Getting a site to rank in both google.com and google.co.uk
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I have a client who runs a yacht delivery company. He gets business from the US and the UK but due to the nature of his business, he isn't really based anywhere except in the middle of the ocean somewhere!
His site is hosted in the US, and it's a .com. I haven't set any geographical targeting in webmaster tools either. We're starting to get some rankings in google US, but very little in google UK. It's a small site anyway, and he'd prefer not to have too much content on the site saying he's UK based as he's not really based anywhere.
Any ideas on how best to approach this?
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Yes! It is possible for different pages in the same non-country specific TLD to rank in different countries without running into duplicate content issues, even when the text is largely the same. You'll need to indicate to Google, bing, and other search engines that the page is meant for a specific geo-targeted audience. Here's how.
From Ian McAnerin, brilliant international marketer, comes this elegant solution:
- Create the folder: www.mywebsite.com/uk
- Inside, create pages labeled: www.mywebsite.com/uk/name-of-your-page-uk.
- Do this for all the pages you want to have rank in the UK.
Remember - you need only one or a few landing pages for the UK and then send the UK readers into your site as needed. The UK landing pages all need to have the following -
- uk in the url
- local UK address and phone number
- written in British English (use the appropriate spellings, grammar, and choice of words. Ie: the UK has 'lifts'' the US has elevators
- Build at least ONE localized link to the page. Ie: for a UK landing page, get at least one link from a UK based website into that page. You can buy a UK site for this purpose (www.mywebsiteuk.co.uk is probably available)
Learn more about Ian's brilliant international ranking solution here: http://www.mcanerin.com/EN/articles/301-redirect-geolocation.asp
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