region to region. From understanding that European audiences tend to value detailed information and a more formal style, to adapting for American audiences that often prefer bold and persuasive messaging, it’s important to tailor the whole website experience to your audience to increase engagement and ensure high conversion rates.
By adapting your website to meet the expectations of each market – whether that is through localised content, design, or even payment methods – you not only improve the user experience but also enhance your chances of capturing and converting new customers in different territories.
In recent years, we’ve seen an increase in clients that want to reach multiple audiences online. We’ve successfully developed solutions for a bespoke travel agency to reach markets in multiple countries through the use of subdomains and recently launched an entirely separate website to help a well-known tooling business expand their reach into America, as well as launching a brand new UK site.
Whether you’re looking to create one website that uses bespoke landing pages to target different markets, or to launch multiple websites for each location, we’re able to guide you through the process and advise on the best route to reach your target market.
Understanding your target audience
If you’re at the beginning of this process, an important first step is identifying your target audience and understanding the various personas that you need to appeal to. This will help guide your overall approach and ensure that the content and design choices reflect their needs.
When you work together with us to build your new website, we always begin with an audit of the current landscape to help us to understand and advise on the right approach for your business.
Language and Localisation
There’s more to consider than just a simple translation. We’ve all bought something from Amazon or IKEA and had to laugh at the translation of the instructions. This is because literal translation is not always the right answer. It doesn’t take into account colloquialisms and phrases that might be used by the audience. So while translation focuses on simply converting your text from one language to another, localisation ensures that the content is culturally relevant and resonates with the target audience.
As we mentioned previously for example, an audience in Germany may prefer a more formal tone, while American audiences may respond better to a more casual style of communication. Localisation ensures that your website takes into account idiomatic expressions, date formats and different terminologies, ensuring your content feels native to its audience – a big deal when you want to build trust.
Aside from language, tone is another important consideration. Cultural differences can play a huge role in how content is received. In some countries, humour and informal language may be a great way to engage users, while in others, a more formal tone is necessary. Everything from the imagery you use to the colour choices you make, can affect how your website is perceived.
Multilingual SEO
Taking the same approach to keywords and SEO as you would for a UK site won’t drive the best organic search results. We need to consider best practice guidance and understand that different countries might search for the same product using entirely different terms. For example, a UK audience might search for “trainers”, where an American audience is more likely to search “sneakers” but they ultimately lead to the same product.
This, amongst many other reasons, is why we insist that a keyword audit is an essential first step in building your new website. Before we begin writing any content or optimising any pages for certain terms, we’ll always ensure that each version of your website is optimised for local search engines. From using country-specific keywords to creating custom meta descriptions to help your new website to rank higher in search results, we’ll use best practice to make sure that your new website performs well in search engines.
Our Approach
When working with you on a website that is not aimed at a UK audience, we work closely with trusted partners and local experts to ensure that your website is not just translated, but fully localised for its intended market. Whether that is adapting your tone of voice, optimising for local search engines, or tailoring your content to fit cultural norms, we ensure that your new site can deliver an engaging experience for your audience.
We were recently able to support an international client with the launch of a UK site, assessing their large bank of knowledge base content for its tone of voice and anglicising their terminology to ensure it appealed to UK audiences. These small nuances make all the difference when appealing to a new market – authenticity is key to building trust and encouraging visitors to take a desired action on your site.
How will website design affect your audience?
Similar to the need for tone of voice and language differences, there can be subtle design preferences between countries that need to be observed. These can vary from audience to audience, but it’s important to consider how colour schemes, imagery and layouts can vary by culture. Your new website should respect the differences if you want to succeed.
Before any design development takes place, you must consider the user experience and their expectations around the navigation, the call to actions on each page, and the overall flow of the website.
