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The Internet opens up worldwide possibilities to even the smallest of enterprises and organizations. But if your business or website is only set up to deal with local or national clients, local search engine optimization will help you target your customers and deliver the highest performance. Since Google‘s country specific searches offer diverse rankings when compared to Google.com, it is essential to know how to benefit from local search traffic.

Search engines, like Google, index sites in the most appropriate index they have, thus a UK based website will be primarily indexed and ranked in the Google.co.uk search results. But country-targeted sites seeking top placement in search results should not only target their audience but prepare to compete with the local sites. They should be flexible in their approach and country specific SEO techniques. You have to be aware that the closer a website to the user, the more relevant it is to that user.

Below you will find several simple tips that will help you feel assured that the search engines are aware of their site’s true geographic location.

Country Specific Local SEO Tips

1. Arrange for a local domains and local hosting

The major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Live Search) check Top Level Domain (TLD) name to determine where a website is located. If your site has a Country Code Top Level Domain Name – that is, a domain name that ends in a country code like “.ca” for Canada, “.uk” for the United Kingdom, or “.fr” for France – then your site will be included in the country-specific search results. In most cases the local TLD shall win .com name when it comes to local search results.

Registration criteria differ from country to country. It is fairly easy to register a .co.uk or a .co.nz, whereas registering .com.au name involves establishing a business entity in Australia. Therefore, if your core goal is to get your content to make top matches in Google.co.uk or Google.co.nz, you had better host that content on country specific TLDs.

The second method used by the search engines to determine the geographic location of a website is the IP address of the site. If your site is hosted on a server that is physically located in the target country, then that site will be included in the country-specific searches even if you have a generic TLD domain name like “.com”, “.net” or “.info”.

You can also register and redirect domains from other countries. It’s possible to register a UK website with a hosting provider from anywhere in the world, e.g. the US registrars provide hosting from all over the world. But host the main content on your co.uk domain, if you are particularly interested in local SEO. Make sure to check physical location of local hosting servers using, for example, SEOmoz’s IP Location Tool.

2. Include contact information

Specify your address, location and contact details in the footer of each page. This will help tell your clients and the search engines that you are a local business. It doesn’t really help is if you have offices in multiple locations, thus mentioning many countries / cities in the footer won’t do much for your local profile in each of those places.

3. Take care about language issues

Take the time to check your spelling and use the type of wording your clients will understand and are familiar with. Different English speaking countries use different spellings and different words when they speak, so you should use the most appropriate for your country. For example, if you are optimizing a US based travel portal, you will use “vacation”. However, searchers from UK, Australia and New Zealand use “holiday” instead of “vacation”.

Targeting different countries you encounter a problem of mirror content when you simply put the same content to your websites located on different domains. You might think that Web pages translated into different languages leave the mirror content problem aside. Not really. You have to remember the marketing demands will be different for the American, Canada, New Zealand and other country readers that speak English.

Performing local optimization, you need to adhere to local approaches. For example, the USA sales language is more direct in comparison to the tone adopted in Australia, UK and New Zealand. If possible take advantage of a local copywriting service.

4. Get local inbound links

Search engine spiders consider the inbound links that form your link profile. Inbound links from local TLDs will help you to get in top results of local search engines. Try to gain links from local business partners, chambers of commerce, government agencies, suppliers, etc.

Local directories are also of great use as well as the local Yellow Pages like Yellow Pages Australia, Yellow Pages New Zealand, and Yell (UK). Listings in the regional sections of the DMOZ, Yahoo, and BestOfTheWeb global directories will also help to improve the local link popularity.

5. Take use of Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools help you control the country association of your content. Country specification will help determine how your site appears in search engine country-specific search results, and also improves your search results for geographic queries. You can set specification on a domain, sub-domain and directory level.

If you don’t want to go to the effort of setting up structures in other countries, the alternative is to set up a Google Webmaster Tools account for the site you have and specify which country you are targeting.

This is one of the most simple but effective methods. Here is the four-step process of Google Webmaster Tools specification:

# Click on Tools;
# Then Set Geographic Target;
# Then Associate a geographic location with this site, and finally;
# Select the Country or Region you want to target.

Remember this feature is restricted for sites with a country code top level domain. They will be targeted their country correspondingly.

6. Submit to Google Local Business Center

Google Local Business Center offers you free listing on Google Maps. When potential customers search Google Maps for local information, they will easily find information about your business: your contact details, hours of operation, even coupons to print out and bring to your shop. You may edit your listing to have your Google Map results updated in a few weeks. Google Local Business Center may be of help even if you don’t have a website of your own.

Подобни статии:

1. Lesson (17): Building the Right Site Architecture (2) ...
2. Lesson (17): Building the Right Site Architecture ...
3. Step 3: Optimizing Site Structure ...
4. Lesson (18): Domain Name, File Names and Extensions ...
5. Lesson (19): META Robots Tag and “robots.txt” ...