SEO - Foreign Countries & Domains

We’re told that by publishing our content on the Web we will have a global audience. Although the contents of our websites may be viewed from anywhere in the world, this content is unlikely to be ranked highly or returned in searches in many other countries. This is because search engines, which are the primary means of finding content on the Web, and the primary referrers of traffic to our websites, are trying to deliver search engine results to which are most relevant to searchers in each specific country.

For example, a person searching google.com, using the English language in South Africa or even Canada is likely to see a different set of search engine results to a person searching for the same key phrase using Google.com in the U.S. This is because Google’s search engine technology is able to take account of where you are searching from by automatically checking your IP address, and then using the appropriate local search centre to screen and organise the search engine results you are shown accordingly.

In order to do this, the other side of the coin is that Google has to be able to recognise signals from each web page / website to indicate which country is primarily intended for / targeted for. Google uses 200 or so ‘signals’ to decide how to categorise and rank a web page. Some of these signals relate to geographic location. Taking Google as an example, what ‘signals’ relate to the location of web pages / websites?

Some Location Signals...

Top Level Domains
Top level domain or TLD refers to the part of the domain name after the dot at the end e.g. .com or .co.uk. TLDs often indicate which country’s audience web pages are primarily intended for e.g. .de (Germany), or .ie (Ireland). These are called ‘Country Code TLDs)’or ‘ccTLDs’.

There are however TLDs which aren’t specific to individual countries and are therefore are more difficult for the search engines to decide exactly which country to display the search results to purely based on the domain. These TLDs are known as ‘Generic TLDs’ or ‘gTLDs’. Examples of these include .eu, .asia, and even .com.

Server Location
A server’s IP address can be pinned down to a physical mailing address i.e. a physical location, and therefore a web server’s physical address. The web server is basically the computer that web pages are hosted on. Since search engines such as Google know that this is often located near the website’s target audience, the IP address is one of several relevant location signals used to sort pages to display in search engine results (depending on where a person is searching from).

Google is aware however that some websites use different Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), or are hosted on web servers in different countries / not in proximity to their target audience, and therefore the server location is not the main location signal for web pages or intended target audiences as far as Google’s concerned. Google is far more likely to take several factors into account in combination.

Signals within Web Pages
Signals to a web page’s geographic intended target audience are also taken from within the web page content itself. These signals include local telephone numbers and addresses. Also, if currency is mentioned e.g. prices are shown or goods are sold via the web pages, the type of currency listed is also a location signal. The language of the web pages is another signal of the intended geographic target audience. Individual languages however are spoken across a number of different countries e.g. English is spoken in the UK, the US, Australia, Canada etc. For this reason the language may not always be a definitive signal.

Incoming Links
Incoming link quality plays an important part in the categorising and ranking of web pages in Google. Which country therefore the incoming links to web pages come from is another location signal used by Google.

Use of Appropriate Google Tools
Using Google tools which focus on and indicate location are another important signal. This can be particularly appropriate e.g. where gTLDs (generic) are used rather than ccTLDs (country specific). These Google Tools include ‘Google Places’ (where available) and Google’s ‘Geotargeting Tool’. Signing up to and using ‘Google Tools’ is therefore an important step in helping to target specific geographic audiences effectively.

Potential Strategies

Within ‘Geomarketing’ then, ‘geotargeting’ on the Internet is an important strategy and tactic in order to get your web pages ranking highly in search results within specific countries. Based in the information above therefore, here are 2 potential strategies (related to natural listings) for doing so:

Strategy 1 - Complete Localisation
For the purposes of this article this term has been invented as a shorthand title for the idea of having a web pages hosted in another country, at an IP address definitely linked to that country, and using a ccTLd for that country. These web pages would need to be in an appropriate language for that country, and would need to contain other appropriate local page signals e.g. telephone numbers, currencies, physical address details etc.

This strategy is a high involvement, high investment, potentially higher risk strategy for many organisations.
Developing high quality incoming links from pages within the country you’re targeting is an important part of this strategy too.

Strategy 2 – Using Google’s ‘Geotargeting Tool’
For this strategy to be successful the following steps need to be taken:

• Use (register) a domain name with a gTLD i.e. a generic or geographically neutral and not country specific domain name e.g. .com, .eu, .asia.
• Set up locally targeted directories / folders or sub domains focused on a specific region. Sub domains could be for example ca.yourwebsite.com (for Canadian customers).
• Sign up to Google Webmaster Tools and verify your website as per Google’ instructions e.g. by inserting a specific Meta tag or creating a html file with a name provided by Google.
• Individually add each of the sub domains to Google Webmaster Tools as individual websites.
• Using the ‘Geotargeting Tool’, individually target each of these sub domains to the relevant region / country.
• Develop high quality incoming links from pages within the country you’re targeting.

In both strategies it is important to avoid the use of duplicate content in any of your web pages.

N.B. These strategies focus on achieving natural listings search engine rankings. Within the Pay Per Click advertising system there are other ways of geographically targeting PPC adverts.