Hi, I rank well for a few of my favoured terms in the google.com searches but I want to climb the rankings of the .co.uk as I want to target UK customers. How is it possible to target a specific geographical area as I see many .com and .net websites that are hosted in US ranking highly in google.co.uk searches. Any help would be appreciated
nickjason is correct. Other minor factors which are believed to have an effect include: The domain being a UK TLD. Whois registrant country being UK. IP address of the server being in the UK.
One of the biggest factors that nobody has mentioned is links from UK based websites. If you want to rank well for a specific country or region, you need backlinks from websites that are hosted in that area or are somehow related to that area. Other ways that a website can be related to a specific region include: -.co.uk tld -domain registered in that region -the name of that region included in page urls, titles, headers, etc -a physical street address for that region listed on the website Don't set your Google geographical target to UK if you want both US & UK customers. If you want to target multiple countries I think it is best to leave that option set to no target country.
Use all the above mentioned tips but I would concentrate on 'quality' inbound links from UK based sites, these include those in your niche and directories (which isnt always easy). Just ensure that your hosting is UK based and you should start to see your rankings climb. I haveused these methods to target ONLY UK based traffic and it seems to work. Good luck
Thanks for all your help, I will try all of the suggestions out. Not sure I can change my hosting to UK based yet though but the other things are possible