Target specific countries using Organic SEO!

Lets say you have a website that’s hosted in the UK and your domain name is www.mycompany.com. Lets also assume that you have been doing quite well targeting your customers in the UK. But its a new year and you have new plans. This year you want to start targeting the US market. You know that you can easily do this using PPC, but you want to take a long term approach and you know that organic listings will help your conversion numbers.

So, how do you geotarget a particular country using Organic SEO?

1. The first strategy you might think about is getting yourself a new domain name and host it in the target country, and start to build a presence there over a period of months. The important point to remember here is when you are registering a new domain name, make sure that you use contact details that are located in your target country. So, if your target country is the US, then don’t register with an address in the UK. To line all your ducks up on the domain side you should:

• Use a registration address for your domain name that is in the target country (a virtual address will do)
• register a domain with the tld or cctld for the target country, in other words a .com, .co.uk, .de, .sa…etc
• host the new website in the target country

As I say, this is to line all your ducks up. The key steps are listed in order of priority above. So you may not want to host in your target country, but you should definitely register with an address there.

2. Let’s say that you don’t want to go to all the hassle of registering a new domain and building a new website. What else might you do? Well, you could just register the new domain name and setup it up as an alias. Once you have this setup you can submit your new domain to directories in your target country and leave comments on blogs (with your new domain name). This is a bit messy though as visitors soon find in the About Us page where you are located. Again though you may want to setup a virtual address and put in on your existing website.

3. So what else could you do? Well you could use Google Geo-targeting functionality by IP address. Here you use software that detects what country your user is coming from and serves an appropriate page. Obviously this will not help you get good rankings for your target country, but it make help with certain situations, e.g. different states in the US.

4. Or you could use Google’s ‘Set Target location’ in their Google Webmasters offering. You can configure where you want Google to focus your listings. You can use your root domain or sub directories or sub domain. For example if you had www.example.com and you were targeting the UK, but you also wanted to target France. You could set up a sub directory like so, www.example.com/fr or a sub domain like www.fr.example.com.

Summary: So what’s the best way to target a country using Organic SEO?

The best proven method is to setup a domain specific strategy, i.e. a domain either with the correct cctld or hosted in the country you want to do well. Also remember to register the domain name using a virtual address in the target country. The jury is out on the geo-targeting functionality offered through Google Webmasters.

Remember also to have enough appropiate on-page content that also targets the locals!

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