Grow UK traffic for US news company

[electrictalk]

Hi,

Currently my company's news site is US focused and recently we want to grow in the UK. Through my previous post here I realize that we would need a UK server, separate UK site- co.uk etc. Just trying to figure out the simplest way we can rank in the UK.

1) Will be difficult for our CEO to be on board for creating .co.uk so I looked into other similar sites. For example with Bloomberg- https://www.bloomberg.com/ they broke it out into US, Europe, Asia. With Europe URL- https://www.bloomberg.com/europe. I assume that their international articles are able to rank in their respective countries? Do they have specific Europe servers that's hosting articles within that URL? How else do you think they rank in the respective countries?
2) What's the difference between i.e. www.mycompany.com/uk or www.mycompany.com/uk? We currently already have these types of URLs and our articles (like top cafes in London) aren't ranking in the UK.

Thanks in advance!

Thanks!

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 10:56 pm (utc) on Aug 1, 2019]
[edit reason] Delinked example URLs, as "europe" address returns a 404 [/edit]

[goodroi]

Does your website have 90 million backlinks? If not, don't expect your site to have the same results as a site that does have 90 million backlinks and a huge following of free & paid subscribers. Don't blindly follow another website that could be operating with very different Google ranking signals than your site.

[electrictalk]

Understand, the company I work for is relatively known just not as big as Bloomberg. Do you have other advice that would be helpful?

[tangor]

Keep plugging. Take out hosting local (which is indicated might not be on the table). And use other media to get the word out ... It is amazing what something as small as a local TV or Radio interview/interest piece can accomplish, particularly if followed by a SM comment or YT release.

In other words: Make Noise!

Aside: this pre-supposes your content ACTUALLY IS valuable to the intended target area(s).

[goodroi]

If you work for a big company and are looking to do an international expansion don't go cheap on the SEO. Pay for consulting that is personalized to your specific situation. If you want to keep it all in-house, develop an integrated marketing strategy to maximize the synergy between your SEO, PPC, social & offline efforts. SEO success is increasingly influenced by factors from the different marketing branches.

Google still works best when you follow the KISS apprach (keep it simple). You want it to be as simple & easy as possible for Google to recognize you are relevant & popular to the UK market. The fewer signals you give (like not using a co.uk domain) the harder you need to work on the other signals. If your CEO doesn't want the domain then be ready to work harder & spend more money but it is still doable.

[JesterMagic]

I had a whole reply point formed out but I figure I will let Google do the talking. You probably have already looked at a lot of this but check out smaller competitors to see what they have done. A few of mine use the old meta content tag which from my understanding Google doesn't use anymore:

<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="UK">

But it appears to help them rank. The biggest thing as you suspect is the domain name and hosting location.

Handling multiple regions is pretty similar to multiple languages. Look at Google's advice under "Targeting site content to a specific country" and specifically using hreflang and sitemaps

[support.google.com...]

They have a good list of dos and do nots.

[RedBar]

2) What's the difference between i.e. www.mycompany.com/uk or www.mycompany.com/uk?

None ..., or am I missing something?

and our articles (like top cafes in London) aren't ranking in the UK.

Are you are news site or a social review site?

Insofar as news is concerned the BBC dominates, do you really feel you can compete with them?

For regional news and review sites I have no idea other than I occasionally use our local newspaper site.

My feelings are that you are entering a very crowded space outside of London, within London it's possible that a niche site could be successful simply because of the high proportion of the non-UK indigenous population ... That's a wild guess on my part based upon my own experience in living in several different countries and not using their local media and wanting to try something else ... I could be totally and utterly wrong!

[electrictalk]

Oh sorry I meant www.mycompany.com/uk or www.mycompany.com/tagged/uk. I am a news site. BBC was just an example of how they are structuring their languages. Didn't say that we are competing with them.

It is crowded but that's where the company is heading so all I want to do is to see how they can grow UK traffic.

Also are we able to old meta content tag some articles?