Ratio of searches is approximately
UK: 28
England: 13
GB: 3
Scotland: 4
Wales: 4
Ireland: 8
(I am not covering the outlying islands in this.)
What we need to do is capture those searchers who are typing in the other terms.
How should we go about it:
My ideas are as follows:
Finish an address England, UK rather than just UK
Make sure that if an address appears more than once GB is used in some cases rather than UK
Give regional coverage in Meta Description.
Give regional coverage on at least one page of your site (use in conjunction with your most popular keywords)
Has anyone got any better ideas?
We pull quite a lot of referrals from 'keyword(s) uk' and 'uk keyword(s)' searches
But it looks like there is quite a field for research by British SEOs that others don't really have.
(Thinks why doesn't any other country have more than one name! - maybe I should emigrate to Australia)
One thing though. Word order is now crucially important in Google so I would be tempted to optimise one page around "keyword England" (with or without UK) and another page around "keyword UK" (if I had any sites to do with England). I'd make the home page the most competitive on that I could get a Google top5 for, then work down from there.
Looking at a couple of phrases including "britain", there seems quite a high search rate without corresponding competition.
Calum
US, United States, USA, America - in theory they have the same problem - but I bet 99% of US related searches don't even bother specifying the country.
I like the - "site in GB English" + variations.
I would imagine that it would also depend on the industry on which keywords are most useful - if your looking for visitors from the US then England has got to be as useful as UK (more so?).
Where british residents are probably more likely to type "keyword UK" ... anyone agree with this?
Americans are likely to search for England, British are more likely to use 'keyword uk' as their way of filtering out US sites.
You are right in that US has a number of different names, however most .coms are US biased and so .com engines tend to lead with US sites, except for a few foreign interlopers.
However, I don't think I have ever had a referral with "england" in, I guess it is time to add that keyword to some of my pages.
btw, anyone know the difference between the UK and GB? ;)
Not sure where all the little bits lie. (Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey etc)
I know ciml may have extensive info on the Scottish Borders ;)
Guersey, Jersey, Isle of Man, Sark etc. have their own governments, laws and taxation methods (unlike the different parts of the UK who have standard taxation) but look to the UK to handle defence and view the British Monarch as Head of State. Some are not in the EU - which the UK is - which gives them an interesting status for banking purposes!
btw I intend to use addresses in include pages for future sites. Anyone recommend?
That can go at the bottom of every page.
Brotherhood:
I know ciml may have extensive info on the Scottish Borders
Which I'll keep to myself seeing as you're reading here. ;)
Regardless of where the place is, though, it's easy to loose sight of the main objective (long term and/or short term sales) and put too much effort on the fun stuff (server logs). This is especially so when it's not your own site. Sometimes the extra effort in getting the more general listing just isn't worthwhile.
For example, getting top1 for {MyService in MyTown} can be at least as much use as the top1 spot for {MyService in MyRegion} or even {MyService in MyCountry}. The latter may give better traffic, but conversions are likely to be less if the product or service is location specific (eg. accommodation).
Lateral thinking, eg. {MyService for SomeActivity} is also important. It might be easier and more rewarding to promote under {martian fishing holiday} than {martial hotel accommodation}.
While the Scotland/UK promotion is always in mind up here, Ian's absolutely right, the England/UK thought process looks under-exploited.
I've never expended thought before on Britain or British. The more I look, the better it seems. Thanks guys!
Calum
Some figures from the last 3 days:
uk - 515
england - 29 (never noticed them before :))
ireland - 27
scotland - 21
wales - 7
britain - 6
gb - 0
Other random ones
kent - 4
devon - 6
midlands - 6
somerset - 1
london - 5
manchester - 1
south - 16 (south east, south west, south england etc.)
north - 8
UK is certainly the big single keyword but, and I am guessing here, I would think that if you totalled up all the regional searches they would come to a similar figure.
I like robbers suggestion of registered in England and Wales, and ciml seems to imply that this has been obvious to the Scottish and Welsh.
You can also place <meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-gb"> in your meta headings but I don't really know how much extra traffic that'll generate for you.
Unless you are offering a very localised product/service surely it's better to cast the net wide ? If you want to capture local business then Business Links, Chamber of Commerce, may be more benificial and rewarding, but sadly they don't show up on log files.......YET!
You are right in that how you promote depends on your site and target market. I have one site who is happy to be in the top ten for his home town and doesn't want any more out of his site, others who want number 1 on Google.com
I prefer to use 'uk', 'england' etc in the search string 'cos it gives me more control.
I may miss the odd site that hasn't bothered to include any location info, but I still get better results IMO.
When doing SEO on a client site there is loads of almost free traffic to had by targetting the local regions.
A restuarants catchment area includes many regions and people do search for 'restaurant preston' etc and the 'hit' is worth more than a hit for 'restaurant uk'
