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How much of your referers from S.E's are U.S based as opposed to your local country / region?
Or, put another way but slightly different:
How do your local SE's or variants from the big U.S players perform in comparison
to the U.S engines and directories?
90% of our traffic is generated from the major U.S based engines. Would be interested to see how the local European portals are doing although it will depend on industry as well as the product / service / info that your site provides.
our US visitors are growing, but ceased to be a majority last year...we now have massive traffic also from the UK, Germany, France, Holland, Mexico, and Scandanavia...Asian traffic is the next main area of expansion...at which point the US will still be important, but no longer a dominant source of traffic
Google.com 13.2%
.co.uk 8.1%
MSN.co.uk 10.81%
.com 6.95%
The traffic from google.co.uk has been growing over the last few months; I presume this is down to more people clicking on the UK only search
I would expect this to change over time due to Google opening up their local sites (eg. google.de). When users realize that they can search Google locally, I think they will migrate from .com to the local one.
I'd say that a ball park figure covering all my clients would be 70% local, 30% US engines - depending on the region or country.
I think it is pretty hard to tell actually. There's so many factors that influence referrers. If you have a site in english and danish, the number of searches is much much higher on the english keyword and so is the competition. In Denmark it is the opporsite - few searches, few competitors. Doing a good job on danish keywords would maybe outperform a medium job on english keywords making the danish SE the biggeste referrer. You have to take this into consideration.
Google.com 7.00%
Google.nl 1.27% (and growing, google.nl domain is used since a few months only)
Msn.com 0.15%
Msn.nl 0.87%
Interesting similarities with Tigger's numbers I think. Seems to indicate google.com is generally more important to it's local version, and it's the other way around for MSN.
The language used is important I think, I have very different numbers for sites targeting english keywords, .com/.net domains:
google.com 8.70%
google.nl 0.00% (more from images.google.com,directory.google.com, google.de, google.fr)
msn.com 3.04%
msn.nl 0,00% (more from msn.ca, msn.co.kr. msn.co.uk)
Above all: Google - Google - Google
Only important local player with own db is Fireball. Traffic also comes from Metager, taking in results from minor local players.
All big portals are doing own directories combined with international websearch. Most default search options to german sites.
For Germany also Austrian and swiss searchers play a role.
for those who might have wondered: the google figures were before this edit of course revolved - sorry
Google is by far the biggest FREE referrer, inclusion in the biggest local "brand" cost from $180 to $800.
Rumbas, you are absolutely right about the language issue.
Denmark: 50% local (with paid inclusion) and 50% US (mostly google.com/dk) for a site in Danish language.
Denmark: 10% local (no paid inclusion) and 90% US (English language)
Germany: 80% local, 5% Austria and Schwitzerland, 15% US. (German language)
UK: just about 40% local, 60% US (English language)
Besides the language one should also consider TLD, local TLD's often gain and sometimes .com are totally wiped out.
Besides the language one should also consider TLD, local TLD's often gain and sometimes .com are totally wiped out
Some local SE's would favour your .de over your .com, some don't care.
Other SE's only include country specific domains and lastly there is the user preferences, as explained above for google.com/dk my experience is that .dk domains has an advantage over .com domains.
I can be wrong, competition in English is much larger than German, Danish or any other language, this affects my resuls too.
No evidence for this assumption. Having a dot-de can be advantigious nevertheless.
As said before - most engines have default search options set to german language pages. If pages from a dot-com turn up in this search they are subject to the same ranking criteria as dot-de pages.
BTW: Welcome to the European forums here at WmW Stever
We've had this discussion before and I must agree with Ulstrup.
Getting dot-com's ranking in the top of European SE's can be a bit of a hazzle. In my experience many Euro SE's favor their own country's TLD. If you search danish SE's you'll see .dk everywhere. This, of course, is quite natural hence most danish sites are on .dk domains.
But, some are not, and they seem to rank pretty bad. Specially on those engines using international db's (Opasia.dk using Google, Kvasir using Fast etc.).
At least many default searches are set to filter on local TLD's, so having that local TLD will probably be a good idea.
I agree that once you get on the serps, you're subject to the same ranking criteria wether it's dot-com or dot-local.
I remember Rencke saying that he'd always suggest to his clients that they get the local domain name if appropriate. I think this is very wise due to several reasons:
- you get credit for all the traffic.
- you can more easily track/analyse traffic from the different countries (which country brings me the most traffic?)
- branding
- linkpop
Then there's the issue of convincing local directory editors, who imo in some cases seem to prefer sites in their own TLD.
Finally there's the users/costumers. Convincing them to make a purchase etc. could be easier when your site appears to be local.
This thread confirms how important the European and U.K audience is as well as the fact that to market and position to them correctly, you need to register local domains and put some € into translations.
I suppose as an alternative, you could pay the European guys in this thread to position your clients sites in their countries for you ;)
So i should have one .com and one of the country you are targeting (.se .dk)
/Ove
Yes, that's what I would do if I had the option.
But hey, that's just me and I like to have as many options as possible to work with.
