Previously, I have already touched upon tools that help in geo-targeting and compared their effectiveness. All of them are beyond your on-site optimization efforts:
- Setting geographic target with Webmaster Tools;
- Server location;
- A country specific top level domain;
- + Backlinks from local websites.
While the above list is a must if you want search engine to get your geo-targeting efforts right, some important on-site optimization should not be missed either (that will both ensure your site better local search rankings and generate local backlinks):
- Include your location information on visible to crawlers (even better: prominent and powerful) pages.
- Use <address></address> tag to make it even more evident what your business location is.
- Consider optimizing some of your page titles (and other important to SEO page elements: URLs and internal anchor text) for your city/state.
- Make sure to include (and probably optimize for) your zip code / Post Office Box address.
- Make sure to add your local phone number (including area code) to your contact details and home page.
- Don’t forget to tailor other geo-specific details to the current geographic version format: pricing in local currency, working hours based on local standards and time zone, dates in the locally understandable format (e.g. YYYY/MM/DD vs Russian DD/MM/YY), etc.
- Run country-specific promotions (for local holidays and days off);
- Optimize for local spelling (e.g. British English vs American English vs Australian English) to get traffic from local search referrals;
- Try your hand at local link bait: cover topics that are specifically interesting to the nation you are targeting (add national facts, humor and proverbs specific to the country).
Interesting post…especially about using the HTML tags for your contact address.
I will give it a try in my efforts and see how it works out.
Nice post Ann.
I am battling to get one of my clients ranked well on google.co.uk at the moment. Doing well on .com though.
The problem I have is that my client is not based in the UK, so I can’t use UK contact details such as addresses and phone numbers which makes it tricky. This also means I can’t add them to google local for the UK.
I am currently working on building up the backlinks from UK sites which could/should do the trick. I am also working on adding other on site optimisation data such as the words UK to the pages copy in the hope that G may take a hint.
I changed the geo location settings in webmaster tools some weeks back but this hasn’t helped.
Congratulations on your blog btw. I also look forward to reading your posts.
I would sugest to your client to open a mail box – NOT a PO BOX – at Mail Boxes etc. – that will give him a local business address in UK which you can use for listings in local searches.
Thanks Josh. Great idea. Will look into it.
Hi Ann, Interesting article! I’m going to go through your suggestions and review/revamp my web site accordingly. I do have a noob geo-targeting question, in your opinion, should I use the geo-targeting in Webmaster tools if my web site is a travel guide/resource site for a particular region (cape cod) and our audience is very broad, locationally speaking? Thank you!
Hi Anne, country specific domains both .co.uk and com.au will overide server location , my forum has a local domain (net.au) and hosted in the US, and is number one , in local search for its target , same with a co.uk I look after, also you can use a country specific directory or sub e.g mydomain.com/uk/ this was suggested by Google engineer and will be recognized by Googlbot
This’s great article. Thank you.