How to Get Your Website Found in Country Specific Search Results

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Most Search Engines (SEs) offer the option of a country-specific search. This is a simple way for searchers to find pages from sites about their own country rather than receiving search results from the entire Web.

Many searchers looking for information on, or services in, a specific country (ex., homes in Australia, accountants in Canada, etc.) will use the country-specific search feature in hopes of receiving more relevant results.

Does your site target a local market?

Capitalize on traffic generated through country-specific searches by following the listing tips below.

Let’s start with the big picture first…

How Search Engines Determine a Site’s Country of Origin

There are two main criteria SEs consider when identifying which country a site belongs to…

• the IP address of the Web hosting company and…
• the suffix used in a domain name (.com, .co.uk, .ca, .com.au, etc.).

If you’re targeting a regional market only, outside of North America, then it’s beneficial to register a domain name with a local suffix (i.e. United Kingdom — .co.uk). The SEs are more likely to list a site with a local suffix in their country-specific search results.

If you want local business and exposure to the rest of the world, the top recommendation is to use a .com, .net, or .org suffix.

You can then purchase a local domain from any local seller of domains and redirect it to your main website.

For example, let’s say you register www.how2makeawebsite.com as your main global domain name. You also set up how2makeawebsite.co.uk (via Domain.co.uk), which redirects United Kingdom traffic to your .com site.

Your site’s domain doesn’t need to match the country domain for which you’d like it to return.

It’s also important to keep in mind that our crawlers don’t index duplicate content, so creating identical sites at several domains will likely not result in their returning for many country restricts.

If you do create duplicate domains, we suggest using a robots.txt file to block our crawler from accessing all but your preferred one.

To learn more about robots.txt files, please refer detailed instructions for blocking pages from Googlebot.

Get Found in Your Region’s Search Results

Search Engines are constantly improving their algorithms.

Over time, they’ll get better at determining regional content and listing relevant pages in their country-specific results, regardless of the criteria above.

If you have concerns about being found regionally, there are several things you can do to alert the SEs of your location and increase your chances of being listed and found in their country-specific results.

Try any or all of the following:

1. Choose a domain name that contains the name of your city or country.

2. Use locally targeted keywords in headlines and throughout your content.
(ex., <h2>Canada’s 5 Star Hotels In Montreal, Quebec</h2>)

3. Do a country-specific search related to your site theme (ex., “hotels in Montreal”). Approach the owners of sites ranked high in the results to exchange links. The benefits of this are twofold…

• More incoming and outgoing links to and from country-specific sites signals to the SEs that your site is relevant to the country-specific search results they’re serving.

• Visitors to your site will appreciate the additional resources and see you as more of an authority on your topic.

4. Submit to local and regional directories and portals. The incoming links will alert SEs of your local status. Find regional directories and portals.

5. Specify your region on every page of your site, particularly your “contact” and “about us” pages. If your site promotes a local business, include your physical address on every page.

6. Sprinkle in words from your country’s official language (ex., French for France-based sites, German for sites about Germany, etc.). SEs are learning to recognize content in specific languages and use that as one of their criteria for including a site in their country-specific search results.

7. Submit your site to country-specific Search Engines. Here’s a list of Search Engines, broken down by country:

http://www.searchengineguide.com/pages/Regional/Countries/index.html

8. If your website business model promotes a local business, add your business to Google Maps. (This feature is only available for businesses in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, China, and Japan).

Go to http://maps.google.com (or maps.google.ca, maps.google.co.uk, etc.) and click on the Business Owners: Add/Edit Your Business text link to add your business.

9. Include specific geographic details in your title and META description tags, ex., <meta name=”description” content=”East Devon, UK travel and accommodations. See the best of Great Britain’s coastline”>.

Marketing Takeaway

If you’re marketing to a regional audience, getting listed and found in country-specific results pages has the potential to generate more traffic for your site.

Take the time to clarify the origin of your site for the SEs by implementing the suggestions above.

This post brought to you by Saikat Ganguly

I am a software professional working for a major multinational IT company. I am passionate about SEO and own a webdesign and SEO software development company based at UK. A keen SEO researcher and software developer. I mentored and helped a lot of new internet aspirants on how to create a website that works! Recently, I created a game changing, non-spamming, SEO Blog Commenting Software, which is currently under soft launch.

Saikat has written 1 great posts for Traffic Generation Cafe.