Ranking a website in the US

[Ecopac]

Hi all

I am based in the UK and my website caters solely for UK customers, however the website is a .com.

I have been thinking about doing what I do over in the US where the market is far bigger, but I'm not really sure how to go about ranking a site in another country.

Would it be advisable to create a site on a subdomain, so maybe us.mywebsite.com? How do you specifically target a website to a country, so that the UK serps don't rank both sites? I assume there's some kind of way of getting US IP addresses to redirect to the US site?

If I use google.com over here, it looks like my (UK) site is ranking number 1 already for the keyword I want to use however I am not sure how accurate that is.

Any advice on how to approach this would be greatly appreciated!

[fashezee]

How will Google treat new TLDs?
Matt Cutts - March 30, 2012
Google Webmasters - trt 1:30
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldFPcJZulXQ [youtube.com]

Notice how many times he says "Try".

I would do a search for the top keywords you'd want to rank for and see how they approached it and see where their hosted.

I haven't seen any TLDs other than .com and country ones rank well.
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[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 5:23 pm (utc) on Jul 25, 2014]
[edit reason] Added video title, date, and source info... made link clickable [/edit]

[Ecopac]

If I use a subdomain, it would still be .com though, I wouldn't use a new domain name or .TLD

[RedBar]

I haven't seen any TLDs other than .com and country ones rank well.

You certainly do not work in my industry! Apart from .com I have .asia, .co.uk, .eu and .in all ranking at #1 in the US and that's apart from .org/net/info/biz/etc and I'm not the only one.

If I use google.com over here, it looks like my (UK) site is ranking number 1 already for the keyword I want to use however I am not sure how accurate that is.

Not very accurate at all and worse than useless if you don't clear your browser cache and cookies regularly.

If you use Firefox try their SEO Global extension, that's very good.

[Ecopac]

Great advice - tried the plugin and very different results.

I still think that I can do a job in the US market, what are the things to do when wanting to build a website targeting people outside of your home country?

Thanks

[BoostSoftware]

Definitely assess your target audience. Much of the research you do up front will help you in developing content that will fill their specific needs and interests. Look at some successful sites as examples.

You are on the right track in knowing how to ask questions and problem solve as you go. You also have an excellent track record in already having a site and understanding SEO strategies.

[rainborick]

If you want to target the US, you should create pages dedicated to the US market - either in a subdomain or a subdirectory, and then use the geographic targeting tools in both Google Webmaster Tools and Bing's Webmaster Tools to set them to recognize your US targeting. In addition, it would be a good idea to build links to the new pages from sites in the US because the source location of links also influences rankings in terms of geo-location. And while language and geo-location are separate ranking factors, your new pages should be written in 'en-us' and have the appropriate language settings in the mark-up.

You can check your rankings in Google's Webmaster Tools by country by using the Filter settings in the Search Queries tool. That tool will give you an immediate snapshot in a pie chart that shows where your site is being seen in the search results by country.