Looking for some advice on ranking well locally

Hey all,

Here's my websites current situation:

I live in the UK use Market Samurai, Host Gator and my sites a .com.

I'm currently ranking 6th for a global broad search in Google according to Market Samurai's Rank Tracker. My home page keeps bobbing up and down on the first page between 3rd & 8th and has done for a couple of weeks now however I still seem to remain on the first page but have not yet grabbed a number 1 or 2 spot. I assume this is all because of Google.com

I got into IM'ing through the 2009 30DC and have only just been introduced to the factors around local search.

When I search my main theme keyword in Google.uk which is my default Google page (not sure how to change this I usually use HideMyAss to use Google.com so if there's a setting anywhere please help) I rank 11th, on page 2.


Here's the Market Samurai keyword data for my URL's main theme keyword:

PBR - 100% SEOC - 253,000 SEOLC - 8,550 SEOTC - 21,300 (1760 local) SEOLTC - 110 SEOTCR - 8%



How do I push my site up the rankings on the first page? Is it s simple as getting backlinks from .co.uk domains?

Does the fact that I'm UK, using a .com with Host Gator (who are based in the US) affect my UK rankings. (Host Gator don't accept .co.uk domains).

I'm looking at starting my 2nd site following the CWS system and was wondering if I would be ok using a .com alongside a UK affiliate programm for UK search only?

Any advice would be appreciated.

Stu784 said:

Does the fact that I'm UK, using a .com with Host Gator (who are based in the US) affect my UK rankings. (Host Gator don't accept .co.uk domains).

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If I were in your situation, I would definitely go for UK hosting (with servers in the UK) and a co.uk domain because server location and TLD can affect your rankings.

are there any company's you'd recommend in the UK who offer similar hosting package to Hostgator in terms of cost?

How would you go about pushing this domain from 11th onto the first page for UK? Do I need .co.uk backlinks?

For my next domain: what if I chose a domain name of www. targetkeyworduk.com or www. uk targetkeyword.com would this have an affect?

As I have the Hostgator unlimited domains account I'm trying to keep costs as low as possible until I'm making enough to spread my hosting around as I grow my number of sites.

I'm having this exact same problem for one of my sites: #4 in Google US but like #85 in Google UK.

The thing is I have loads of other ones which are just fine in each local search engine, with only a couple of places difference, but this one is not working well. It's fairly new so I'm going to keep trying on it for a while but otherwise I may have to switch to UK stuff too. Bummer because it costs more.

its certainly annoying...

What about including UK specific address somewhere on the blog (for example my business address) or UK specific posts mentioning the UK , UK towns or UK cities such as keyworduk or keywordlondon or keywordyorkshire?

Also english spellings

Would that increase my UK rank or decrease my US rank?

Trying to think of solutions its hard with no light at the end of the tunnel.

Stu784 said:

its certainly annoying...

What about including UK specific address somewhere on the blog (for example my business address) or UK specific posts mentioning the UK , UK towns or UK cities such as keyworduk or keywordlondon or keywordyorkshire?

Also english spellings

Would that increase my UK rank or decrease my US rank?

Trying to think of solutions its hard with no light at the end of the tunnel.

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I'm not convinced about adding an address, I don't see that doing anything. The UK towns and spellings...I'm not sure either.

I think it just needs more anchored backlinks. To be honest, everytime I've been in doubt I just did more backlinks, and eventually it worked. Lol. Kinda lame but there you go.

I think in the future that a UK domain name would make things easier..

Thanks for the advice, I think I'll dust off scrapebox tomorrow morning for another high PR session.

I'm just trying to avoid the pitfalls with my second site that I made with my first however I don't think I've learnt everything needed yet.

Been looking at Google Sniper and today Consumer Wealth System and I don't get how they rank page 1 with very little to no backlinks.

Stu784 said:

are there any company's you'd recommend in the UK who offer similar hosting package to Hostgator in terms of cost?

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The only UK company I've used is Inn0H0sting, and I really can't recommend them, as they have a lot of downtime. Also, they do have a cheap plan (about $5/mo), but you don't get unlimited add-on domains with it. Good, cheap hosting is hard to find. Good luck with that one.

