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
-
Prevent us.domainname ranking for UK searches
Hi Moz Community, I'd appreciate any advice you can offer on this. We have a client with international offices, and we manage the website and SEO for some of these offices, including UK. Others, such as their US office, are managed by another agency. All websites have the same domain name, but differ in their sub domains depending on their targeted country, e.g. uk.domainname for UK, us.domainname for US. All are .com. The US office's agency re-desgined their us.domainname website earlier this year. We noticed a couple of months ago that the US website started to outrank the uk.domainname website for branded searches on Google from the UK. After some investigation, we found that their agency had incorrectly implemented hreflang tags and set the us sub-domain as the hreflang="x-default" instead of www.domainname. They corrected this and uk.domainname is now the first organic result on Google. However, us.domainname has remained in 2nd place for organic brand searches (from Google UK) for the past two months, when we were hoping that this would have dropped out of the rankings by now. We have asked the US office to ensure that their International Targeting is set to United States in Google Search Console, but have no way of knowing if this has actually been done. Does anyone have experience of this? Is there anything else we could try to stop the US site ranking for Google UK, or is it just a matter of waiting? Many thanks, James
International SEO | | mcmnetjames0 -
How is Google determining location for geotargeting
Hello, I have a question related to Geotargeting.
International SEO | | Lvet
Let's suppose I have a website: mysite.co.uk
As far as I understand Google will consider this site targeted for the UK and will appear on searches preferentially from the UK. What happen now if I have a person located in Spain (with a Spanish IP) and searching in Google.co.uk. Will mysite.co.uk still appear in searches? What are the factors that Google takes into account for Geotargeting? Thank you0 -
Why would a site lose rankings in U.S while maintaining rankings in other English locations (Canada & Australia)
What would cause a site to lose ranking in the U.S while maintaining top (1st page) positions in other English results countries such as Canada or Australia? Is this purely penguin related because of location of backlinks or are there other significant factors that could be in play? Would this rule out Panda as a cause because it's simply an "English language" targeted algo and not location dependent like backlinks (penguin)? Appreciate any insights
International SEO | | ResumeGenius0 -
Best practice for WPML, Yoast and sitemap for google
Hi Mozzers, I have a wordpress installation and work on a hotel website in three different languages: English, German, Spanish. In order to manage each language as a regional or global website, I started to give the website the names like: de.hotelnamen.com, es.hotelname.com (Hotel is in Costa Rica, maybe cr.hotelname.com is even better???) and hotelname.com. The possibility of WPML to manage my multilingual blog is good and the Yoast plugin gives me the sitemaps I want for each language. Because it is a hotel I have to have a global page which should serve the world if they try to find the hotel, right? That's why i put hotelname.com as a global page in English and registered the sitemaps and page on my webmaster account in countries as "not listed". For de.hotelname.com I choose Germany on another webmaster account and for es.hotelname.com Costa Rica (the country in which the Hotel is located). Unfortunately, after three month I don't receive good results with that methode. The hotelname.com adress is always the page which comes up in all search engines. I my tactic wrong? Where is my mistake? I would like to have hotelname.com in the rankings of all search engines beside of google Germany because for the German market I have the German version. Same in Costa Rica. Thanks for some ideas...
International SEO | | reisefm0 -
Keyphrase ranking a geo-redirected site in Google
Hi all This is the situation. I have a client who runs a number of ccTLD sites (all exact match brand name domains), including a .com which they use for the US. This is a hair care product and due to Advertising Standards Authority (UK) restrictions, they cannot use a certain phrase to promote their products - 'hair loss' on the domain.co.uk site. However, in the US, there is no such restriction and can use wording this on the site. A brand name search in google.co.uk brings up .co.uk as 1st result and .com as 2nd result, so the .com is indexed in google.co.uk. Any non-US user visiting domain.com will be redirected to their ccTLD site. Here's my question - could I feasibly get the domain.com site ranking in google.co.uk for certain 'hair loss' based keyphrases, considering the fact that I can mention it in the copy on there but not on the domain.co.uk site. Would I need to remove any Geographic Target in the WMT account for domain.com? Or is this a form of Google cloaking and could see the site penalised? Thanks
International SEO | | Coolpink0 -
Moving British site to the US... who will have .com? US or UK?
We are the UK's first baby social commerce site launched in Nov 2011. We're doing quite well and are looking at expanding to the US. However I'm not sure what advice you'd give me in terms of internationalising the site. I see three options on how to deal with the URL structure? Make US site as .com as it will be my main source of revenue for the long run and redirect all British traffic to .co.uk Have .com for both UK and US but have the URL as either: us.babyhuddle.com or as babyhuddle.com/us/. Same thing for the UK Another option? Would love to hear the feedback from you guys. Thanks, Walid
International SEO | | walidalsaqqaf0 -
How do you submit US based news on Google News US from the UK?
How do you go about submitting US news (based in the UK) to get indexed on Google News and show up in the US rather then the UK?
International SEO | | CameronT0 -
How can I rank couple of pages to a specific geography ?
Hi guys, I have a pretty good success in many of my keyword on google US. We are a multi-country company and would like to get better ranking on all these countries. I know it's a long run and we need to by patient to get the rank desired. We are getting the slowly, bu surely. In the next couple of months, we will be attending a conference where we will have a booth and we would like to conduct a campaign to invite customers to join us. My question is : Is there an efficient way to have just couple of pages on our web site that could potentially rank fast on a specific geography ? Europe is my target audience ( France an UK ). If you have any advice, I would appreciate. Best regards,
International SEO | | processia1