By Mick Dillon
Online Marketing Consultant
The internet has certainly contributed to bringing the world closer together but as far as search engines are concerned there is definitely a regional divide. The major search engines now display results based on a user's geographic location, e.g. Irish websites to Irish Users, UK websites to UK users and so on. This is fine if your website is located in the country you are targeting however it creates a problem for those who wish to target audiences abroad, as your site may be penalised because of its location. Geographic location may become an even greater problem if your site is targeting multiple markets.
The search engines look to the following to assign a location to a website:
- The websites domain name
- Location/IP address of server the website is hosted on
- Language used on the website
- Character Encoding of the website
So, How Do You Target More Than One Geographic Location?
(i) Pay-Per-Click campaign
At present there are two dominant Pay-Per-Click networks:
Google Adwords
Google Adwords has tremendous reach and is a great way of delivering qualified traffic to your website regardless of your websites domain name or IP address. Using Google Adwords you can target almost any country in the world. The only downside is that there is a cost associated with each clickthrough to your website and the management resources required to maximise the campaign.
Overture
Like Google Adwords an Overture Pay-Per-Click campaign will also solve the domain and IP address issues when targeting specific countries. Native language content needs to appear on the website however money and management resources are also required to run an effective campaign. Unfortunately Overture does not offer country-specific advertising for every country so country specific targeting must be achieved via the ad creative, whilst at the same time ensuring that visitors from non-target countries do not clickthrough. Overture's ppc network includes Yahoo!, MSN and AltaVista.
(ii) Optimise the site for specific target country listings
For country organic listings (free listings), the search engines must be able to identify the website as relevant to a country or region. How is this achieved?
Domain Name
Register the domain for the country you are targeting. Registering domains in some countries may not be possible due to ownership restrictions. However a local partner might register the domain on your behalf.
Hosting
If registering a local domain is not possible, regional hosting may provide a viable alternative. Regional hosting utilizes the IP and regional domain of a local hosting company. This is often enough to satisfy criteria for inclusion in regional search engines.
Language
Ensure that the website contains content in the language of the country you are targeting.
Character Encoding
Ensure that the character encoding of the website is in the native language of the country in question.
What If You're Targeting Multiple Locations?
If your website is targeting multiple locations, register local domain names for the markets you are targeting. Ideally create a separate website for each domain name and ensure each site is populated with unique, regional specific content. It is vital that you do not replicate the same content on each site as this may result in penalties from the search engines. In any case localising the content will improve customer confidence in your website's offering. Whilst this strategy, used in conjunction with other search engine optimisation techniques, will help transform your website's search engine visibility in your target markets, there are a number of associated issues which you should consider:
- Domain Name Availability
As stated previously, some country-specific domains are difficult to register, if you do not have a physical-presence in the country in question.
- Branding
Consider the effects on global branding strategy. Will you be diluting the branding possibilities for your primary domain name?
- Link Popularity
Overall link popularity of the main site will suffer in terms of link popularity, as you will be spreading the links across a series of regional websites. However it is possible to compensate for this by having multiply links between the various different websites.
- Maintenance
The more websites with unique URL's/content the greater the resources required to manage the websites.
