Hello there. I had a question from a client which goes like this:
They're an IT company with three offices in Australia, Sydney (NSW), Melbourne (VIC) and Brisbane (QLD).
They wanted to know if they had three websites with IP that geo-resolved to Brisbane, Melbourne, and Sydney (by housing the sites in data centres in Bris, Melb and Syd), if that would influence their ad's rankings positively (and their quality score) in those regions for geo-specific keywords.
For example, this client's web server is a data centre in Sydney. But if I'm a customer in Brisbane (with a Brisbane IP) does Google favour ads for websites with Brisbane IPs (assuming all other factors like content etc are equal?) Further, does this effect get magnified if I geo-target the campaign to Brisbane?
Outside of SEM, I've seen massive responses to unpaid traffic for sites moving from outside of Oz back to Oz for queries running on Google Oz, but I haven't done any studies on the impact on paid keywords...
Has anyone experienced changes based on the geographic location of their webservers for SEM work? In particular, has anyone seen any changes for interstate changes?
Thanks in advance!
M.
