Ranking a site in the USA
-
I'm UK based and looking at setting up a site to rank in the USA. As I understand it a .com TLD is best but these are used worldwide so do I simply need to set the geotargeting to USA in webmaster tools? Or is there a better domain to use?
With hosting the site in US and on page content related to US cities (I plan to create a page for each US city I operate in the the city name in the H1 tag) will that be enough for google to understand that the page should rank in the US version of google.
Also how can I view Google USA search results - when I go to google.com it automatically redirects to google.co.uk and I can only change the location on the left hand side to UK cities.
Any help much appreciated!
-
Hi Samuel,
You've got most of the things right.
A .com domain works fine along with US hosting.
Just make sure you get links to your city pages from local US sites. Contribute to the local communities and get them talking about you online and Google will pick up the signal.
As for checking rankings, you can use Bright Local to set up your campaign. Its fairly accurate.
https://tools.brightlocal.com/seo-tools/local-search-rank-checker/tool
To check rankings manually, on the bottom right of your Google.co.uk screen you will see Google.com. Click that and the .com version opens. You can set your custom location in the left side panel.
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
-
My sites are not mooving why?
i have three local sites in Dubai. my second site is on page three. i didn't go for any guest post yet but for a long time with all improvement, It didn't move a bit. unable to understand the adhesivity of page three. lol any suggestion site 1- https://www.desertsafaritour.ae site 2- https://www.arabiannightsafari.com site3- https://www.uaedesertsafari.com any expert suggestion or any guideline by moz expert www.desertsafaritour.ae
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | faisalkiani0 -
SEO question regarding rails app on www.site.com hosted on Heroku and www.site.com/blog at another host
Hi, I have a rails app hosted on Heroku (www.site.com) and would much prefer to set up a Wordpress blog using a different host pointing to www.site.com/blog, as opposed to using a gem within the actual app. Whats are peoples thoughts regarding there being any ranking implications for implementing the set up as noted in this post on Stackoverflow: "What I would do is serve your Wordpress blog along side your Rails app (so you've got a PHP and a Rails server running), and just have your /blog route point to a controller that redirects to your Wordpress app. Add something like this to your routes.rb: _`get '/blog', to:'blog#redirect'`_ and then have a redirect method in your BlogController that simply does this: _`classBlogController<applicationcontrollerdef redirect="" redirect_to="" "url_of_wordpress_blog"endend<="" code=""></applicationcontrollerdef>`_ _Now you can point at yourdomain.com/blog and it will take you to the Wordpress site._
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Anward0 -
Development site is live (and has indexed) alongside live site - what's the best course of action?
Hello Mozzers, I am undertaking a site audit and have just noticed that the developer has left the development site up and it has indexed. They 301d from pages on old site to equivalent pages on new site but seem to have allowed the development site to index, and they haven't switched off the development site. So would the best option be to redirect the development site pages to the homepage of the new site (there is no PR on dev site and there are no links incoming to dev site, so nothing much to lose...)? Or should I request equivalent to equivalent page redirection? Alternatively I can simply ask for the dev site to be switched off and the URLs removed via WMT, I guess... Thanks in advance for your help! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart1 -
.GOV Link - same impact on my site's rankings whether link to home or Gov related category?
I own a job site and I am about to get a link from a .GOV. My site has a category called "State Jobs". Should I ask the ".Gov" to link to my homepage or to the state job page and use the anchor text "State Jobs". I understand "State Jobs" page would get a big kick by that being the anchor text and linking to that specific page, but the question I have is this: for my site as a whole (homepage and various categories) would they get around the same "push up" whether the linking is to 1) my homepage with anchor text being my site's name or 2) to the state job specific page and in this case the anchor text would be "State Jobs"? thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen0 -
How are pages ranked when using Google's "site:" operator?
Hi, If you perform a Google search like site:seomoz.org, how are the pages displayed sorted/ranked? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anthematic0 -
What happened to my site?
This is my website: http://goo.gl/Brekn It was related to health niche. I am good with the serp for the last couple of hours. I am in top for the keywords: cure for piles, hemorrhoids treatment, natural hemorrhoid treatment. My main keyword is hemorrhoids treatment. And has recently added this page, http://goo.gl/SXNtX This page has some dupe content, as content writer was busy i have copied the content from other sources. Does this have any effect? I have not added this page onto homepage as i dont like google to index it until my copywriter writes the content. Dont know what happened, in the last few hours i lost my serp to no where. Can anyone tell me what happened to my site. Did i done anything wrong? In the last week i have added a link to my ebooks related site. Does this affected my serps? Or did the Google recent change http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-improvement.html Has any effect on my site? Awaiting for your replies...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dex324344320 -
On-Site Optimization Tips for Job site?
I am working on a job site that only ranks well for the homepage with very low ranking internal pages. My job pages do not rank what so ever and are database driven and often times turn to 404 pages after the job has been filled. The job pages have to no content either. Anybody have any technical on-site recommendations for a job site I am working on especially regarding my internal pages? (Cross Country Allied.com) Any help would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Melia0 -
Is Google taking longer to rank new sites?
We run a lot of "niche blogs" and websites focused on fairly non-competitive keywords. At the start of the year, we used to be able to put up websites and be able to achieve almost instant rankings on these sites. However, recently, it seems to be taking a lot longer for these sites to rank. It also seems to be taking longer for Google to index links. Is this a recent change in Google to protect against spam and help filter out the lower quality sites? Has anyone else noticed this or is it just me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ukss19840