Ranking UK company in Google.com
-
Hi all,
I have a UK client with a .com domain, hosted on a US server, but the physical business premises is based in the UK. Their product is a really great product and available for export to the US.
I want to rank them higher in the US, more specifically Google.com.
I've helped them rank very well organically in the UK (google.co.uk) for some great terms, however they rank almost nowhere in google.com (gl=us) for the same terms, for example:
In Google.co.uk they rank #3 for the key-phrase.
In Google.com they rank #90 for the same key-phrase.I've got them some great US focused links with PR coverage including MSN Cars, nydailynews.com etc.
I just wondered if there was any one "golden ticket" for boosting US rankings? I've read that a physical business premises located in the US helps a lot. Can anyone confirm this and if so, would a rented PO box in the US help?
The site has great social signals too, growing twitter following and many FB likes/shares etc.
Any other tips/advice?
Thanks in advance,
Cheers,
Woody -
If you are still looking for a business address to sound like a US company, try US Global Mail - www.usglobalmail.com - cheaper and better service than ECM.
-
Make a US section of the site and target that subfolder for US rankings. That subfolder should have a US address if you can make that happen and be geotargeted for the US. Or you could create a second site, keep them hosted differently and not interlinked. Might actually be a good idea if you want US customers to feel you are a US company and not that they are hiring a UK company to do work in the US which makes companies a bit leery sometimes.
-
Yep, that's a useful post, thanks
I was planning to continue building US links anyway but just wondered if there was anything else, any fellow SEO's, in the same position, found to work well?
Cheers
-
Well, then, ignore what I said. It did sound like you had a .com and a .co.uk. Google likes to keep sites in a given country.
I would suggest you look at this Moz post
http://moz.com/community/q/what-is-the-best-way-to-rank-well-on-both-google-co-uk-google-com
-
Hi CleverPhD
Thanks for taking the time to answer, and I'll certainly look into Earth Class Mail
Perhaps I've mislead you or you have interpreted my questions incorrectly, but there's not two domains, just one.
It's an international business, with HQ located in the UK. Unfortunately it's only physical location is in the UK but it's products are available internationally. You order from through the website, the product is built in the UK and then exported to the US (or any other country).
If I set the Geographic Target to US in GWT wont we lose rankings in google.co.uk? Which is by far our biggest market, (only because we rank so well in google.co.uk), the potential is in the US.
Just seems strange that the en-us keywords are identical to en-gb keywords, so why are we so far behind on google.com?
Any other ideas?
Cheers
Woody -
Basic level, you should go into Google Webmaster Tools and make sure that your Geographic Target is set for the US on the .com. Otherwise, all Google has to go on is your UK physical address. You may also want to set the UK domain to the UK geographic location in GWT.
Another question, is the US site just a duplicate of the UK site as far as content? It may be that Google sees both, but since the UK site is the original then it focuses on the UK site.
I would agree that a US address (and not a PO box) would help and you can get an actual virtual street address by using services such as Earth Class Mail. https://www.earthclassmail.com/ They have various street addresses you can use, they then scan everything in and you can login and see your mail. If you need something ultimately delivered they can forward that too. It is a pretty cool service and we have been using it for over a year. I work for a virtual company (we have folks all over the US) and we use this and it is great as we used to have to forward mail and it would take forever. Now we can login online and access it almost immediately.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Good day team.. have problem with my website i lost all ranking and lost 10x times traffic in 1 day without reason...
Good day everybody. My website is www.evilrpm.com and ii have drop in rank and traffic in 1 day without reason... still fighting with that issue .. from that moment i starts to get the errors and in search console if i make testing pages .. after test they can show like warning or error page but in console its green.. i was check everything, and i think that problem in server.. because it happened when i write the truth about my experience with Shopify... this is extraordinary organization i feel like they from the starts was don't give me the way to grow... any idea what the problem? thanks for your support!
International SEO | | EvilTIGER0 -
Has any one seen negative SEO effects from using Google Translate API
We have a site currently in development that is using the Google Translate API and I am having a massive issue getting screaming frog to crawl and all of our non-native English speaking employees have read through the translated copy in their native language and the general consensus is it reads at a 5th grade level at best. My questions to the community is, has anyone implemented this API on a site and has it a) helped with gaining traffic from other languages/countires and b) has it hurt there site from an SEO standpoint.
International SEO | | VERBInteractive0 -
Geotargeting in Webmaster Tools - Is there an expected ranking benefit in the geotargeted region ?
