Almost zero traffic outside Finland

[tuomashaapala]

Hello,

I am becoming a bit clueless with our business website. Our site is doing really well in Finland and with Finnish language. Even though our business is fairly new, we have been able to pass many of our competitors in the search only after about year of operating.

What confuses and worries me though is the fact that our English content is not ranking at all. The aim for the English content is to be general and reaching audiences worldwide. But as you can see in the image attached, we are doing really bad for example in UK, which is one of our main markets.

I've been doing active keyword research, built high quality and natural links and writing long and keyword rich content on our blog but still our rankings don't seem to change outside Finland.

I would be interested in knowing, what I am doing wrong and what would be the right steps to start improving the situation?

[tuomashaapala]

@rekomakela Yes, it does. I don't know why Moz is not accepting my replies but hopefully this one will be accepted.

[RekoMakela]

Just to be sure - does your english content use <a hreflang="en"> HTML-attribute?

[tuomashaapala]

@martijn_scheijbeler As weird as it sounds, this could actually make sense as the trend is quite obvious. Along with problems with ranking abroad, this can also be seen in Finland and in Finnish language, where we have been basically wiping the floor against those same competitors that are beating us with ease in English.

So basically having some high quality links from Finland is pressing us below those domains that practically don't have any authority or good quality content. It's weird (and also kinda silly) but does make sense when you think about it.

I've been quite busy with other aspects of my work lately but at some point I will be trying to get back to link building also. This month I have only gotten 11 new domains to link to us, out of which 8 are not .fi domains.

Hopefully the travel industry gets closer to the norm in the future and we will be able to get some media visits arranged. That would be the most certain way to success for sure.

But still: any further feedback and ideas are warmly welcome.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

@tuomashaapala I looked specifically at Ahrefs data, I would say it's all relative (keep that in mind). In the end if 20% of your links are Finnish but if for the average site in the UK/US you notice that it's about 1% you're obviously still signaling to Google that you're likely having a Finnish audience. These metrics are hard to influence, just giving you my take on the signal itself. You're likely already on the right way to solve this, it might just take some time. Especially with the low amount of links.

[tuomashaapala]

@martijn_scheijbeler This of course is one option. It's sad that Moz is not finding all our backlinks. We have some from big news sources in the US for example that Google has listed also. I would say that in total about 60-70% of our backlinks are from .com sites.

And one thing to note is that we are losing in rankings against some domains that have practically zero backlinks from any source and also have really outdated and badly written content.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

@tuomashaapala My best guess is that i's primarily due to the fact that most of the links you have that aren't a .com are .fi which likely would signal to Google that your site is primarily for a Finnish audience. I would try to diversify that more by getting links to your blog posts from more global sites.

[tuomashaapala]

Anyone, please?