How do I get US & UK traffic?

[TomJ]

Hello All,

this is my first new post here so hello to all! ;-)

I just got a cool new .com domain today and I'd like to know how to go about making sure I get as much US & UK traffic as possible.

Of course I'm going to do my best to SEO the nuts off my site cos otherwise it wont matter as I wont have any traffic but:

Does hosting in US mean I loose more UK customers?
or does hosting in UK mean I loose more US customers?

Or should I just be trying to get as high as possible in google.com and the rest will just fall into place?

[shahid]

You should concentrate on your last statement. Just concentrate on google and everything else will follow.

[sullen]

You need to really think about how important UK as opposed to US customers are. If you host in the US and you have a .com, you won't appear in Google UK only searches. This is only important if your location could be important to you customers though - i.e. if you ship something. Spelling and word choice can be a factor too - you won't get many UK customers visiting a site optimised for "blue colored widgets".

Also Google's definition of a UK host is imperfect - some UK IP addresses still do not show up in Google UK searches, so you should check other sites from the same host before you sgn up.

[TomJ]

thanks so far guys!

well I want to have content (same theme) but different obviously for the two countries.

could i use geo-targeting to move US customers to something like blah.com/us ?

Tom.

[fazer600]

As sullen said think about UK/US spelling. A month ago I spent a couple of days trawling through the internet trying to find out how to change the colour of a photo in Fireworks. Obviously no search engine gave me anything of use, and neither did the macromedia website which I couldnt understand. Finally days later I posted on a macromedia forum and then twigged. It's a shame google didnt prompt as it does for misspellings.

If you really want to target UK customers then why not have a subdomain with country specific information. ie international telephone number, different p&p rates, returns policy...

[makemetop]

Having a .com and hosting in the US is going to lose you UK customers.

Not having a .co.uk is going to lose you even more UK customers!

.com domains get a boost on Yahoo.com and msn.com and a demotion on the .co.uk versions. AOL UK filters out most .com sites for UK searches etc., etc.