SEO in the UK
-
Will soon be starting to do SEO for a client in the UK and wondered if there was anything I should do differently for what I do in the United States?
-
Yep, bowler hats for sure!
-
Give us an idea of the industry and what the monetisation is and we can be more specific
I second that the website language is not much of an issue, but spelling is! Also, set your html language to UK English
We do a lot of international content development and have a style guide for each so that anyone who works on a foreign site has a quick reference to turn to
Geo text and UK based linkbuidling should be standard concepts. You could try a few paid press releases via http://www.prnewswire.co.uk/
obviously, everyone in images should be wearing a bowler hat and all men should have a pipe
-
Mostly it's the same, but if you are targeting google.co.uk you will need to pay attention to the small details.
1. Language - the language is the same, don't worry about having to sound like someone from Mary Poppins, there is really little difference and colloquialisms really have no place in writing for a broad audience.
2. Spelling - watch your spelling, we do things a little different over here. Watch, your z's and s's and maybe get it read by a UK copywriter. This is important, if you have US spellings, you are telling google it's for a US audience!
3. GEO Stuff - You can specify the location you are targeting in webmaster tools, obviously, but you can also do more. Make sure the UK address is on the site, make sure you use the correct monetary units and any other localisation that is important to the business.
4. Link Building - You will want to find some UK link sources, ideally topically relevant ones as well. That's not to say you can't get links from the US, it's no biggy but you want to make sure you have some quality UK ones.
Really, it's not much different, just the smaller details so don't sweat it to much.
Matt Cutts made this video about releasing the same content over multiple top level domains (TLDs) yesterday I think and whilst it is a different subject there are some good indicators of what they are looking for
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ets7nHOV1Yo
Cheers!
Marcus -
I am probably sharing too much of my own personal experiences and expectations. Perhaps I lived a sheltered life
I had assumed working with someone from England would be like working with someone from another US state. We all speak English, right?
I never anticipated not being able to fully understand everything that was said in a conversation. Nor did I expect such a different system of taxation. These were two areas of culture shock for me.
-
Haha, Ryan you make us sound as if we are aliens or something
-
A few thoughts I would share from my experiences in England:
-
England has VAT which is a tax on goods and services. The laws surrounding VAT are quite different then what we are accustomed to for taxation in the US. You may want to gain a high level understanding of how VAT works depending on your role in the SEO process.
-
"British" English can be quite different from American English. I had serious communication problems when I first began speaking to people from England. One example is "Prices here are much dearer". I guessed that either meant more expensive or cheaper, but had no idea which. You may want to read a quick guide such as: http://www.effingpot.com/slang.shtml
-
Do not just treat England as if it was another US state. The culture is quite a bit different.
There isn't any other more direct advice I have to offer.
-
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
-
International SEO Two Subdomains Showing Up in Google Search Results
Hi I have a client that is having two subdomains showing up SERP when you Google their name. Here are the details. They have two subdomains us.companyname.com and en.companyname.com us.companyname.com is for the US and has completely different products and content than en.companyname.com en.companyname.com is the site designed for Europe and it is in English. How can I make it so that only the us. version shows up in the search results? Thanks in advance!
International SEO | | JohnWeb120 -
Redirected traffic and SEO problem
Hi all, I have a bit of a search engine predicament and I can't find the answer anywhere. It's a bit of a complicated one so please bear with me 🙂 ... I'm a Freelance Copywriter, I recently started the business, I've also recently moved to New Zealand. As such I'm looking for business back in the U.K. (As that's where my network is), but also locally, in NZ. I've purchased both the .co.uk and .co.nz domain names (http://www.inspirecontent.co.uk and http://www.inspirecontent.co.nz) The way that the domain provider / host has set these up is for one to redirect to another. Currently if someone visits www.inspirecontent.co.nz it redirects to the U.K. Site. That's less than ideal for me, because I dont want NZ traffic (i.e potential leads) to think I'm a U.K. Based business. my questions are as follows: 1. Will the redirect to the U.K. domain prevent me from appearing in NZ search (I.e if someone searches via google.co.nz) I'm really struggling to rank at the moment, I'm working on more content but if the redirect is a problem then I need to know about it so that I can find a work around. 2. Any suggestions on the best approach to the work around? It would be great if the URLs didn't change! So that you wind up from the U.K. on the U.K site, and if you're from NZ, you land on and stay on the NZ domain, but I'm not sure how to achieve that. One option, I think, would be to have two different websites, hosted separately, but I hear that duplicated content is bad for SEO? Thanks all in advance Kind regards
International SEO | | Andrea_howey0 -
Any Idea for International SEO in this complex situation?
Hi,
International SEO | | teconsite
a client of mine has a site with a domain name brand.es. They are a furniture manufacturer. They has a well known brand in its sector.
brand.com is registered by a US company. (Completly different activity) This client registered its domain name 10 years ago, and its audience was in Spain.
