My website is in dutch - so my two targets are the dutch speaking people in Belgium and The Netherlands. I'm trying to rank in a very competitive niche, the keyword is very competitive I already rank on page 1 (at the bottom) for this dutch keyword in Google.be, but for the same keyword I'm far behind on Google.nl - like page 10!! My domain is .be and not .nl...but can the fact that my domain is .be explain a 10 page difference in ranking??? It seems hard to believe, because lots of .nl sites are doing just fine on Google.be. Any ideas? The site relatively new tough...what should I do, keep on creating links,content and hope for the best?
This will always help. You may find your website on a different page regularly until it finally settles down. But by continuing to build backlinks and add content, you should get the results you're looking for. That includes moving the .be site up farther on page 1.
The rankings are different because Google ranks search results differently for different languages. I would imagine given the difference in the mixture of minority and majority language groups in Belgium and the Netherlands that Google weights results according to the percentage of language speakers in each country. The lower ranking probably occurs because there are more sites aimed at Dutch-only SERPs in Holland than there are in Belgium. Therefore, it's easier to compete for Dutch keywords in the Belgian market.
Above is a sum of your answer. You are using .be domain and that's why your website got a better ranking in Google.be over Google.nl even your website has been written in Netherlands. Your current domain itself ia a country specific one so it would be much harder to get ranking Google.nl, even compare to .com extension. You may consider doing these. 1. Create another version of website under .nl domain and 301 redirect to your current one. 2. Acquire backlinks from websites hosted under Netherlands web hosting, relative is a plus 3. Get traffics from Netherlands from other way beside common organic seo. This has some influence anyway.
JM007, there are the following aspects that influenced the nl-be difference: - domain tld, as mentioned - your hosting location - your whois geo data - address on the website - geo location of linking websites - geo location of linked websites As you see, to get with pure .be to .nl is not that easy and straightforward.
Definitely work on getting much stronger .be and .nl backlinks. You can also study those sites that are already ranking and see what are their advantages over your site...
You can try to make subdomains on your site and choose for them regions you need in Google Webmaster Tools.
Google introduced regions to there search, not very long ago, that is one of the resons that you get a google map appearing when you serch foe some things. so if your website is on a UK server then it will rank better in a google.co.uk search and may rank lower in a google.com search. They are trying to make there searches more localised so that someone in glasgow will find glasgow shops when they are searching. so if you are also running a .co.uk domain then you may get a better search result in a google.co.uk search. Google is trying to make there searches more relevant to the user and there location. This is something that google has stated themselfs on there youtube web master page for Q&A.