How would you go about pushing this domain from 11th onto the first page for UK? Do I need .co.uk backlinks?

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Backlinks for sure. In theory, it seems that having links from other UK sites would be best if you're targeting a local audience, but I see no harm in getting links from non-UK sites. Not all sites that are hosted in the UK have .co.uk TLDs, so if you could find some of them and drop links there, then that may be good as well. (Check where a site is hosted by going to whois.net and entering the domain. It will tell you the nameservers, which you can use to find out the IP address, which in turn you can use to determine the country where the server is located using a service such as ipchecking.com.)

You might also want to look into ukescuba's G00gle Domination course. It was created with U.S. traffic in mind, but some of his non-U.S. customers are using the methods with success.

For my next domain: what if I chose a domain name of www. targetkeyworduk.com or www. uk targetkeyword.com would this have an affect?

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It might have an effect, although there's been much discussion recently about exact-match keyword domains taking a hit in the SERPs. However, I haven't found this to be the case with locally-targeted exact-match keyword domains (e.g., keywordcity.c0m, where keyword is your keyword or phrase, and city is the city that you're targeting).

The thing is, I've got another 6 or so .com domain names, and get this:

4 are entirely in Spanish and yet rank pretty much the same in google.es as they do in google.co.uk, if anything they are worse in google.com even though they are .coms

1 is in English and ranks #1 in google.com and #3 in google.co.uk

1 is in English and ranks #4 in google.com and #85 in google.co.uk!

And last of all, that one which does so badly in google.co.uk - the number one spot is a .com!! The rest below are .co.uk

I've a e-commerce site in page 1 since Christmas on google UK, but the site is .co.uk and I had no problem. so I'm thinking .com wasn't the best choice but try adding uk, Britain and such to the keywords you target.



aamcle

Ok I've just ran a Market Samurai Rank tracker for both all countries and territories (my default setting) and a UK only and looked at the top 10 for both, a lot of the sites that I'm beating in Google.com are beating me in Google.co.uk and these are sites that have .com domains.

The only variation/ replacements are the .co.uk domains one of which is number one.

So I can see the .co.uk makes a massive difference however why are the same sites that I can beat in google.com, beating me in google.co.uk. Oh and there is even a keyworduk.com who has a 6 spot in google.co.uk



I'm looking through the URL's to see what backlinks I can steal.

To rank well in UK, or any country for that matter, you should have a country TLD, hosting and backlinks from other relevant and regional websites.

Further, you can specify 'preferred location' in your GWT and add your site to Google Local business listing of your country.

The reason of being beaten by those sites in UK is due to the fact that those domains have country TLD, backlinks from regional site or probably hosted in UK as well.

Hear this right from the horses mouth > http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=62399

Thanks for the link.

So I guess my question now would be sub folder or sub domain for UK.

I still want to keep my rank as it is and if I make a change like this will I be affected/ lose my rank. More importantly is it worth the change?

Also would you need to treat that sub folder or sub domain as a completely new website needing content, backlinks & rank etc or would it automatically replace my current standings for UK search.

Can you set up a redirect to my main homepage?

Thanks for that webnise. I'm going to follow through the steps recommended on that page to reconfigure my local zone..

In the meantime, it still makes me laugh how the #1 result for my term in google.co.uk is a .com domain, while all the rest are .co.uk ...!

I use ukcheaphosts. i think with a .co.uk and hosting it's $20 for two years.

They use cpanel and just upgraded the server. Support seems pretty solid and reliable.

Stu784 said:

Hey all,
When I search my main theme keyword in Google.uk which is my default Google page (not sure how to change this I usually use HideMyAss to use Google.com so if there's a setting anywhere please help) I rank 11th, on page 2.

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Click on "Go to Google.com" link located below the search box.
Here the direct link http://www.google.com/ncr or http://www.google.com/webhp

Deleted member 1924571, if you use a .com targeting country ranking, make sure you set your country (UK) in google webmaster tools for your domain! Sounds like your site is currently configured to target international/worldwide as a default.

If you do that then hosting location does not matter.

I'm currently ranking well for google.com and don't want to change to Google.co.uk I want to rank well in both using the same website.