Accidental case study of Google Webmaster Tools Settings
Here is an "accidental" (in the sense that I didn't mean to do it) case study which will be of particular interest to non-US marketers who maybe want to market to the US..... it also hilights the significance of the "Geographic Settings" in Google Webmaster Tools (which has figured significantly in a recent WSO)
I I've in the UK and when I first got online I setup my hosting in the UK (which was logical because I started a number of UK specific sites to start off with). One of my sites (a dot com extension) was intended to be more of a "global" site targeting quite a tough keyword with most of the affiliate products being advertised in US dollars.
After a while I found that I was top5 consistently on google.co.uk in the UK for my main keyword and top10 for a number of "related" keywords. However, I was absolutely nowhere on Google.com for the same keywords.
I did some back linking and I came into Google.com at around 600 and got my keyword to Number1 in the UK and stayed there.
However, my site wasn't converting at all into sales and I concluded that the main reason was that the content, sales pages etc were geared more towards a US audience (we are a conservative lot here in the UK!)
I was convinced that the reason I was not ranking on google.com was that I was hosting in the UK so I moved my site to US based hosting (back in April) and 3 months later I had a slight improvement (up to 430 highest) on google.com and still (somehow) number 1 on google.co.uk
So I set about investigating whether there was anyway of "telling" google which geographic region I wanted to target. I had already submitted my site to google webmaster tools (I recommend doing this btw there is a lot of good information you can get about your site including keyword performance, crawling stats etc) and lo and behold there is a setting within webmaster tools called (configuration then settings) called "Geographic Configuration" and then some interesting notes about how google determines which location your site is targeting.
All the country search engines are listed, so within this panel you can actually specify which country you want your site to target. There is also an option "unlisted" which according to google means that you are not targeting a specific region. There is more blurb which essentially amounted to (to paraphrase significantly) if you specify "unlisted" google will "guess" which area you are targeting by virtue of IP, DNS settings, visitors etc.... I figured that because of my sites history that google was guessing that I was still targeting UK, and given my sites visitors were mostly UK, was a pretty good guess.
However, I was desperate to target the US so I changed my settings to target the USA...
Two days later (this was three weeks ago) I woke up to find I was Number 13 on Google.Com, all my significant keywords were in the top20 with some in the top5 and I was still Number1 on google.co.uk, though I did notice that some of my secondary keywords had dropped off the front page
I did some back linking and within the week I was up to Number2
on google.com for my main keyword and even more exciting was that I was top40 for the three word version of my four word main keyphrase. I stayed there for a week or so, and I was convinced that the visitors would just keep rolling in. What I found was that my visitor numbers went up a bit (20%) or so but not as much as I had hoped, and in fact my UK numbers had dipped.
About a week ago my daughter did a search for my site here in the UK. Sure enough it shows up on internet explorer on google.co.uk at Number 1...... but on the first line of the search results were the words "United States"......... and in my head I convinced myself that this would completely put off my UK visitors.... (you know whats coming next.....)
So in my head I thought that if I changed my site back to "unlisted" I had done enough back linking to maintain my position on google.com..... WRONG!
Two dates later, sure enough the "United States" indicator had disappeared but I had completely dropped down the rankings on google.com to number 74 and many of my related keywords had dropped out of the top100 completely. Significantly my UK rankings were stronger than ever, with all my significant keywords ranking in top10 and many top5 ..... I was back to square one
Then I went through a couple of days of debating in my head whether I should change my whole site to target my UK customers (basically put all my sales in pounds where I can) (incidentally this is one of the things I like about adsense, it will serve adverts to the local region of the searcher) because my rankings were really significant for the UK, or whether I should go back to the US targeting and leave the site as it was.
Sorry to say I changed it back and forwards a couple of times (Decision making has never been one of my strong points) but I have now categorically decided (I think) to go "worldwide" and I have changed it back to the US. I did this yesterday so I am just hoping that I can get my google.com ranking back ... I'll update this thread with any news in the next week or so
So the moral of the story is if you are running a site out of the US and want to target google.com go register your site at google webmaster tools and if necessary adjust the targeting. Be prepared for your local results to suffer though and you may end up having to make a decision as to whether you want a share of the bigger visitor pot that google.com can give you whilst running the risk that your local visitor numbers might suffer...
