[question]
Why do I rank high in Google.us but not in other countries?
[/question]
[answer]
Google automatically gives preference to the sites from the same country. Basically, Google gives preference to sites on its specific country domain. On Google.de, www.mybikeshop.de will get preference over www.mybikeshop.com pretty much no matter what, unless you’re the Forbes of Bike Shops.
If you are targeting one specific country, these are some good factors to take note of:
– The way your site is written (example: color vs. colour) helps Google determine where your site is from.
– Google also checks your IP to see where you’re hosted. So if you’re trying to sell specifically to another country, you might also use a host there.
– Keywords might be different in another country. In the USA we might search for ‘18-wheelers’. In Britain, though, folks search for ‘articulated lorries’
If you want to be ranked everywhere and not in just one specific country, using the .com domain is your best bet. Unfortunately, depending on strength of your business, your competition will be much greater and any website content you publish no matter how well optimized it is will be competing on a far larger scale.
In Webmaster Tools, you can specify the geographic target of your website. You can also target different countries with different pages on your site.
Also
If your target market is the UK and you have a back link profile of UK-based websites, it will significantly help your rankings in www.google.co.uk. The same is true with external links; if you are linking to mostly UK-based websites, this also helps Google see that you are targeting the UK and further optimizes your site accordingly.
And…
For example, I would buy “mywebsite.ie” and have it redirected to my main website called “mywebsite.co.uk.”
I could then start to build back-links to the .ie domain as well as the .co.uk domain. This would give me more visibility in Google.ie search listings. By doing this I’m telling Goolge that I’m targeting the Irish market now too as well as my core UK market.
I would also highly recommend setting your domains up in Google Webmasters and allocate specific pages on your website to target different countries.
[/answer]
