Driving more global traffic to a .co.uk

[whiskers]

I have a client whose site is currently stuck on a .co.uk for historical reasons. They brought me in to help improve their traffic and ad revenue which has gone well (we've improved by around 1000% in both areas over the past couple of months).

One thing I notice however is 84% of our traffic comes from the UK and this figure doesn't seem to change. Their content is globally relevant (related to a topic rather than location) but Google seems to be only promoting it heavily for UK based searches.

I notice in Webmaster Tools there are geo-targetting options but these are only available to .com/.org domains.

Does anyone know of a way in which we can persuade Google the content is not UK specific?

Thanks in advance.

[tedster]

You are using a "country-code top level domain" or "ccTLD". Google does not offer you any other kind of geographic targeting choice except for the actual country the TLD represents.

However, there are now a few ccTLD cases that have been opened up for international registration (.tv, .fm or .co for instance) and Google does now offer international targeting for these.

All that said, if you acquire growing natural backlinks from internaionally located sites, and if your traffic starts to reflect that, you certainly can start to rank better internationally with your .co.uk domain.

[whiskers]

Thanks Tedster, so you're saying inbound links from American sites will have a factor in improving our visibility specifically in US search results?

[tedster]

Yes - inbound links that also get clicks. The traffic has to be there, too, and after all you want the real business, so that's not bad at all.

[whiskers]

Of course Tedster, we're not looking to game it in any way at all. The current organic traffic is due to the unique and broad content on the site about a specific topic.

I'll have to have a think about how we can raise our visibility to influential American sites - we get quite a few high quality inbound links from UK news organisations and the like already.