Receptional_Andy - 11:39 am on Jun 22, 2008 (gmt 0)

I'm in full agreement that appealing to local visitors with the aspects you can control (title/snippet/url) is an important factor in encouraging clickthroughs. However I think there are sufficient counter-examples (sites with no regional identifiers in serps whatsoever) to suggest that this is not a significant factor in ranking - or at least, not a big part of the reason sites get a 'regional boost'.

For me, the question is what causes sites to enjoy this 'regional boost', and why do some sites get it more than others.

The basics still seem to be most significant: UK hosting and/or a UK TLD. I work mostly with UK sites, and I pretty much take for granted that if they feature in 'pages from the UK' results, they will also do much better in worldwide Google UK searches as opposed to at .com.

The question remains as to why some sites enjoy much more of a boost than others (or put another way, why some sites enjoy less of a boost than others ;)). Certainly, I have difficulty in correlating on-page factors with this.

There seems to be more emphasis on authoritative resources (i.e. an on topic page at an off-topic site) on Google.com - so, bigger, more established UK sites have better relative performance at Google.com as opposed to Google.co.uk, and poorer relative performance at Google.co.uk. Of course, there are a number of things that might explain such an effect, if it is even widespread.