Ranking in regional Googles

One of the more common seo questions is “how do I make my website appear in google.co.uk?” or “google.com.au?” or any particular regional Google.

It’s a valid question as it’s important that you have your site in the most relevant regional Google to your customers.

Google determines the geographical location of a website based on a number of indicators; these are:

• Hosting server location
• Top level domain (TLD) of your website
• Backlinks to your website from other regionally based sites
• Geographic location setting in Google Webmaster Tools

Hosting Location

This is one of the easier indicators to control, simply ensure that the webserver your site is hosted on is physically in your target country. Having a hosting company that is based in the same county is not a guarantee as for example some UK hosting companies actually keep their servers in Germany! So always be sure to ask the hosting company to tell you the exact location of their datacentres.

Top Level Domain

Another one that is easy to control when first setting your site up, if you buy a .uk domain you will be included in google.co.uk’s UK only results, if you buy a .au domain you will be included in google.com.au’s Australia only results.

Backlinks from regionally based sites

You can appear in a regional Googles results if you also manage to generate a large enough number of backlinks from other sites that Google has determined to be based in that particular region. I have seen this work in such a way that sites that are seen to be predominantly based in one regional Google will also appear in another regional Google’s region specific results for some search terms.

Geographic Location setting in Google Webmaster Tools

This is the newest of the indicators. Quite simply you tell Google where your sites regional focus is in your sites webmaster tools. What hasn’t yet been determined is how this affects the other indicators, i.e. does it overide any of the other 3 indicators?

How many indicators do you need?

You don’t need to cover all the indicators to get included, for example you don’t need to host in the UK if you have a .uk top level domain.

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