Difficulty to rank outside USA especially UK

[electrictalk]

Hi,

I have been trying for a year to have my team with UK centric articles (I work for an American company) but the articles don't get much traffic from the UK. We are just using our main website to publish the articles. Is it topic issues? But we're already writing articles like best cafes in London, featuring UK musicians. I don't think my company would be on board if we did a /uk site or does that really make a difference? Thanks!

[goodroi]

Reverse the roles. If you were Google why would you rank this site for UK results?
Is it using a uk domain?
Does it have plenty of uk sites linking to it?
Is it written in American English or UK English?
Does it have an American address or a UK address in the footer & contact pages?
What EAT signals are being generated that are relevant to a UK audience?
Is it GDPR compliant?

There are already 100s of other sites located in the UK and run by UK gentry talking about the cafes in London. Why would Google ever rank your American site above them?

[Dimitri]

If articles are made to target UK audience, you need to send the right signals to Google (or other search engine). For example of "en", you and use "en-gb" for your language related tags.

[support.google.com...]

You can also try to register a .co.uk version of your domain name to host these articles.

If you can host your articles on a separate domain or sub domain , you can use the GSC geo options to set it to the UK.

A host with a UK IP address can help too .

[electrictalk]

Thanks! We currently have this <snip> for our London articles but I don't think it's enough? Is there something more we can do that doesn't including doing .co.uk? Just don't think the founder would be keen for that. Do we need coming up all the UK articles to have the URL be a part of that like www.example.com/tagged/removed-specifics but I'm not sure if the company wants to segregate like that.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 9:16 pm (utc) on Jul 17, 2019]
[edit reason] No specifics that would lead to your site, please. [/edit]

[Dimitri]

You shouldn't post your site's URL, it's against the TOS that you read and accepted when you joined.

By the way, in my opinion, the best would be to host your articles in a subdomain , like uk . xxx . com and use the right language tags and if possible host it in the UK , or use a proxy server in the UK, to get a UK IP. And in the GSC set the geo targeting for this sub domain to the UK.

And don't forget that you have to be compliant wit h the EU GDPR , regarding your UK (and more generally European) visitors / members, as mentioned by @goodroi

edit:

I work for an American company

but on the site it says HK based company, so this is not sending right signals to Google either...

[tangor]

There are no mysteries when ip addressing is involved. You are where you ARE (as far as what faces the web) and SEs will take note.

Not every company will find success everywhere. The logical thing is to work the areas where you are successful and build that to the max, then continue expanding into other geo locations as it make sense to do so.

Another way to look at things is "don't bite off more than you can chew".