A recent discussion with a client looking to move into the European market focused on their desire to be seen in the new market as a native business. They were keen to open an office in Germany and have a sales team actively on the ground to make sure there was a local point of contact for their clients. In many cases, your website will guide your audience’s first impression, so it was important to note the differences in the imagery that German audiences are used to seeing. It was also important to think about their preferred payment methods and style of CTAs. Ignoring this key information would make it clear to the audience that this is not a German business and could hinder their chances of success in the area.
Our design development process
You might be sick of reading the word ‘research’ but it really is one of the most important aspects of marketing. Before beginning any design process, research, research, research. We’ll look at competitors in the area and use other native websites to guide the design process. We’ll follow country-specific best practices to make sure that designs will be well received by your target audience, building trust with new users and search engines.
As always, we’ll begin with wireframes to show the overall layout of the page, highlighting where key information will sit and understanding which elements will be more important on the page.
Subdirectories Vs. Subdomains
When it comes to structuring your website for different country audiences, two of the most common approaches are subdirectories and subdomains. Both have their advantages, and the right choice depends on your goals, resources, and how you want to manage your global presence.
Subdirectories
A subdirectory approach uses a folder structure within your main website, such as yourwebsite.com/de/ for a German version or yourwebsite.com/us/ for the US market. This method keeps everything under one domain, which can be beneficial for SEO as all traffic and backlinks feed into a single domain authority. Google tends to treat subdirectories as part of the same website, meaning your SEO efforts are centralised.
From a user experience perspective, subdirectories offer a seamless browsing experience, with easy navigation between country versions. For businesses looking to maintain a cohesive brand identity while targeting multiple markets, subdirectories provide a straightforward, cost-effective solution.
We’ll use hreflang, an HTML attribute which specifies the language and geographical targeting of a webpage to let search engines know that there are variations of the same page. This serves as a nod to Google and other search engines that these are not simply duplicated pages.
Subdomains
Subdomains, on the other hand, create a separate web address for each country, such as de.yourwebsite.com or us.yourwebsite.com. This approach can be helpful if you want more control over each version of the site, perhaps with country-specific website design elements or different product offerings. Subdomains are treated by search engines as distinct websites, so while this can dilute your domain authority, it also gives you the flexibility to implement highly targeted SEO strategies for each country.
For larger businesses with significant international traffic, subdomains may offer greater autonomy and flexibility, allowing for more substantial regional customisation without affecting the core website.
Country-Specific Domains
When expanding your business internationally, a great way to establish credibility and improve local visibility is by using country-specific website domains, also known as country code top-level domains, or ccTLDs. These domains, such as .de for Germany or .fr for France, signal to both users and search engines that your website is tailored to a specific country’s audience.
Firstly, this effectively builds trust with local users as most people are more likely to click on a website with their own country’s domain extension because it feels familiar and reliable. Afterall, a German user seeing yourwebsite.de is more likely to appreciate the content, services and products as they are more relevant to them, as opposed to seeing a .co.uk domain, for example. It also demonstrates that the business is committed to that market, which helps boost credibility and user confidence.
When it comes to SEO, country-specific website domains provide a significant advantage. Search engines like Google tend to rank ccTLDs higher in local search results, which is a good way to improve visibility with your intended audience. By using a .de or .fr domain for example, you’re signalling to search engines that your website is specifically targeted at users in those regions, increasing the likelihood of ranking in local searches. This can be especially beneficial if you’re competing with local suppliers/businesses.
It’s important to remember that although ccTLDs offer numerous benefits, it can be time-intensive to manage multiple domains, each with their own SEO strategy, content management and separate hosting.
Our Recommendation
We generally recommend subdirectories for businesses looking to expand into international markets for the first time, as they simplify SEO management and keep branding consistent. However, for companies with highly differentiated markets or products across countries, a country-specific domain may be the better choice. Ultimately, we tailor the approach to fit your business goals and ensure your website structure supports strong SEO performance, easy management, and an exceptional user experience for every audience.
Other Considerations
Planning for a new website involves a huge amount of decisions and strategic considerations – of which we’ve only touched upon in this blog – but what else do you need to think about?
Are you ready to discuss your new website project? Get in touch.