Optimisation on country-specific search engines

If your business targets customers based in one or more different countries, making sure that your site is optimised and included within the main search engine results that serve those countries is a must. However, regionally-based search tools operate in a variety of ways and may not always list your site.

For a business targeting the UK market it will be important to get the site listed on all of the main search tools used in this country. However, search engines like Google and Ask Jeeves have filters for their ‘UK-only’ search results which can restrict how sites may appear. The best strategy is to use a .uk domain (co.uk, org.uk’) as this will allow your site to be listed in both the ‘web’ and ‘pages from the uk’ listings on most search engines. For example, Ask Jeeves currently filters UK sites purely on the domain name extension.

Another alternative if your site uses a ‘top level’ domain (such as .com) is to host the site within the UK, as most search engines will recognise it as being a UK site through its ‘IP’ address. There are plenty of occasions where Google will not display a UK-based .com domain if it is hosted on a non-UK server, which can be frustrating as this will mean that the site does not also appear in front of the target audience.

If you believe this may be an issue with your site, you can check your current server location using this domain explorer service.

Google and MSN also appear to place a weighting factor on sites when searching ‘the web’ from different versions of these search engines. For example, a UK site may fare less well on Google.com as it does for global searches on Google.co.uk as the IP address will add a small but noticeable ranking factor for ‘local’ sites. This shouldn’t be a problem for most UK sites however, as Google also recognises a UK user’s IP address to redirect them to their .co.uk site version by default.

These factors also apply to other regionally based search engines and directories. There are localised versions for most of the main search engines across the main European countries and these will filter sites in similar ways. Google offers 3 search options on their foreign-language search sites – for example, on Google Germany the search results can be shown for the whole web, for just sites in German, and also for sites based in Germany. This latter option filters sites by domain name and IP address, in the same way that Google UK operates.

Therefore, if your website needs to target one or more different countries, the best option is to hold domain names for each country and either point these to your main site, or ideally to create sites for each individual country.

There are, however, some restrictions on who is able to buy domain names in certain countries. For example, France requires a registrant of a .fr domain to be a French registered company, whilst some other countries require a ‘local contact’ – a role which domain name sellers are often able to take for you! There is a useful list of restrictions for European domain names here.

If your business targets a localised area, or you are interested in using pay-per-click advertising to target a regional area, our March 2005 article may also be of interest to you.

If you’d like to know more about using search engine marketing to target specific countries, please contact us for more details.

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