SEO Consult Blog

The Internet has turned the whole world into a global village. This has forever changed the way we do business and created opportunities for international trade that did not exist before. Many online businesses concentrate their optimisation efforts directly for the people in their own country.

This is all good and well if your business niche falls solely within the borders of your own country. What if your business stretches across the world and you attract prospective customers from all over? Does this affect how the optimisation of your website is handled? If so, how must your Search Engine Optimisation efforts be adjusted to accommodate your website visitors from other countries?

Your domain name and your server

You need to weigh your SEO options when you consider going global and not just market within the UK. Your chosen server is important and if it already hosts in several different countries, you benefit from organic traffic that come from outside the borders. You need to ascertain that this does not harm your local traffic though. All the pieces of optimisation have to fit together, but if your server creates a problem there is always a solution.

You might consider having more than one domain extension to improve your rankings. You could use one domain extension for your UK market and a global domain extension for other countries. Or you could go with one international domain extension instead.

Web page information and language

For global marketing purposes your contact information has to be very specific. Visitors within the UK have a local knowledge of place names, locations and telephone numbers. Your International Traffic does not and you need to give your contact details explicitly. Special care has to be taken to give international telephone numbers correctly and physical addresses must be displayed in full.

Language plays a very important role in international marketing. For instance UK spelling is much different form US spelling and SEO efforts must address these differences. Language has an impact on your rankings and your optimisation must be inclusive of language differences. The aspects of colloquial English as spoken in different parts of the world must be taken into consideration as well.

Link building for international markets

It is fact that link building plays a crucial part in any search engine optimisation effort for your website and business. If your target market therefore falls not only within the UK, but in other countries as well, you need to consider where you want to rank in search engines elsewhere. Inbound links always has an affect on your search engine ranking. This means adjustments must be made to accommodate international inbound links. It is not an insurmountable task to optimise your website for the international market.

It is being done every day by online businesses all around the world. SEO Consultants are experienced in international optimisation and have all the facts and solutions at hand to assist any online business. International optimisation simply means taken extra factors into consideration to accommodate international visitors and clients to your website.

The Internet is a global phenomenon and this gives any online business full access to potential clients in any country around the world. This is excellent as it gives a business the potential to grow and become known in many other countries besides his own.

For most online businesses, this global factor has become the all-important factor that drives them and they focus their entire search engine optimisation campaign on this. This is all good and well and works for many online marketers. Unfortunately, many do not see the glaring gap in this picture and this can become detrimental to the success of their business.

Local search for a tight focus

Local or geographical search is the fastest growing search option at the moment and businesses should realise how valuable this is for the success of their company. Local search or regional search is the geographical targeting of your intended audience. It is using search engine optimisation techniques to target those prospective clients when they do a local search for services and products.

Retailers who have several locations and companies that provide services are the perfect businesses to fully utilise local search. Granted, the search volume that comes from local search will not be as high as can be obtained from non-regional searches. The important aspect here is to realise that people who use local search and reach your website in this way are far more likely to be ready and eager to be converted into paying customers.

How to successfully optimise for local search

Firstly, make sure that your regional number is prominently listed since many people search by area code. It is important to include on your website precise and clear instructions of how to get to your location by road. An excellent way to make sure there is no confusion is to use a mapping service to properly display your exact location.

Use sublime optimisation through pictures; show pictures of your location that are easily recognisable and make sure to include all relevant street names. Make sure that your driving instructions have the complete and full address of your business for reference.

If you have an online regional directory, make sure that your site is listed there as well. It is important to place each region that you want to rank for prominently in your Page Titles. Lastly, get text links that will impact by having the regional phrase included in the link.

Local search optimisation is a smart business move

All the optimisation techniques used for local search falls under good web design and is actually common sense, yet businesses overlook this valuable resource of do not utilise it fully. The goal is to allow people to find you and then use your services and products. If they cannot find you, they will go somewhere they can easily access the products and services. This means you would have lost a valuable client to one of your competitors. So incorporate local search into your website design from the start.