Most of the larger search engines are filtering results from their main database.
With the increased dominance of Google, I am seeing so little traffic from any UK specific SEs (as opposed to UK filtered) that it is not worth targeting them for any except the really high traffic sites.
So what do you do differently when a site requires only business from the UK?
Obvious starters for ten are UK Overture & Espotting.
After that, hitting all the UK specific minor directories - mostly for the PR where available.
But what else is still worth doing?
Here they are so far:
1. Get a co.uk if possible
2. Have UK physical address clearly visible
3. Include UK in the title
4. Hosted in UK
5. Local/UK information pages
6. UK web directories
7. UK PPC (espotting)
8. UK spelling
9. Regional listing in ODP
10. Standard offline UK marketing.
I know there will be more.
Cheers
I think it really depends on the demographics of prospective customers. Certainly in the industrial world in which i work, businesses deal worldwide, and as long as the cheque dose'nt bounce, its good.
Hence certainly for my own company, very strong UK coverage, with all the industrial directories, UK regionals of Yahoo and LS partners, and some cross linking with UK sites, and then all other English speaking relevant directories and search engines around the world.
Individually there might only be one referral a day/week but if you have several dozen of these delivering then it can have a big impact, and because the users are UK based convert better than general traffic.
A couple of starters for 10 on UK specific business portals that will deliver traffic to you :
Ecademy [ecademy.com ] 13,000 member community
Beyond Bricks [beyondbricks.com ] 4400 member community
I can't believe how close the Pub Conference is now, I can almost taste that first beer!
Don't forget the UK category on DMOZ and also UK based topical directories.
Does anyone think the UK PPC engines are worth it any more?
If you are referring to UK Overture, Espotting, Mirago and BidRight - the answer is yes! Are there any others?
Don't forget Google Adwords Select where you can specify that ads will only be served to UK users. Plus they seem to have made some changes whereby the minimum bids have been set lower for ads to be shown only in the UK (I don't believe that the price setting algo used to take in to account what country you wanted the ads displayed in).
In fact I'm getting to quite like Adwords Select....suppose I've got to after latest Google update ;)
