How to get your website showing up in other countries
As search engines strive to give more targeted and relevant results to their users, SEOs will have to play catch-up to ensure their sites are still seen in the SERPs.
Two of the major themes taking place in the world of search are personalisation and localisation.
In the future, every user will have their searches recorded, and the search engines will record what sites they click on and what subjects they are interested in. With this knowledge, already taking place at Google, the search engines can fine tune their results – giving highly targeted results and adverts to the user.
This is potentially good news for the user, they get personal filtered results of only the sites they are interested in, but can cause problems for the SEO.
If your site sells a particular product worldwide, but is based in a small town in the UK, how do you make your site appear relevant to users getting personalised results in another country? How do you combat the effects of geolocation, and show up in all your intended markets?
There are a number of ways to do this, as I have listed below:
Get links from sites in the country you are targeting
If you want to appear relevant to an Australian audience, but your site is UK based, getting links from authorative Australian sites will help your rankings. Lots of links from a particular country will make you appear useful to users in that country. Remember, as with all linking strategies, good, relevant and authorative sites will give the best boost.
Set up sub-domains for each country and host these in that country
Setting up a country-specific sub-domain for your website and hosting it in that country can be a useful way to obtain good localised search rankings. E.g. if your main site is www.widgets.com, for the UK you could use uk.widgets.com, for Australia use au.widgets.com. Search engines such as Google often look at the URL and server location of sites to help determine where the site is based and where the target audience is.
Set up regional mirror sites
Similar to the last idea, setting up a regional mirror site will help the search engines determine what area you wish to target. E.g. for a UK based business, get a .co.uk domain, for Australia get a .com.au. For a general international site use a .com.
Make sure not to have duplicate content on each site, only have region specific content. There is no need for every page on one site to be mirrored on another site, treat each site as it is – a totally different site from the others. Try to host the individual sites in the targeted country to get the biggest benefit.
Use AdWords advertising in each country
The simplest and fastest way to get your site noticed in a specific country is via PPC. Using Google AdWords and choosing the target area will enable your site to show up in the sposored listings for particular searches in a particular area/country. This method can be expensive, but is a great way of getting targetted traffic quickly. If you want a temporary fix, rather than a long-term solution, then PPC may well be the way to go.
June 2nd, 2007 at 8:11 pm
Good post Alex!
I can imagine hosting sites in other countries and buying foreign domains could be a pain to administer, I’m also ignoring the language and character set problems that may need to be overcome.
June 4th, 2007 at 10:52 pm
Agreed. Some really useful tips there. You might also be interested in this article from Wired: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news/2004/07/64178 which I found interesting because it’s very close to the way I see the geolocation issue.