Hello there - long time lurker, first time poster. I work for a global software company as a regional Marketing Manager. The company is HQ-ed in Germany so has a strong market presence there - it also has a strong presence the US and France. As a consquence, our English website is in the United States, and web visitors can change their language (not location) via the drop down at the top - we currently have English, France, Germany, Span and Japan. UK web visitors are directed to the US website. We currently without specialist SEO knowledge - a gap we are a looking to fill. The UK is a smaller market for the organisation, but they are looking to grow this. My question is this: Can we drive UK traffic to a US based website? My colleagues in France, Germany and US gather plenty of organic form submissions - I feel this is because they have a website dedicated to their market. I need to start generating web traffic and conversions in the UK, but I'm not sure it's possible without being able to update a UK based website with content, blogs etc. As a temporary measure, we have Google Ads running in the UK which papers over these cracks. But I need a long term strategy and have no idea where to start - a new website for the UK would be a serious undertaking for the business so I need to absolutely sure it's the right path to take. Thanks a lot.
You can add content targeting the UK within the “US” site. Dot Com is global. Not everyone in the UK searches using their .co.uk extension. Content like Best “whatever your software is” in the UK or London, etc. Add a geo modifier to it. You could target every major city in the UK like this. Later, if you could get some .co.uk backlinks to this geo targeted content, it would re-enforce its target of the UK.
Incuboy, first a disclaimer. I'm not a high-tech guy, just a typical mid-level user/webmaster. That said — I too have a USA-based website, hosted by Godaddy and using the Godaddy/Sucuri firewall and CDN to give it global points of presence. Now the stats relevant to your question: of our ~62,000 monthly visitors, almost 3% are from the UK, or nearly 1,900 UK visitors monthly. I don't know if that's higher or lower than your expectations for the UK traffic % from your USA-based website. Just an FYI by comparison, India also sends about 3% of our traffic. A total of 54% of our traffic is from outside the USA. I'm not doing any special kind of SEO. Nothing geographically targeted or the like. Just the mainstream, proven SEO used by most knowledgeable webmasters. BTW, I'm not into dropping working links into forums (that's Stone Age SEO). But if there's any helpful stuff you and your tech staff can draw from my website, try it at www[DOT]jimfeeney[DOT]org ~Best wishes
I've done well putting the other languages in a folder named after the TLD of each country. The full site of course, not just a few pages.
There is a more interesting way of doing it, all the top site uses a very specific approach to generate organic traffic above their marketing, if you go to Nexcess Magento Enterprise Hosting, but it's the same for Wordpress or Drupal, these clusters cause Google to rank and index pages at the speed of light which is really all that matters, there are then little tricks that you can do such as having load balancers in the UK so Google sees them as UK sites. We have a new site with 15,000 products 50% indexed in a few weeks with Grade A 95% category performance and Grade A 97% product page performance, Google loves clusters, now those MCP clusters from Nexcess cost $5k to $10k per month, however the consultants with years of experience are able to do this differently via AWS at a fraction of the cost, then on top of that they can host multiple sites per cluster which reduces the costs even more, it can do what 10s to 100s of dedicated marketing people do, faster, cheaper, and more accurately, the wonders of automation. The next issue is selling US based products in the UK, there are various issues with it but as it is software makes life a lot easier, with software it's not necessarily the case a UK site is better than a US site, there is a lot of prestige with US based software and direct buys are often not a problem for most people even in USD, basically you need to tell Google that you cover the UK market directly, today that will not be happening but it doesn't mean it can't.