We recently wrote an article for shipmodels.co.uk, a website dedicated to representing the broad community of sailing and boating enthusiasts in Australia. We wrote the article to provide information about growing your business in the international marketplace via the Internet. The article focused specifically on our experience in setting up an Australian website and the response we received from the Australian market. We would like to replicate some of the information we provided in that article as we think it is a useful insight that can help anyone looking to grow their internet business.

From national to international

Prior to launching our Australian website, we had already built a UK website and launched a US website. After launching our Australian website in early 2014, we also launched our French website. This experience has provided us with the knowledge and expertise to grow your business internationally and we want to share this knowledge with you.

The first step in developing our Australian website was to secure an Australian domain name and then create the website. There were two obstacles to achieving this. Firstly, in order to localize our services correctly, we wanted each website to use the currency of the country/region in which it is hosted; therefore the currency on each website is different; British Pounds for the UK, US Dollars for the USA and Australian Dollars for Australia. Mayflower Modeling is a small business with a small staff, and with orders all over the office, it can be difficult to manage without the added hassle of dealing with orders placed in many different currencies.

First issue: handling orders in multiple different currencies

Solution: Multi-store website back-end management program such as Prestashop

Prestashop is designed to help you manage your e-commerce website. It helps you keep track of orders placed, products on your site, adjust prices and communicate with your customers. The solution to Mayflower Modeling's first problem is Prestashop. it allows you to manage all your stores from one place, the UK, USA and Australia. Each order on each site is placed in its relevant currency and is displayed in Prestashop in that currency. Prestashop also allows you to have the same product range on all your international sites and manage that range from one place. For example, you can adjust the price of a specific product for the UK, US and Australian stores from the same place. Or, you can disable a product in the UK store, but keep it enabled in the US and Australian stores, again from the same place. Prestashop is essentially an online solution for managing international stores, but there are other CMS (Content Management Systems) that offer the same service. Check out this page to see some of the best CMS's as voted by users.

With the UK website now live we have spent a lot of time creating the content for the site, from the text on each page and perhaps most importantly the images on each product on each product. With over 500 products on the UK site and plans to replicate the range on the Australian site; was it a simple task to replicate each product along with images and text? Unfortunately not.

Second problem: copying content from a UK site to an Australian site

Solution: Geolocation

The main problem with duplicate content is related to search engines like Google. Google uses the content of a website to determine its relevance to a search query. This is what is known as SEO (Search Engine Optimization), the service of adding content to a website to increase its visibility in the search results of engines such as Google. The higher the search results for a website, the more traffic it receives and therefore the greater the revenue potential.

The problem with duplicate content as far as SEO is concerned is that if Google finds two sites with the same content, it can be difficult to determine which site is more relevant to the search query. All websites have a domain authority, which is used by Google (among other things) to determine how much reputation a website has and therefore how high it should rank. Domain permissions are affected by many factors, such as the age of the site and the number of times the site's content has been shared by others (this is also known as link building).

In our case, since the Australian site has just been created and since its content is not shared with anyone else, its domain permissions are much lower than the UK site. Therefore, if the content on both sites was the same, the Australian site would be penalized by Google and potentially de-indexed; meaning it would not rank at all for any search queries that is! This problem was solved by geo-targeting, under the guidance of our web developer iris, we implemented geo-targeting on the Australian site, this is the process of telling Google that this site also belongs to us, and therefore the content belongs to us. Google will also use geo-targeting to determine the relevance of a website to a search query based on where the user is searching. In other words, if a user searches for "model boats" in Australia, the Australian site will rank higher than the UK site.

The result of our efforts

The Australian website is now celebrating its first anniversary. The response from the Australian market has been very positive for our website and our business. We believe the popularity with Australian consumers lies in the country's maritime history and culture. After launching the Australian site, we launched a French site and are now looking forward to a German site. If you have an online business or are thinking of starting one and want to expand internationally, then we hope you find this article a useful source of information. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us. Finally, if you know anyone who is in a position to expand their business internationally, please help them by sharing this article with them.

Morigi Mayflower ModelIt is an artisan boat model manufacturer dedicated to boat model making, with 32 years of boat model making history, and countless display boat models for major shipyards, and will treat the boat model business with the spirit of craftsmanship in the future. Please contact us by phone if you need any help!