Keyword Strategy for outside of the US

[evan89]

I posted a similar question a while go, so I will attempt to articulate my question a little better....

I am the owner of an E-Commerce site that operates in Canada. I have been brainstorming ways to find opportunities and niches for Canadian online shoppers in an industry that is dominated by corporate American E-commerce sites.

I saw  another Canadian e-commerce site try to combat this issue, and I wanted to get some advice on whether this strategy is sound. Here is an example.

Well.ca is a large e-commerce site in Canada. They take a competitive product like a "Tide Lundry Detergent"  and include local and intent terms in their page titles. For example "Buy TideLaundry Detergent from Canada at Well.ca - Free Shipping".

If a Canadian shopper searches for "Tide Laundry Detergent", they are going to find results for amazon.com, ebay.com, Tide's website, etc.. I would imagine that Canadian shoppers would start to add terms such as Canada, Buy, or online to try to find Canadian sellers. If that is the case, then Well.ca ranks and arguably serves the customer with those intentions much better.

I guess my question is, if the dominant search terms in my industry are polluted with irrelevant or American companies (even in Canada), is this form of localization a good idea? The terms don't seem to be searched much according to any keyword research tool I've used, but I know that I add "canada" to my search terms in order to find Canadian results?

Thoughts?

[evan89]

Hey James,

Thanks for the feedback. Testing was the conclusion that I came to as well. I will try to remember to follow up with the results.

Cheers,

Evan

[JamesNorquay]

I guess you could push the "Located in Canada" message on your domain, and on the meta description for example to increase CTR. If you want to increase authority and ranks it is a question for the whole domain.

This is an issue you will see in all markets, even in Australia for example .com.au is country specific TLD will do well, yet US companies on .com will still rank for long tail. You just need to push the "Buy local" message in your titles/ Descriptions where possible. My advice is test it and see what happens.