Localized SEO, I have an inquiry.

Here are the details:

I live in Canada.

I'm ranking on page 1 for a term with "Google USA" but for the same term, I'm on page 9 with "Google Canada".

I'm unsure why this discrepancy exists, although a friend and I were discussing this matter and he suggested that it might be due to my hosting company, which is U.S. based (hence, US IP).

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks

Check webmaster tools, you can set up geo location.

I don't know what to answer but in your case only US IP i not responsible.

From what i have read on the subject, google rankings do differ by countries. In order to serve relevant pages google use a number things to decide the region of your website. I think TLD is the first indicator so for a website serving the uk only market a .co.uk domain.

If you site has a .com or .net extension and you have not specified anywhere else where you are targetting then google might use your hosting IP to determine this (much debate over this).

As terryuk says you can now specify location in webmaster tools which is probably easier than changing your hosting account especially as the us has some of the best deals on hosting (note: not all US hosting is will have your server located in the US).

The normal option to rank in any given country is to have the site hosted in that country, with a top level domain name extension matching that country. I am going to try what terryuk has suggested about geotargetting in webmaster tools for some of my domains and I will post the results here.