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
-
Can I have multiple GeoShape Schema for one page on one domain?
Hi Mozers, I'm working on some Schema for a client of mine, but whilst doing the research on GeoShapes with my developer, we came across a potential issue with this particular mark-up. My client is B2C business, operating in numerous places across the UK. I want to use the Circle property from GeoShape to draw out multiple circles across the UK, but am I able to do this? From looking at some other websites, most seem to just have one GeoShape. Can I have multiple on the same page and same domain? Thanks! Virginia
Local Website Optimization | | Virginia-Girtz0 -
Leveraging the authority of a blog to boost pages on a root domain.
Hi! Looking for some link building advice. For some background, I work for a company that has over 100 locations across the US. So we are deeply involved with local SEO. We also do a ton of evergreen/ national SEO as well and the spectrums are widely different for the most part. We also have a very successful blog in our industry. It really is an SEO’s dream. I do not even need to worry about a link strategy for this because it just naturally snatches them up. I’m trying to find some unique ways to utilize the blog to boost pages on my main root domain, more specifically, at the local level. It is really hard, besides the standard methods for local link building, to get outside sources to link to our local office pages. These pages are our bread and butter, and the pages we need to be as successful as possible. In every market we are in, we are at a disadvantage because we have one page to establish our local footprint and rank, compared to domains that have their entire site pointed at that local area we are trying to rank in. I’ve tried linking to local office pages from successful blog posts to attempt to pass link juice to the local pages, but I haven’t seen much in terms of moving the needle doing this. Are there any crafty ideas on how I can shuffle some internal linking around to capitalize on the blog’s authority to make my local pages rank higher in their markets? Thank you! -Ben
Local Website Optimization | | Davey_Tree0 -
"spammy structred data" search console message
Hey gang, I want to first say thank you to anybody that tries to help me with this. I'm not quite sure where to start. So first I get the message in search console for my locksmith website that it looks like I have some spammy structured data. I remembered that for one landing page I did have the stars short code on it and it was displaying the stars. Well, I went and looked and they were indeed no longer showing. So I simply deleted the shortcode, but I wanted to do a thorough check of my landing pages, one by one. Now I have project supremacy on my wordpress site, which I stand by, it's a solid product and I have been able to make my per page schema look really good, zero errors. So I went through each page that had errors on it and fixed them and sent it all back into google for 'reconsideration'. BUT today (sorry this is getting long) I look in my search console and I see that ALL of my blog posts have errors on them. Something wrong with the hentry. As I test one of the posts in structured data tester tool I see 4 errors and 4 warnings. I don't have the author displaying which is not true and some other things. But I have never ever tried to schema any of my blog posts and there is ZERO site wide schema, I already checked. Where is this bad schema living, and could that be the reason for the spammy stuff? Thank you crew!!! mwDd8
Local Website Optimization | | Meier0 -
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 -
Structured Data Question: Is there any value in "Custom Search Result Filters" structured data?
I have been doing a structured data test for a client who is looking to improve their local SEO. After running several tests in Google Developer Tools structured data testing tool I have been noticing data sets for "Custom Search Result Filters" and "Unspecified Type" structured data properties. I have plans to apply Organization and Local Business schematic markup. However my question is this: do the "Custom Search Result Filters" and "Unspecified Type" offer any value at all? I would like to have a response to our client if they ever ask about this. I attached a snapshot of what this looks like. ydu32k6.jpg?1
Local Website Optimization | | RosemaryB0 -
Hiring an SEO Company
I am looking to hire an SEO company each have there own ideas and strengths. My concerns are what is good and what is bad. Here is one company where their Silver Package fits within our budget. But there are a lot of features on here we do know if is it good or bad SEO. I attached the packages they send us. If we were to hire an SEO Company to do our offsite SEO, what should we be looking for that is considered whitehat seo for 2015? zCJowNb
Local Website Optimization | | TIM_DOTCOM0 -
What is the best CMS Approach for Multilingual Versions of Site?
We have expanded into France and Brazil and now have a someone in-house that can translate to French and Brazilian Portuguese. I own ".fr" and ".com.br" versions of our domain. We are using Wordpress for our CMS. We are currently publishing about 2 articles a week on English site which we would be translating and publishing through new international sites (when appropriate). We will be changing out photos and videos at times in addition to all the text/copy. So, before I jump deep into this I wanted to reach out for help regarding the best modern approach to this. Should I use some sort of WP Plugin that will let me manage each of these through 1 WP install or is it better to run each separately through multiple WP installs? I want to achieve this while... avoiding any duplicate content penalties. provide easy admin/editor management of publishing content. Any help/advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Local Website Optimization | | the-coopersmith0 -
Potential sexaual harrassement issues in adding home address to website
Hello Google Local Experts I'm a little stress, to put it mildly. I have been working hard to get to grips with Google+ and Google Local. I have followed all the advice on Moz that I can lay me hands on. Following advice, I have added my private address (in rich text snippets) to the header of my own site. I've not felt particularly comfortable about doing that, but it's clearly one of the messages Google Local requires to be sure that your site is authentic. My concerns got concrete last evening when a new follower on Google+ started to send me private messages - culminating in asking where I lived. Despite family demands I went straight to my site and removed my house number. Now I know I'm messing up my NAP - but Ahh - my About section points straight to my site which at that point had my full address in Bold on each page of my site. I really am upset about this and think that Google should be rethinking their demand for displaying a companies address on the site. If you are self employed you are put in a vulnerable position which is morally questionable. Please would someone give me some advice on the best way to address my worries in the short term? Please could someone with a bit of clout point this potentail danger to women out to the powers that be in Google?
Local Website Optimization | | catherine-2793882