Geotargeting per Country to Help Rankings?

[Timetraveler]

I've been meaning to geotarget a couple of our sites for awhile now but was curious what kind of impact it would have on SERP rankings.

Personally I believe it has a positive impact but have no concrete evidence. For example, our sites are pretty straight forward and essentially geared toward the user wanting to be advertised to, thus it makes sense to advertise the proper 'widgets' per their country.

Just curious if it has a good impact on different google dot .com / uk / dot whatever rankings?

I've read this thread [webmasterworld.com...] and am going to have the ads in the proper language because in reality that will be what they are looking for.

We just really lack in other country rankings and am looking for a boost in other countries for our target 'keyword in domains'...

thanks.

[goodroi]

To truly target country specific serps you probably want to use the country specific tld, host the site in that country and write the content in their language. You might want to look at just how profitable the traffic is to determine if you should go to all this trouble instead of using the geotargeting option.

[Marketing Guy]

Is hosting the site in the country still applicable? The notion has been around for as long as I've been in SEO and a lot has changed since then - many more businesses reselling hosting packages that use foriegn servers. Isn't it fairly common for a good selection of UK sites to be hosted in the US (for example)?

I transfered a .co.uk which was hosted in the US (UK company) to a UK based hosting service last year. No real movement in rankings to speak of.

[goodroi]

You can target a country without the hosting (you don't even need country specific tld) but I prefer to make it as simple and easy for the search engines to realize that my site is relevant to that country.

[CainIV]

In our experience it does impact rankings positively for that geo location especially when done in conjunction with other local signals.

[snickles121]

I just geotargeted a few months back by placing those pages in sub folders and then targeting them in google webmaster tools. If you do this make sure you name the directories correctly as specified with Google.

Now traffic stayed the same for those countries for about a month, then crashed a month later, then finally jumped up slightly at the beginning of this month. In the long run I think I saw a increase in traffic for those countries overall of 5 to 10 percent from when it was not targeted.

[mcskoufis]

Have clients under both scenarios... local site, UK or US IP address and local site in local IP. Can't see any difference. The deals you get in US and UK are at a fraction of what the local hosting companies charge.

So often I see local sites hosted on other countries that don't have trouble competing in the SERPs.