Hurting my SEO by not using subdirectories or unique URLs

A customer recently asked me to write about top level domains vs subdirectories. Here's the full question:

We (a UK retailer that also sells to US customers) use a .com domain, as in the naughties, using a .com is what UK retailers usually used, as it made them look more like a serious business than if they used a .co.uk. There are still a lot of UK businesses, new and old, that prefer to use .com's

[M]y latest realisation is that as our main markets are the UK followed by the US, I may be hurting our SEO in one or both English-speaking markets by not using different subdirectories (e.g. adding a "/us" to the urls for our American customers, or changing our main domain to .co.uk). I still need to look more into this - right now our Shopify store just detects the customer's geolocation and changes the currency accordingly; there's no change to the URL.

Quickly as an aside, this question reminds me of an old boss. She would refuse to interview candidates simply because they had a AOL email address. She felt AOL was 30 years ago (this was a few years back 🤣 ) and if they have an email from AOL that no one uses anymore, they can't be a serious candidate. Clearly this is garbage, and it shows her biases (and ageism) more than anything else.

Generally speaking, I don't advise changing your domain (going from .com to .co.uk or whatever). There's a lot more risk and there are a lot more steps involved when changing domains.

Established domains already have a ton of trust and reputation built up that you would essentially have to start all over again if you change your domain. Meaning it doesn't matter if you change the top level domain to .co.uk or if you change your name from Susanne to Lilly. Google sees these as completely different things. Yes there are things you can do to make that transition smoother, but it's not easy and the risks remain regardless of how careful you are.

With that said, there are a few ways to approach selling internationally that helps both your customers and Google better understand how you sell products.

• add new top level domains (e.g. keep .com and add .co.uk),
• add subdomains (e.g. uk.example.com) or
• use subdirectories / subfolders (e.g. example.com/en-gb).

Any of these are perfectly acceptable as long as you follow a few "rules" of the road.

The other part of the question was are they hurting their SEO by not using subdirectories.

No, your not hurting your SEO simply because you are not using subdirectories (aka subfolders) - as I said there are many ways to approach this.

However, using geolocation and not having unique URLs for each currency (such as top level domains, subdomains, and subfolders) can absolutely hurt your SEO and ads with Google and LLMs. Google usually only visits from a US-based IP address and many LLMs can't process JavaScript (the mechanism that changes currency when you don't have unique URLs).

Since both .co.uk and .com would use English, the language piece is less concerning than incorrect currency as that can be difficult for customers to understand currency conversion rates. Additionally, you may have conflicting data between your landing page, product feed and structured data due to how unreliable JavaScript can be in these situations.

Also, I wanted to address something specific they said.

A "serious business" can't be reduced to the type of top level domain one uses. There are many trust factors at play to help a customer decide to buy from a new business and choosing .com or .co.uk is rarely the top of that list. Also, I've spoken to many UK retailers and some think .co.uk is a better domain than .com while others believe the opposite. Honestly, most people don't care and those that do, it's just their opinion, not fact. Customers usually search your business on Google, find and click the link.

It's not like they look at .co.uk and think, oh these people don't know what they are talking about. They may say "oh I wonder if they ship to the US" but that's not necessarily a deterrent anymore. Many companies ship worldwide and those that don't explicitly state as such on their shipping policies.

As a risk adverse professional, the best advice I can give here is to keep your risk low. Keep your domain as it is, add either subdomains or subfolders, and stop geotargeting to meet Google's expectations with selling internationally. Don't forget to use this guide to ensure your Shopify Markets is setup correctly.