Will local optimization effect international ranking?

[aaronleven]

Lets say a company serves Canada and US customers regularly, but they are based in Canada. They currently have no local optimization or confirmation of their location on their website.

If I were to begin local optimization (google my business, local content, link building, schema etc), would Google recognize this website as a Canadian business and remove rankings in the US that it is currently appearing in now without any locational information?

[aaronleven]

Hi Miriam,

Thanks for your great reply. It is a fairy tricky situation. In this case, we're dealing with a B2B manufacturing company and currently the lions share of their business comes from the US. Rankings on important keywords are roughly the same in the Canada and the US.

We're currently trying to weigh the benefits of whether establishing the location of the firm and building that credibility would out out-weigh the potential risk of Google then penalizing ranking in the US.

Thanks again for your help!

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Aaron,

This is a bit tricky, actually. Let's say you are Whole Foods - an international corporation. Your corporate headquarters are in Texas, but you've got stores in the US and Canada. Being headquartered in Texas does not prevent your branch in Calgary from showing up in Google's local pack of results because you have a physical location there. No sweat!

What you are describing is a different situation. It sounds to me as if you are offering virtual services to US-based customers from your headquarters in Canada. Is that correct? If so, then there is some chance that strongly localizing your business to a particular city in Canada might in some way alter Google's perception of you business as a best answer for US-based-or-related queries. We're talking about organic queries here, presumably, rather than local ones, though, because if you don't have US offices, you're not ranking in the local packs for US-based-or-related queries. So, in the long run, if your organic content and authority are currently strong enough to show up for searchers in the US, chances are, they will continue to do so, but it is not out of the question that strongly localizing your business to a city in Canada might in some way impact this.

I'm afraid I've never seen a trustworthy study done to prove how much impact, if any, this type of marketing might have on a business in your situation. In your shoes, what I'd do is try to find a comparable business - one that is headquartered in Canada but also appearing for US-searches and see if they appear to be doing well both on the local level for their city and on an organic, international level with their general content. My gut feeling is that the impact would not be very big, but I wouldn't rule it out completely.

It would be great if a community member who has been in Aaron's situation could comment on their own experience!