UK company not ranking .com domain in UK

[SEODale]

Hi,

we have a slight issue with our website. We have been proactively doing SEO for the past year, but we have run into a slight issue.

Our website is ranking for search terms everywhere except Our local area (UK)

We have tried creating separate sections of our site targeted just at the UK In search console. As well as targeting the whole site as UK preferred and setting the hreflang tags to en-GB.

Nothing seems to be working, any ideas?

Thanks in advance!

[effectdigital]

Darn. If you'd be willing to share the domain I'd be willing to do a full crawl of it and return the data to you. If there are no glaring technical errors then at least we'd know it was probably a combo of content issues and off-site popularity metrics which could be corrected over time

Up to you though. Seems complex though, like we should begin ruling stuff out

[SEODale]

No it's not that i'm afraid. Thanks for your help though.

There's also no country targeting when you add a domain in the new version.

[effectdigital]

The targeting in Search Console isn't working for you very well right now as Google is overriding it. I might leave it in place but know that all it will really do, is limit the traffic you get from elsewhere. It does apparently push up your rankings in the location specified but only very, very marginally. Mainly it cuts traffic out from other locations, so based on that decide what's best for your site and business

It makes me wonder if you're working with the wrong search console property. Most sites are not currently on the domain-level search console property as it's currently annoying to set up (you need to edit DNS records or go through your host, instead of just uploading a file as it should be, as it has always been). This means you're probably working with non-domain level GSC (Google Search Console) properties

If that is true, you should have at least four registered (HTTP WWW, HTTPS WWW, HTTP non-WWW, HTTPS non-WWW). If you have always worked with a GSC property that references the site as beginning with "http://www." and then you move to HTTPS with WWW, and you still continue working with the old property, it won't do anything as it's the wrong one. When you change architecture you very often need to add a new GSC property to accommodate that. If that's true in your case it could be possible you've been making all the GSC changes in the wrong property to no effect, so do check that too

[SEODale]

Hey,

Thanks for your response.

Are you saying that we should remove the country targeting that we have set in the search console?

The reason we're confident that there is a technical issue is because there are competitors with lower pagerank than us and far fewer links, that are ranking in #1 for relevant search terms.

Are there any particular things i should look for?

You are right in saying the majority of our backlinks are from overseas. But it's a catch 22, as our content is ranking elsewhere and not in the UK -

[effectdigital]

That can happen due to poor coding and misaligned hreflang tags, but  more commonly happens due to a misaligned Digital PR strategy. In the absence of traffic data to dive into, Google will often look to popularity (link) metrics to decide whom it thinks should see a particular website. If lots of your links are from the USA and you are on a .com site then it might be pushing you up over there

Google's search console actually has a tool that forces a property / domain to rank only in a certain area. It doesn't move your rankings across though, it just nullifies any outside of the specified region (so either way you still have an uphill climb ahead of you, no magic bullets I am afraid)

I can only imagine it's having done something silly like building a UK site that lists prices in USD or something crazy like that. The sheer determination of Google to not rank you guys in the UK, should in the end point to an obvious and glaring error of some kind

It could be Digital PR related or to do with the structure of the site. Because Google seems adamant to rank you in the wrong area, I'd say it would be extremely likely to be a cascade of failures, converging to give you these unrelenting issues