How to Improve Your Local SEO Efforts

For numerous years, if you wished to rank highly within Google UK then it was extremely important to ensure you had a .uk specific domain name and your website hosted within the United Kingdom. However, doing this limited your chances of ranking highly in other country specific Google results pages. This is because the results Google shows to a user in the UK may vary from the results returned to a user in Ireland.

In the past, if you wanted to sell your products/services to Ireland then you were probably best advised to register a .ie (Irish) domain extension, hosting it on an Irish based server, and doing a lot of work to avoid duplicate content issues. But what if you owned a generic top-level domain, such as .com or .org and wished to target specific countries only.

These days Google makes it a lot easier for webmasters and marketers to ensure they could achieve high rankings without incurring increased costs and labor time through their free webmaster tools. If you have a website and haven’t already signed up for a Google Webmaster account I would highly recommend you do so (incredible amount of useful resources completely free).

Google Webmaster Tools Geographic Targeting Feature.
If your site targets customers in a particular geographic location, you can use the geographic target tool within Google Webmaster Tools to provide Google with information that will help determine how your site appears in the search results. You can only use this feature for sites with a generic top-level domain, such as .com or .org. Sites with country-coded top-level domains (such as .uk) are already associated with a geographic region, in this case the United Kingdom.

Attempting to rank within specific Google geographic results only
If no information is entered in Webmaster Tools, Google will continue to make geographic associations largely based on the top-level domain (e.g. .co.uk or .ie) and the IP address of the webserver from which the context was served.

However, if you only delivered your products (or offered your services) to customers within the United Kingdom then you can simply:
1. Log into your Webmaster Tools Account
2. On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want to configure.
3. Under Site configuration, click Settings.
4. In the Geographic target section, select the option of United Kingdom.

Attempting to rank within multiple Google geographic results
How about you delivered your products (or offered your services) to customers within the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. Do you need two sites to achieve this? Thanks to the Google Webmaster Tools this is no longer necessary.

If you want to geo-target the two locations above you would create two sub folders (i.e www.yoursite.com/uk & www.yoursite.com/ireland), one targeting UK listings, the other to Ireland listings. The downside is both homepages of the sub folders need to be different to avoid a duplicate content penalty. However, this shouldn’t be seen as a negative as it offers you the opportunity of tailoring two homepages to different target markets. You can include different (country specific) contact numbers, delivery costs, currency details, payment options, etc.

Geographic Targeting in the Words of Google
The following video should be able to provide you with additional information on how to get the best out of this feature within Google Webmaster Tools:
Setting a geographic target for your site in Webmaster Tools

I hope you have found this post useful. Please feel free to add your comments below.