As it is a .es ccTLD it is directly geotargeted to Spain. 5 years ago, they began to export to other countries, and today they have distributors in a lot of countries like Italy, France, England, Portugal, Germany, and many more... As they are manufacturers and they sell their products to multiple locations worldwide, the language aproach seems to be the more efficient way to reach they users. The problem is that they are using a ccTLD domain brand.es, beacuse the .com domain was registered.
Actually the international organic traffic is very poor, mostly related to queries with the brand name. My question:
Is it possible to do international seo with a geotargeted domain .es?
Should they register a .com that doesn't match exactly their brand name? (it is a little difficult, beacause brandfurniture.com would be good for England, but not for Spain or France. )
Or should they focus their strategy with some ccTLDs for 3 or 4 of the main countries? (Not sure this would be an alternative... too much cost) I know, that in this situation there is no perfect solution, but I would appreciate your opinions.
Any Ideas ?????? Thank you!!0 -
.co.uk domain for US market??
I have a client in the UK with a very successful .co.uk domain. He has also chosen to enter other markets by translating the website into different languages and acquiring the appropriate domains. So he has a .fr and a .de for example. He wants a larger presence in the US market. The question is - Does he acquire the .com and ensure all pages are very different to the UK variant ( a lot of work) or is it more appropriate to use the .co.uk domain and (for example) acquire more US links to the site in order to increase its universal/US appeal in the eyes of Google?
International SEO | | driansmith0 -
SEO international - ccTLD or Subdirectories / Hosting on 1 server (IP) in Netherlands
Hi All, I do mingle me in discussion if it's better to have an Ecommerce site of a Brand X on seperate ccTLD's (Brand.nl / Brand.de / Brand.com or use subdirectories (brand.com/nl, brand.com/de, brand.com/fr etc. I see a lot of comments on this, but i am missing one (maybe) essential part. We are using Magento with multi ccTLD support. BUT the environment is hosted in the Netherlands. Will we be "penalized" on hosting in NL when using www.brand.DE or other countries? Or is it MUCH better to host those ccTLD in country of Origin? Because if it is, maybe we can better use subdirs because then we can use our builded authority of the root domain. Hope someone have an answer on this one! Thanks! Jeroen
International SEO | | RetailClicks0 -
Global SEO - How quickly/aggressively should one expand into multiple countries?
SITUATION: Our client is a global company lacking the global presence, so naturally the idea is performing international/global SEO in each country. For benchmarking purposes, our plan is to focus on a select number of keywords (ie 8-15) for each country and begin link building within each respective country. All SEO effort (ie. link building) will be for sub-folders (ie. www.client.com/subfolder/) on the same top level domain. Note, each country may have multiple languages, so each language will be broken out as it's own unique SEO campaign with it's very own strategy and link building efforts. For example: Mexico has 2 languages (English & Spanish) and will be considered 2 separate campaigns. PROBLEM: The client wants to be extremely aggressive and perform SEO on 3 new countries every month. This amounts to 36 new countries/SEO campaigns per year. Assuming each country has 2 languages each, we are looking at 6 SEO campaigns per month, or 72 per year. Our concern is that since all SEO effort will be performed on the same top level domain, we may be growing too fast and the search engines may consider the addition of these new pages and links to be too 'spammy'. We'd love to hear some feedback or personal experience on what might be considered a "safe" or "healthy" expansion into different countries. Thanks!
International SEO | | ByteLaunch0 -
Google US vs Google UK
I could have posted this somewhere else, but I cannot find it. So, I have keywords that rank well in Google US and many that do well in Google UK too. I thought all of my keywords ranking well in the US would also rank well the UK. I have figured out today that it is not the case. Why would I rank in the top 3 in the US and not even show up in the top 50 in the UK? It is very strange. Thanks for your help! I am not super new to SEO or web business. I have had a very good company that has been ranking well since 2004.
International SEO | | journeybeyondtravel0 -
Multi-lingual SEO: Country-specific TLD's, or migration to a huge .com site?
Dear SEOmoz team, I’m an in-house SEO looking after a number of sites in a competitive vertical. Right now we have our core example.com site translated into over thirty different languages, with each one sitting on its own country-specific TLD (so example.de, example.jp, example.es, example.co.kr etc…). Though we’re using a template system so that changes to the .com domain propagate across all languages, over the years things have become more complex in quite a few areas. For example, the level of analytics script hacks and filters we have created in order to channel users through to each language profile is now bordering on the epic. For a number of reasons we’ve recently been discussing the cost/benefit of migrating all of these languages into the single example.com domain. On first look this would appear to simplify things greatly; however I’m nervous about what effect this would have on our organic SE traffic. All these separate sites have cumulatively received years of on/off-site work, and even if we went through the process of setting up page-for-page redirects to their new home on example.com, I would hate to lose all this hard-work (and business) if we saw our rankings tank as a result of the move. So I guess the question is, for an international business such as ours, which is the optimal site structure in the eyes of the search engines; Local sites on local TLD’s, or one mammoth site with language identifiers in the URL path (or subdomains)? Is Google still so reliant on TLD for geo targeting search results, or is it less of a factor in today’s search engine environment? Cheers!
International SEO | | linklater0