I mentioned last month in the post regarding the impact of SEO on adwords quality score, that I’m currently working for a mobile phone website in UK, targeting UK potential customers. When I started to work for the website, I realized that a huge SEO mistake has been done from the beginning, even before they actually code the website: they took a “.com” website, instead of “.co.uk”…. What’s happening now?  Well, half of our SEO traffic come from US (really not appropriate when you are proposing UK mobile phone deals). So what should have been done? and How do we tell Google which country we are targeting? We can list 5 things to do in order to “set up” our website for a specific country for the Google point of view.

Language on your site

This one seems quite obvious. If you target french people, you must have french content on your website, otherwise, they won’t make the effort to read in a language they are not comfortable with. How do we do when the language we have on our website is used in more than one country? English for example. How do we tell Google that a website is ONLY for UK people?

TLD or Suffix domain name

The TLD is the suffix of your domain name and this is actually where any SEO strategy starts. It is a key factor for success to have a local TLD (like .fr or .co.uk for example), if you target a specific country. Indeed, Google.FR will give priority to .fr websites AND google.co.uk will give priority to .co.uk websites. Search now for “mobile phones” on Google.co.uk and check the TLDs on the first page: 8 out of 10 have a .co.uk suffix. The TLD is the main criteria for local search, and should be the FIRST thing decided in your SEO strategy. I can hear you already saying: “If Google give priority to .co.uk websites on google.co.uk, why are there still 2 .com websites then”.  Well, that’s a good question which lead to the hosting section.

Hosting Location

Mobilephonesupermarket.com and Mobileshop.com are both on first page for “mobile phones” on Google.co.uk. Here is the explanation: Every website have an IP adress which Google pick anytime their spiders crawl pages.  The website’s IP is in fact the hosting server IP, and this information is enough for Google to locate the server (and therefore the website). Google decided to consider the hosting location as a criteria for local search. Let’s go on Whois Domain Tools and check where those 2 websites are located: http://whois.domaintools.com/mobileshop.com, http://whois.domaintools.com/mobilephonesupermarket.com:The IP location clearly tells United-Kingdom for both of them. That is why they are considered as UK pages.

Inbound links

We observed that local search ranking are emphasized when incoming links are coming from websites also considered from the same country. Concretely, if mysite.fr have inbound links from othersites.fr, this will help Google to tell that our website is from France AND for french people, and at the same time will boost rankings for local search. Nice isn’t it?

Google Webmaster Tools

We also now have the possibility to target countries with the Google Webmaster tools. Indeed if you go on Dashboard > Tools > Set Geographic Area, you will have the opportunity to select the location you want to target. To be honnest, I’m a little bit suspicious about that one, and if anyone could comment on this, it would be greatful and highly appreciated. I’m not fully convinced that this simple set up is enough to make the difference in SEO geo targeting.

You should have everything in your hand to Geo Target in SEO now