It is a fact that search engines rank differently for different countries. If you want your website to rank consistently well in the search engine result pages relevant to the country your business is focussing on you should consider geo targeting strategies when setting up your website or streamlining your site.

Single country strategies

Firstly choose a top-level domain that tells the search engine the location of your site. For instance use “co.uk” if you are targeting customers in the UK or “co.au” if you are targeting customers from Australia.

Besides this search engines are able to determine the location of your website through your web hosting provider. For this reason you need to make sure that your hosting is done in the country you are targeting. It is possible to host from a different country but having an IP address different form your hosting country will probably affect your rankings.

Placing a local business address on your footer will help Google determine the location of your website too.

The language of your website needs to be relevant to the country you are targeting. It also helps to optimise your content so that it can be distinguished. For instance make sure you differentiate between British English and US English.

If your inbound links are from let’s say France even though your target audience resides in South Africa, Google for instance will rank your pages higher in France. This works for traffic too. The country generating the most traffic is where you will be ranked higher.

Multiple country strategies

Having a multi language website is the only way you will be able to rank highly in each single country. This will also ensure that your product can be found by a global audience via search engines. There are strategies that follow those of single country such as top-level domain, local hosting and business address but there are other factors that need improving on for each individual country you are targeting.
Your content needs to be country specific and in local language. It also helps to set up site architecture that can handle this.

From there you will have to decide whether you are going to use sub folders, sub domains or separate domains. If you decide on sub folders for example (www.name.co.za/australia) rather than a sub domain (Australia.name.com) or separate domain (www.name.co.au) this will allow the whole domain to stand apart from and gain benefit from any inbound links.
By adding either the sub folder or separate domain as a site to Webmaster tools you are telling Google which WebPages target which country. Google then sets its geographic location accordingly.

SEO branding

The future of SEO is tied into branding and for this reason your site needs to be optimised for the country your branding is intended for. There are many avenues for advertising besides online, yet by concentrating on branding your website will open up your website to your audiences and encourage a higher rate of click troughs.

Get Involved