So here’s a question – you have a .com website that targets several different countries. How do you get content aimed at a particular country to rank in international versions of Google?
This is a recent project that we have taken on for a client, to get their country pages to rank in that country’s version of Google. So not only in the “the web” but also in “pages from XX”.
Is that possible I hear you ask? Yes, it certainly is, using Google Webmaster Tools’ Geographical Target option, found under Settings. This setting has actually been around since 2007, but there doesn’t seem to be much consensus on if it works.
Now, the option is only available if you have a .com website or other non-country specific TLD (otherwise, you’ll get a message saying e.g. “Your site’s domain is currently associated with the target: United Kingdom”). So to rank a subdirectory, you need to do the following steps:
1) Create the directory – I would suggest a nice obviously geographic name, like /uk/ for the United Kingdom or /new-zealand/ for NZ. Populate it with the content that you want to rank in the destination country.
2) Create an account in Google Webmaster Tools for that subdirectory, and verify it with the meta tag or file upload method. Note that it will be the same code as the file for the whole site if you already have that verified.
3) Set the Geographic Target in Settings
4) Wait for Google to do its stuff
In my experiment, it took a couple of weeks for the content to show up in the regional version of Google from creation and verification. This content was brand new but located on a good authority domain. We linked to the content internally from other pages on the site discussing the country. The site is entirely in English, and the targeted country/regional Google version was also English language.
The top level site is a .com hosted in the UK, and ranks well in both Google.com and Google.co.uk. I didn’t want to mess with this at all, so there is no geographic target set for the site as a whole.
What is perhaps odd is that this worked so well, but the UK SERPs are so rubbish at the moment?
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