For a generic domain say www.purplecola.com where the company is based in India (IP address there too), how should they best optimize for US search traffic?
-
Let's just say that they want to target the US market. Should they add a US based IP address? Would love to hear insight from people who have managed this, experienced this or have expertise. Obviously, a US based physical address would help. Thanks!!
Chris
-
Given all the other geotargeting factors are fine, using a domain name whose IP is from USA would be a good added signal.
Remember, you don't necessarily need to have your site hosted in the USA for having a USA IP.
-
I agree with you.
But let me just add something.
New Delhi to New York is 12.000 km, that's around 120ms of latency. While within India it's probably in the 3 to 15 ms range.
-
TTFB should be below 500ms to be in a safe zone, that 120ms leaves 380ms for everything else, is definitely doable,
-
each http request made from the browser is going to be affected by the latency, but for a long list of good reasons the website should be optimized reducing the number of request necessary to render pages,
-
to improve performance reducing latency a CDN is the thing to use, duplicating content around the world on different physical or virtual machines with the purpose of improving performance, still make sense, but only if your traffic is epic.
-
-
A US address would help, but only in the sense of latency. If you're hosting in India and I'm in the US, that means the data has to literally travel halfway around the world and back again. With the cheap cost of virtualization (cloud) hosting, that just doesn't make sense if you're trying to target the US market. So i would physically host in the US for that reason. If you still need to target an Indian market, I would get a ccTLD .in domain (i.e. purplecola.in) and host locally for that as well.
Beyond that, breaking into the US market should be simple. Your two things to keep in mind are
- Proper localization. This is more crucial since you're in India. There's a tendency for Indian companies (especially in the tech support industry) to try and pretend they're American. I've had Indian phone tech support tell me their name is Bob and it's just not believable (tell me your real name or it looks like you're trying to hide something in plain sight). This goes double for your SEO content because there are LOTS of Indian companies trying to sell American content that is not really American localized. You need your content to look and read American because you don't want bad localization.
- Once your content is good, go get some American links. This will send a strong geolocation signal that you're a US focused site. You should already have Webmaster Tools set to the US anyways.
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
-
Is it possible to rank for street name searches?
I am working with a real estate agency who serves a very small geographical area in Dallas, TX. Many areas with Dallas addresses have proper names (e.g. Uptown, Highland Park, Lake Highlands, etc.), but the area my client wants to target is nameless, so we had the idea of trying to target searches for particular street names instead (e.g. homes for sale on easy street). I have looked around quite a bit, but have not found a website that takes that approach. Any thoughts on whether it's possible?
Local Website Optimization | | cbizzle0 -
New Domain Link Building Order - When to 301 Redirect?
Hello Everyone - I am trying to lock down the best Local SEO and link acquisition order for 1 1/2 month old Domain. The Domain is clean - No History - Registered in WMT's on January 20th It's a service franchise website consolidating about 5 independent locations into a single branded site. The each location now has it's own location page on the new site: www.examplesite.com/Location-1 I'm considering the best timing to add 301's to the current Locations individual websites, to the locations pages on the new site.Some of which are currently ranked well (position 2) for one of their primary commercial terms. www.individuallocationsite.com ---> www.examplesite.com/Location-1 I don't want to lose that ranking, but will need to do the 301 redirect at some point. Should I - A.) Complete all of the Citation Work, Natural Profiles, Blog Posts...etc FIRST and let the new website age before 301'ing the locations? Giving it the best chance to have no interruption in those rankings? B:) 301 All the properties into the new website first and start all of the other Local SEO work second? C:) Something else? Thanks in Advance
Local Website Optimization | | CRO_first0 -
SEO geolocation vs subdirectories vs local search vs traffic
My dear community and friends of MOZ, today I have a very interesting question to you all. Although I´ve got my opinion, and Im sure many of you will think the same way, I want to share the following dilemma with you. I have just joined a company as Online Marketing Manager and I have to quickly take a decision about site structure. The site of the company has just applied a big structure change. They used to have their information divided by country (each country one subdirectory) www.site.com/ar/news www.site.com/us/news . They have just changed this and erased the country subdirectory and started using geolocation. So if we go to www.site.com/news although the content is going to be the same for each country ( it’s a Latinamerican site, all the countries speak the same language except Brazil) the navigation links are going to drive you to different pages according to the country where you are located. They believe that having less subdirectories PA or PR is going to be higher for each page due to less linkjuice leaking. My guess is that if you want to have an important organic traffic presence you should A) get a TLD for the country you want to targe… if not B)have a subdirectory or subdomain for each country in your site. I don’t know what local sign could be a page giving to google if the URL and html doesn’t change between countries- We can not use schemas or rich formats neither…So, again, I would suggest to go back to the previous structure. On the other hand…I ve been taking a look to sensacine.com and although their site is pointing only to Spain | |
Local Website Optimization | | facupp1
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | | They have very good rankings for big volume keywords in all latinamerica, so I just want to quantify this change, since I will be sending to the designers and developers a lot of work1 -
Whats in a domain name in terms of SE ranking.
I'm curious. Whats in a domain name in terms of search engine ranking and keyword searches. Let me provide an example: If I sell umbrellas in New York City and my company name is Rainy Day Umbrellas am I wise to register both rainydayumbrellas.com and newyorkumbrellas.com as a way of targeting my customers and ranking better in a single search phrase for that subject? Second question. If it is a good idea do you just forward that domain to the primary site or have a second mirrored site? Or perhaps just a landing page?
Local Website Optimization | | Bvrettski0 -
Joomla website optimization software or tools?
Hi there, I am running joomla based website for my transportation website "Limousine Service" I have question what kind of software or tools i can use to improve the SEO on my site?
Local Website Optimization | | GarySahota0 -
Best practices for 301 redirect to a new location website.
We just opened a new location in a nearby city. We were already servicing this location from our main base. As such we had a special page for this location which raked fairly well. The new location will have its own website. Would it be better to 301 redirect the current location page to the new location website? Or should we simply link from the old page to the new location's website? Any best practices?
Local Website Optimization | | Vspeed0 -
What is the best type map for local SEO?
Hi mozzers, Can someone tell me which type of map is best when embedding it into your service pages? or any map is good enough? Why? Thanks guys!
Local Website Optimization | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Site does not rank on Google's country specific search engines.
My site shows up on the first page of 'google.com' but not on the other search engines like google.co.uk / google.co.in / google.com.au. It shows up on the 3rd or 4th page for the most part. My competitors' sites rank consistently across all geographical versions of Google. Is there something i am missing out on? My website is a web applicaton and not a business listing.
Local Website Optimization | | dlsound0