Hi Is there an expected ranking benefit from geotargeting regional focused subfolders or domain mapped TLDs' in the target countries ? Or does it just prevent these pages from showing up in other regions search results ? For example i have a client with a main .com site targeting english worldwide generally, then a /tr subfolder in turkish to target Turkey. Then another subfolder /de targeting german in germany (but the de has also been domain mapped to .de top level domain too). Im leaving the main .com site non geotargeted since its job is to achieve english language results wherever possible and wandering whether to geotarget the turkish subfolder & german tld The Turkish regional subfolder & the German tld are achieving some ranking results already in their target countries googles, but also getting traffic from other countries too (which im happy to get, dont really want to stop this traffic unless there really is a local region ranking benefit for the main target country by gwt geotargeting). So should I use GWT international targeting tool or not ? Since the tld site is clearly on a german domain with german language pages and the Turkish subfolder /tr site is in Turkish the i presume Googles got no probs working this out which is demonstrated by the regional & language ranking results So I presume if achieving results in target countries already then no real need to set international taregt in GWT especially if it may stop traffic from other regions too. BUT if its likely to improve those rankings further in the main target countries googles significantly then i would happily cut off or reduce the other region traffic in favour of higher rankings and hence targeted traffic from the main target country .All Best Dan
International SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Dynamic Google search snippet text based on user's language
On Google search results page, I want to show search snippet text (of my webpage) in Hindi language if user is user is using Google in Hindi language. If user chose another language on Google search page, my snippet text should be shown in that language. Is this possible? How?
International SEO | | Avinashmb0 -
Single keyword not ranking in US only
I recently took on a client who had a 6 month old site, and had not done any seo or link building. All links so far have been natural, I can't see anything dodgy that would cause a problem. It's fairly niche so just sorting out the page titles and a bit of on site stuff got them ranking on page 1 & 2 in the UK and US for most of their keywords. However their main keyword which is just the name of the product (lets say xxx and xxxs ) does not appear anywhere in the US search, despite ranking #10 in the UK and all related terms ('what is xxx', 'how to use xxx', 'benfits of xxx' etc) having similar rank on both. They didn't have any analytics installed before I took over so I can't see any historical changes in traffic from different keywords. Any ideas why one single keyword would not show up at all just on Google US when everything else is ok?
International SEO | | ricalebro0 -
Ranking well internationally, usage of hreflang, duplicate country content
I'm trying to wrap my head around various options when it comes to international SEO, specifically how to rank well in countries that share a language, and the risk of duplicate content in these cases. We have a chance to start from scratch because we're switching to a new e-commerce platform, and we were looking into using hreflang. Let's assume an example of a .com webshop that targets both Austria and Germany. One option is to include both language and region in the URL, and mark these as such using hreflang: webshop.com/de-de/german-language-content (with hreflang de-de)
International SEO | | DocdataCommerce
webshop.com/de-at/german-language-content (with hreflang de-at) Another option would be to only include the language in the URL, not the region, and let Google figure out the rest: webshop.com/de/german-language-content (with hreflang de) Which would be better? The risk of inserting a country, of course, is that you're introducing duplicate content, especially since for webshops there are usually only minor differences in content (pricing, currency, a word here and there). If hreflang is an effective means to make sure that visitors from each country get the correct URL from the search engines, I don't see any reason not to use this way. But if search engines get it wrong, users will end up in the wrong page and will have to switch country, which could result in conversion loss. Also, if you only use language in the URL, is it useful at all to use hreflang? Aren't engines perfectly able to recognize language already? I don't mention ccTLDs here because most of the time we're required to use a .com domain owned by our customer. But if we did, would that be much better? And would it still be useful to use hreflang then? webshop.de/german-language-content (with hreflang de-de)
webshop.at/german-language-content (with hreflang de-at) Michel Hendriks
Docdata Commerce0 -
Use country-specific domains or stick to already strong .com domain?
We run an online store with the majority of our customers coming from 4 different European countries. The site is accessible through TLD's of all of these countries. However our .com domain currently has the most links pointing to it and the highest domain authority. Unfortunately, we are unable to tell through which TLD visitors reach our site. The niche is rather competetive, and therefore I am unsure whether it would be worth it to solely use our .com domain for the English language, and try to rank for each of the seperate languages with its own country-specific domain. **Question/discussion: **Will it be worth the costs and time to spent to build links for the country specific domains in these countries, or should we focus on making our .com domain stronger and use it for all countries? I'm aware of the benefits of ranking with a domain in the country the user is in. Note: We have major duplicate content issues at this moment, due the content being available in different languages, on a handful of domains. On each domain, users can view the site in different languages. In addition, the language indication in the url is not very clear (?lang=x) so I believe this should be improved to make it easier for search engines to tell which language is presented. If I choose to use a different language for each TLD, then the language flag in the navigation on the site will point to a different domain, so each language is hosted on 1 domain and there is no more duplicate content. However, I'm afraid this will lead to lower rankings, as the (strong) .com domain will no longer host the content in different languages.
International SEO | | 1200wd0