Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I've got .com site which is hosted on a server physicially located in the city that I am targeting: London, UK.
Bizarrely enough though, both Google US and MSN US seem to like the site FAR more than their UK equivalents.
I'm hovering around #10 for most keywords in the US, but closer to #20 when searching in the UK!
Can anyone suggest possible causes (and remedies) for this situation?
The ordering of UK results is not identical to that used at Google.com (i.e. if you remove all non-UK results from .com SERPs you don't end up with the same ranking for sites). Other criteria are at play, and although widely discussed, there's not much in the way of consensus. Some factors that could be involved, with varying degrees of importance include:
Regionalisation of content
UK sites use different grammar, different spelling and different idioms than their global/US counterparts. I make sure there's a UK address and postcode published on a contact page too, which seems to help some of the local search implementations.
Regionalisation of links & references
The UK internet is a community of sorts and as a result tend to link to and talk about UK websites more frequently - certainly much more so than non-UK sites. It's not unreasonable to look for a UK-centric link profile in a site targeting that audience.
Regionalised domain names and hosting
If the bulk of your target audience is in the UK, IMO a .uk domain name is all but a necessity. There's no clearer way to define a site's geographic intentions. A searcher wanting UK-centric information is likely to see the appeal of a .uk vs generic or overseas name.
The vast majority of sites I've worked with target a UK audience, and the ones that aren't also hosted in the UK are a small percentage.
Regional user behaviour
UK users likely have recognisable patterns of behaviour - perhaps a propensity to click more frequently on, or spend more time on UK-focussed sites. Another clue for Google might be users refining their searches by UK-locations. Of course, user-behaviour is usually a symptom rather than a cause.
Note that many of these factors can be seen as part and parcel of promoting a site that targets a UK audience, regardless of search engines :)
On a more practical note, the first thing I would check is that the site shows up in "pages from the UK". Google's IP database is not perfect by any means ;)
The site does show up when searching for "pages from the UK" - and for company-keyword searches I have the #1, #2 and #3 spots!
Although the site is a .com, I also own all the other TLDs - including the .co.uk.
Do you think it might be worth moving the site to the .uk domain?