This is longer than I thought it was going to be but hope it is useful if you are in this situation....(!)
I I've in the UK and when I first got online I setup my hosting in the UK (which was logical because I started a number of UK specific sites to start off with). One of my sites (a dot com extension) was intended to be more of a "global" site targeting quite a tough keyword with most of the affiliate products being advertised in US dollars.
After a while I found that I was top5 consistently on google.co.uk in the UK for my main keyword and top10 for a number of "related" keywords. However, I was absolutely nowhere on Google.com for the same keywords.
I did some back linking and I came into Google.com at around 600 and got my keyword to Number1 in the UK and stayed there.
However, my site wasn't converting at all into sales and I concluded that the main reason was that the content, sales pages etc were geared more towards a US audience (we are a conservative lot here in the UK!)
I was convinced that the reason I was not ranking on google.com was that I was hosting in the UK so I moved my site to US based hosting (back in April) and 3 months later I had a slight improvement (up to 430 highest) on google.com and still (somehow) number 1 on google.co.uk
So I set about investigating whether there was anyway of "telling" google which geographic region I wanted to target. I had already submitted my site to google webmaster tools (I recommend doing this btw there is a lot of good information you can get about your site including keyword performance, crawling stats etc) and lo and behold there is a setting within webmaster tools called (configuration then settings) called "Geographic Configuration" and then some interesting notes about how google determines which location your site is targeting.
All the country search engines are listed, so within this panel you can actually specify which country you want your site to target. There is also an option "unlisted" which according to google means that you are not targeting a specific region. There is more blurb which essentially amounted to (to paraphrase significantly) if you specify "unlisted" google will "guess" which area you are targeting by virtue of IP, DNS settings, visitors etc.... I figured that because of my sites history that google was guessing that I was still targeting UK, and given my sites visitors were mostly UK, was a pretty good guess.
However, I was desperate to target the US so I changed my settings to target the USA...
Two days later (this was three weeks ago) I woke up to find I was Number 13 on Google.Com, all my significant keywords were in the top20 with some in the top5 and I was still Number1 on google.co.uk, though I did notice that some of my secondary keywords had dropped off the front page
I did some back linking and within the week I was up to Number2
on google.com for my main keyword and even more exciting was that I was top40 for the three word version of my four word main keyphrase. I stayed there for a week or so, and I was convinced that the visitors would just keep rolling in. What I found was that my visitor numbers went up a bit (20%) or so but not as much as I had hoped, and in fact my UK numbers had dipped. About a week ago my daughter did a search for my site here in the UK. Sure enough it shows up on internet explorer on google.co.uk at Number 1...... but on the first line of the search results were the words "United States"......... and in my head I convinced myself that this would completely put off my UK visitors.... (you know whats coming next.....)
So in my head I thought that if I changed my site back to "unlisted" I had done enough back linking to maintain my position on google.com..... WRONG!
Two dates later, sure enough the "United States" indicator had disappeared but I had completely dropped down the rankings on google.com to number 74 and many of my related keywords had dropped out of the top100 completely. Significantly my UK rankings were stronger than ever, with all my significant keywords ranking in top10 and many top5 ..... I was back to square one
Then I went through a couple of days of debating in my head whether I should change my whole site to target my UK customers (basically put all my sales in pounds where I can) (incidentally this is one of the things I like about adsense, it will serve adverts to the local region of the searcher) because my rankings were really significant for the UK, or whether I should go back to the US targeting and leave the site as it was.
Sorry to say I changed it back and forwards a couple of times (Decision making has never been one of my strong points) but I have now categorically decided (I think) to go "worldwide" and I have changed it back to the US. I did this yesterday so I am just hoping that I can get my google.com ranking back ... I'll update this thread with any news in the next week or so
So the moral of the story is if you are running a site out of the US and want to target google.com go register your site at google webmaster tools and if necessary adjust the targeting. Be prepared for your local results to suffer though and you may end up having to make a decision as to whether you want a share of the bigger visitor pot that google.com can give you whilst running the risk that your local visitor numbers might suffer...
This is longer than I thought it was going to be but hope it is useful if you are in this situation....(!)
A-1 Survival