Webmaster Tools - should I set location to a country

[lee_sufc]

I run a site offering specialised services. Primarily, this is aimed at UK clientele, however, we do get a lot of traffic from Google.com rather than .co.uk

In webmastertools, I have been toying with the idea of setting my site's geographic location to UK for a while. However, by doing this, will my site's rankings be lowered (or even taken out of) Google.com?

In addition, by including my office address to go into Google maps, am I making it look like I am targeting one particular town in the UK, rather than the whole country?

I hope all the above makes sense and would love to hear from anyone who has had some experience of this issue.

[edited by: tedster at 6:44 pm (utc) on April 23, 2008]

[tedster]

The results on google.com are geo-located. So if you assign a country choice in Webmaster Tools, then google.com users in the UK will still see your site in the results, but users elsewhere in the world would not. So you won't be excluding UK visitors who use google.com instead of google.co.uk.

Whether you want this or not is a business decision - are you able to make use of international traffic and offer services to them?

I'm not aware of any interaction between a GWT country setting and a Google Maps address. The address you supply is Google Maps would limit your appearance to the area around that address - but as I understand it, that limitation would be for Google Maps only. It is intended to be a form of local search. If your services are intended for the entire country, it may be better to avoid pinning yourself down to one location.