We have a website based in Asia. Now we want to expend our online business to the United States, US, and want to rank high in Google for certain keywords when people in US search for products and services we provide online. My question is: Do we really need hosting server in US in order to rank well in Google US natural / organic search results? If the answer is yes, why is it? Is it purely for website loading speed? I think our server is pretty fast handling US traffics so far. If we do need it, we still need to keep the main server in Asia and find a way to mirror that server to US. And another note is our site is a community or forum alike, dynamic site, so it may not be easy to mirror the site to US servers while keeping both servers sync to each other. Anyone knows any solutions? Some big companies do similar things, such as Google by providing content server all over the world to fast downloading, I don't know how they handle dynamic contents which is changing or being added all the time. Thanks a lot for reading my questions. Look forward to your opinions.
Google uses geotargeting, so having a US server will help you rank better for US search results. The idea is that a business that provides service to the US is more likely to have US hosting.
Thanks for the reply. It makes sense to me. However, we are providing services to online visitors from many other countries in the world and we want to target US search sesults with specific keywords. What solutions would you suggest? Should we get a mirrored site in US (and in other countries as well) with the same domain name (how?) to sync the contents from Asia server real time or with some delay? It is a dynamic site with people asking and answersing questions all the time.
I dont think that, there is nothing like you need to have server in US to target us but onething i can suggest you.. try to add your websites in Webmaster tools of google and in that you wil have an option to target country you may choose US
Basically you could have main site in asia with your main domain extension,and then rsync content to usa server with com or us extension.And also rsync to other country servers/extensions if you want to target more markets.I just saw a localized site of one hollywood movie which is completely same as original site,except domain and content is on local language.
In webmaster tools of Google, can I choose multiple countries? As besides US, we also target many other countries.
Thanks for the suggestion, the problem with our site is we are using the same content (in English) to target US and many other countries (even non-English speaking countries). If we do local extension, such as .us, we will be facing "duplicated content" charged by Google. It seems Google does not like duplicated content on two different domains, and if we do that, we are actually competing with ourselves in front of Google. Local extension, such as .us, should work great for the movie website with localized languages (non-duplicated content). Please correct me if I am wrong
Well you could try to use synonym words for usa words and original english words for international.I mean,there is UK english and USA english,and then you should be able to create different content.